One Night at a Party for Young Trump Fans Says It All About Where MAGA Is Headed

Just like any outpost behind enemy lines, the New York Young Republican Club maintains a low profile in Manhattan. “This location must be kept private,” read the ticket receipt I received for an event at the club in February. “Don’t forget to WEAR RED!”

The following evening, I found myself walking back and forth on a midtown block, looking for the entrance. Eventually I found it, a nondescript door leading to an unmarked staircase, courtesy of three young men who walked in ahead of me. Like me, they didn’t know what to expect. “Should we put our MAGA hats on?” one asked. “Let’s check out the vibe,” his friend replied.

The club was compact and cozy, with tufted couches and red velvet curtains. There were red streamers and Trump regalia on the walls, along with a signed poster of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Drinks were served: beer, liquor, red wine (Josh, naturally). The crowd skewed under 40 and male. Many present indeed wore red. The guys I’d walked in with had donned their MAGA hats. Rock music played from a TV on the wall. When a Spotify ad for Pfizer came on between songs, some boos rang out.

I’d come that night for a talk by Nick Adams, a conservative influencer from Australia whose viral social media posts have earned him prominence in the MAGA movement. He’s been an official surrogate for Trump since the 2020 election, appearing on talk shows across the political spectrum to defend the ex-president with a pit bull’s determination. On his website, Adams calls himself “the Godfather of the ‘Alpha King’ movement,” inspiring his “3M+ social media followers to ‘level up’ in every aspect of their lives.” This event was a stop on his book tour for Alpha Kings, his seventh volume to date.

The “alpha king” ethos is a blend of Tucker Carlson and Tucker Max, with notes of Jordan Peterson thrown in. It is aggrieved and unequivocal. It is also really hard to take at face value. “I go to Hooters. I eat rare steaks. I lift extremely heavy weights. I read the Bible every night,” Adams wrote last year in a typical post. “I am pursued by copious amounts of women. I am wildly successful. I have the physique of a Greek God. I have an IQ over 180. I am extremely charismatic.”

Adams’ posts oscillate between standard right-wing grievance and absurdist, almost ritualistic celebration of masculine totems: Hooters, golf, football, steak, pounding “ice-cold domestics,” and chasing Sheilas (roughly, Australian bro-speak for “ladies”). In video diatribes, Adams holds forth on disloyal RINOs and “woke” gyms and fast-food chains, his Australian accent punctuating his varying levels of disgust, outrage, and zeal. But his most singular focus is on defending the natural rights of the traditionally hyper-masculine. In February, he said a boycott of Chipotle (over pronouns, naturally) would “only end when reparations are made to the alpha male community.”

His political advocacy has a similar camp quality. Last year, after Mars released a line of all-female M&Ms, Adams posted a video of himself scattering a packet of the candy on the sidewalk outside the M&Ms store in Times Square. “Not one M&M will pass my lips until Mars issues a formal apology and releases an all-male package of M&M’s to demonstrate their commitment to gender equality,” he announced.

Is Adams an overwrought activist or a deft satirist on an undercover mission? That question is a big part of the enigma. Let me call your attention to Adams’ posts about the joys of golfing with men, which soar past odes to male bonding and directly into gleeful homoeroticism. In one such story posted online, Adams writes of encountering Ricardo, “a fit young man with thick dark hair who looked to be of Latin descent.” Admiring the “tour stiff shafts in all his clubs,” Adams sensed that Ricardo was “searching for something”:

It was Sheila trouble, of course, in the form of a girlfriend who no longer respected him. Adams assured Ricardo that his decision to dump this woman had been the right one. A “massive weight” was lifted off Ricardo’s “broad shoulders.” The men proceed to have a “fantastic time,” and the “testosterone was flowing” as they went “stroke-for-stroke” and “sunk putt after putt,” watched by a crowd of “10-15 guys.” Eventually, Ricardo loses on his final stroke—his ball does “a full wrap around the hole but lipped out”—and Adams wins. Even so, Ricardo is fully transformed by his time with the Alpha King. (“I feel like a real man again,” Ricardo says.)

Perhaps this is a sincere exploration of the author’s homoerotic perspective through a conservative social lens: a rich vein for psychological inquiry. To me, it scans as something closer to a MAGA version of a Nathan for You episode. The plan: Immigrate to America and become a right-wing influencer who also posts thinly disguised gay erotica, provoking Twitter’s credulous liberal power users into dunking on him, thus raising his profile and earning him the attention and favor of Donald Trump.

And as with the best stunts on Nathan for You, it has succeeded beyond what anyone might have predicted.

“Like me, I know that Nick appreciates the power of humor, when it comes to making a point,” Trump writes in the foreword to Alpha Kings, Adams’ new book. “Reminding young men of the importance of faith in God, hard work, sports, ambition, discipline, confidence, manners, and love of country is a very important task and Nick embraces that challenge with gusto, knowledge, and heart.”

At the club, I chatted with members of the New York Young Republican leadership, who seemed equally unsure about the Alpha King’s shtick. “Is he even Australian?” asked Vish Burra, the group’s executive secretary, who recently served as director of operations for George Santos during his tenure as a representative in Washington. “I think that’s a psy-op.”

Nathan Berger, the vice president, mentioned that although Adams’ rider for the event required that he be provided domestic beer, that afternoon Adams had demanded the club order him a bottle of Amaretto, and that he’d then insisted a staffer make him cocktails with it. “Do Alpha Kings really drink Amaretto?” he wondered to me.

Soon, a hulking man in a dark suit wearing a wire earpiece approached and asked if I wanted to meet Adams. As it turned out, this was one of two security guards protecting the King, who was lounging on a couch at the back of the room. When I walked over, Adams stood up to shake my hand. He was short, with the coiffed magnetism of the regularly televised. I would not characterize his physique as that of a Greek god.

“I’ve been a garden-variety political commentator for most of my career,” he said in a plummy Sydney drawl. “But about three or so years ago, I decided to take a more cultural approach to the things that I would discuss on social media and I decided to start becoming a voice for men everywhere.” The Alpha King movement is totally serious, he promised me: “I am about making sure that young men have got the confidence to take a stand, that they don’t feel that they need to apologize for their masculinity, that they don’t need to get in the back seat.”

A few minutes later, we took our seats, and Ian McMath, the club’s media chairman, introduced the evening’s guest.

“He plays ball and is a pro-Trump patriot. He has transformed the lives of millions of young American men,” McMath said. “He is an inspiration to us, a hero, a man who takes blows for us and a man that we wish to rise up for. So, without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you Nick Adams!”

This was a much more enthusiastic introduction than I expected given my conversation with club executives. On cue, Berger whispered to me, “They gave us that script.”

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” Adams said. “How good is it to be in a room full of alpha males, beautiful women, men that have no shortage of experience when it comes to being on the golf course, foursomes with the boys.” Many in the crowd laughed, recognizing the bits.

“I look into the eyes of every young man here, and I can tell who’s been to Hooters and who hasn’t. I can tell who regularly pounds domestics with the boys”—loud cheer—“and who likes to spend a bit of time with their butcher in the hot tub”—fewer cheers, for a more obscure nod to another of Adams’ homoerotic stories.

His latest book, he promised, would provide a “road map for every young man to unlock their full potential.” That meant a few rules: “An alpha male diet consists of a minimum 80 percent protein, and precisely zero percent soy. Never mask up, never apologize, never pick up the Fortnite controller, always read the Bible.”

Then Adams looked straight at me. “Now, boys and beautiful ladies, I do want to make you aware that in the crowd here tonight, we do have a member of the fake news media,” he said. “It’s the gentleman sitting right there with the glasses! Please stand up.” I stood up. “Try and be nice to him, guys. His name is Ezra Marcus. I call him E-Z. And depending on the article that he writes, he’ll either be ‘low-T’ E-Z or ‘high-T’ E-Z. The jury’s out, but we’ll see. Take a pew, Ezra.” I sat down and said, “Thank you, Alpha King!”

“No worries, my humble servant,” he replied. Then he launched into a jeremiad against “the modern woke feminists destroying every part of our society.”

Adams’ résumé reveals how he has honed the bits inherent to his craft. At 21, he was elected deputy mayor of a Sydney suburb on the Liberal Party ticket—Australia’s center-right party—then made waves with a proposal to kill pigeons to prevent bird flu: “Ashfield should be inhospitable to pigeons,” he told the town council. He popped up again in 2010 as the supposed spokesman for something called the Halloween Institute, which seems to have existed only to organize a single “protest” that paid lingerie models to call for Halloween to be declared a federal holiday in Australia. Adams emigrated from Australia in 2015 and wrote a separate book, Green Card Warrior, about that experience.

In the past several years, at least partly as a backlash to the feminist protests ignited by Trump’s election, there’s been an explosion of right-wing masculinity gurus—influencers who dispense lifestyle advice for men uneasy with establishment mores around culture and health. These range from relatively tame “truth-telling” celebrity podcasters Joe Rogan and Aaron Rodgers to the hardcore chauvinist and accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate, along with niche figures like Bronze Age Pervert and Raw Egg Nationalist, who link masculinity and fitness to political extremism and white supremacy. Adams has hopped on this bandwagon, sort of, with a brand of advice for wannabe alphas so cartoonish that it seems to obviate the need for any women at all.

For example, at the New York Young Republican event, he called for “alpha male–only gyms” to alleviate the scourge of leering Sheilas: “The women won’t leave me alone. They are mentally undressing me!” He offered stark dating advice: “The most alpha act of a man is to deny sex to the woman. If she’s interrupting you and humiliating you at the dinner table in front of other people, don’t be weak and go home when she starts to rub your arm and say she’ll make it up to you. Deny it, boys! Hold on to it. That’s what they do to us.”

There was discussion of the siren song of celebrity women. (“Taylor Swift, honestly, she’s had more pricks than a porcupine. She’s a jezebel.”) There was grievance. (“A whole host of human rights issues that disproportionately affect men: veterans’ deaths, false rape allegations, parental rights, criminal court bias.”) Strangely, though, there were also plenty of encouraging words about pursuing women promiscuously: “There’s nothing wrong, I believe, in being a ladies’ man in the James Bond tradition,” Adams told the crowd. “Look at me. The abundant, peerless, incomparable charisma, the rizz! Many have dubbed me the Rizz King!”

One male attendee asked Adams how he reconciled his Christianity with calls to chase women and go to Hooters.

“If you don’t go to Hooters, you got a problem,” Adams said, and launched into a tirade about how “the pearl clutchers and tut-tutters and the handbag hit squad” shame young men for their natural promiscuity.

A woman in a red wrap dress pressed him further. “As a Christian woman, I will only submit to a man who submitted under God’s authority,” she said. “So what do you say to all the men who are striving to become alpha males and they don’t believe in God’s will?”

“Well, look …” Adams said, put momentarily on the back foot by her strange intensity. “You do you! If that’s your opinion and you only want blokes that are going to be all into Jesus, then that’s fine. I think that every young man should read the Bible. I’m a man of faith. And I think that’s something that they should hold dear. But again, I don’t know that we should make the biggest deal about it.”

I raised my hand. “OK, come on, E-Z,” Adams said, calling on me. The room grew quiet. There was suddenly palpable tension. “You said we should boycott M&Ms until they had an all-male set of M&Ms,” I said, aware of dozens of eyes on me. “My question for you is this: Isn’t eating an all-male set of M&Ms kind of gay?”

The crowd burst into laughter. If I was trying to make him break character a little, Adams didn’t miss a beat. “E-Z, let me share with you a phrase: Iron sharpens iron! The more time you spend with the boys, and that includes male M&Ms, the better you become,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong. I love a little foray with the Sheilas. But hanging around alphas is worth its weight in gold!”

After the talk, I chatted for a while with Burra, the erstwhile director of operations for Santos. I wanted him to make the case for how Adams fits into the GOP’s larger strategic goals. Is alpha masculinity—to the point of female exclusion—a winning message in an election year, given the party’s struggles with women the past few cycles?

“Fuck yeah!” Burra said. Republicans stood to gain in 2024 by centering Adams’ flavor of “bro centrism,” he said, a stance that would appeal to men turned off by progressive attitudes toward gender issues. “Matt Gaetz said something to the effect of ‘For every Karen we lose, we’re gonna gain a Julio and Jamal,’ ” Burra said. Nonwhite men “are like, ‘Yeah, I don’t really want to chop my kid’s dick off, you know’ or ‘I don’t want to drink the soy.’ ”

“We’re not going to have women telling us how to be men,” Burra continued. “And we’re not gonna have soy cucks, fuckin’ soyjaks, telling us what’s manly.”

There was one area where he softened Adams’ message. “I like Taylor Swift. She’s hot,” he said. “If my Sheilas are listening, right, and they’re entertained by the Taylor Swift, we play the Taylor Swift.”

To Burra, Adams’ nebulous background and obvious performance only heightened his Gatsby-esque appeal. “It’s very New York. It’s almost like ‘fake it till you make it,’ ” he said. “I don’t know if he’s an alpha male or not. But the fact is, he’s publishing books. He’s growing an online profile. There’s no pope of alpha who has come out and said, ‘Nick Adams is not alpha.’ Therefore, you know what’s really smart? To make Nick Adams the pope of alpha.”

A while later, Adams walked toward the exit in a long camel coat. I flagged him down to say goodbye. He asked if I’d enjoyed myself. I told him I’d never met anyone quite like him. “My command of the English language is unbelievable,” he said. “And I’ve got the sexual power of a thousand men!” Then he was out the door and down the stairs, security guards trailing close behind him.