“I’m going to do a lap and see who’s cute,” whispers Debra Lea, giggling over the music blasting through Trump Tower in New York. The tower has all the chintzy, gilded glamour you’d expect from the former residence of Donald Trump, and tonight, it’s playing cupid to a newer, younger wave of conservatives hoping to find love.
Lea, a 24-year-old conservative influencer and Fox News regular, is here for The Cruel Kids’ Table, part of a series of singles nights called Make America Hot Again, organized by the conservative dating app Date Right Stuff and its chief marketing officer, Raquel Debono. The event invites people to “meet, mingle, and embrace the chaos.” The app, founded by former Trump aide John McEntee, has cohosted several of these mixers in New York and Washington, DC. But for this one, tickets were a steep $95 dollars—evidently a small price to pay for some in a city they believe favors liberal love.
Quickly, Lea is leaving me to make her way through the crowd of skintight chinos, ties, and polished brown shoes, in search of a tequila pineapple. “I see one tall guy,” she says, laughing, before quickly forgoing her mission, eager to take pictures with the girls before the night gets on.
These days, you’d think it would be much more common to see a roomful of young conservatives partying in Florida, Texas, or even Washington, DC. But the lower ground floor of Trump Tower on this Thursday evening says a lot about how New York City—where Trump picked up nearly 95,000 votes last year while the Democrats lost more than half a million—has changed. Beyond the pearls, glittery high heels, and sultry side glances, there’s a sobering sense that what it looks like to be conservative has shifted remarkably and that such political affiliations finally have a place in the city’s nightlife.
“These types of social events did not exist when I lived in New York City,” says Arynne Wexler, a 31-year-old influencer who relocated to Florida in 2021. “Things are certainly changing.”
Wexler, who has degrees from Wharton and Penn and used to work at Goldman Sachs, believes she, like many others in the room, is an emblem of the new right-wing youth identity. These young people are outspoken, urban, and emboldened by controversy, referring to their politics as a “movement” as opposed to staid, capital-C conservatism. “You don’t have to have the same Nashville country vibe in order to feel like you can belong in our space now,” she adds. “My cowboy boots are Louboutin, and I think that’s the perfect summary.”
Before events like this became popular in New York after Trump’s reelection, some in the room felt disillusioned by dating and isolated in the city, and they closeted their political beliefs out of fears of retribution. Young conservative hot spots, likely scattered across Murray Hill or the Upper East Side, consisted of debate watch parties or a scarce selection of in-group bars, the names of which I was repeatedly denied when asked. “There is a bar in the city where people know that that’s sort of like a known conservative spot,” Wexler says of one joint she used to frequent. “You could even put that in the article, but I refuse to tell you where they are.” All in all, living in the city felt like being in a “political desert,” as Wexler puts it, where you might have been playing the field to no avail for a long time.
But the tide turned sharply, Lea says, in the lead-up to the election: “Never in my life had I seen people wearing MAGA hats in New York City until the night of the Madison Square rally.” A lifelong New Yorker, Lea adds that events like Make America Hot Again are something she loves to see because they show people proudly representing their country. “We can’t let liberals take New York City. I’ve been here my whole life, and it’s only gotten worse with Democratic leadership,” she says. “We’re young, hot, successful, and Republican; we’ve already won.”
