A few months ago I learned that they were making fun legal again. I’d heard that now that Trump had won, the entire world would become golden-hued. Girls would have long golden hair and long golden arms reaching out begging you to dance. You’d stack up huge piles of lustrous golden cryptocoins. All those miserable gray buildings you hate, modernist masterpieces and millennial-slate five-over-ones, would be torn down, and every city was going to be swaggy, dripped out, Miami meets Riyadh, glowing gold under the blue American skies. Politics was about pleasure again, and everything unpleasant would be destroyed. Of course it was libidinal; it was so libidinal that you’re boring for even feeling the need to say that it’s libidinal. A quote-unquote top banker told the Financial Times that he felt liberated when Trump was elected; he felt like a new dawn was rising, because it meant he could finally say the words pussy and retard without fear. A lot of people sneered at that line, but he was right: Something had dawned, something was being liberated. The sluices were open, and all the flows of desire could now flow clear. I wanted to know what that felt like. So I went to the golden basement of the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue and bought an official MAGA hat for fifty-five dollars.
They had MAGA hats in every color, including Barbie pink, and a dark gothic black MAGA hat with the words in Fraktur, and some more restrained pastel-colored hats that didn’t say anything in the imperative mood but were just branded with the name TRUMP. I went for the classic red. The only real choice. But even at the Trump Store, I still felt embarrassed carrying the thing to the counter. I almost wanted to explain to the cashier that I wasn’t like the other people he’d sold MAGA hats to; I was buying it in an ambiguous and ironic and totally deniable way; I was interested in its status as a semiotic instrument and it didn’t really matter to me either way whether America was made great again or not. But as soon as I actually put the hat on, all those thoughts simply melted away. My brain was suddenly swaddled in a thick coat of MAGA. I wasn’t bashful. I wanted to walk straight out of Trump Tower and onto Fifth Avenue in my bright red hat and laugh in the face of all the nice liberal New Yorkers as they grimaced in my direction. How could they touch me? Their hat had lost. My hat won. Maybe this is how the Victorians felt when they blacked up and stuck a decorative bone through their noses. Look at me, dressed like a savage. It’s not even about the actual primitives in their forests, or the actual Trump supporters in their wood-framed homes. The costume is just there to conjure the instinct in yourself that wants to do evil things, which you’ve identified with some strangers on the far side of the world. We were in a new golden age.
On the ground floor of the Trump Tower, there’s a little zone where you can take photos of yourself in front of a big golden roundel, flanked by American flags, that says PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES DONALD J. TRUMP. When I went, a bunch of German tourists were already there, tittering in the MAGA hats as they posed for selfies. They were feeling it too. So gefährlich! So lustig! When my turn came, I jammed the hat down on my head and had one of the Germans snap away. But as soon as I saw the photos the problem was obvious. The official fifty-five-dollar MAGA hat didn’t fit me. It looked terrible. I have a long, narrow, lumpy, asymmetrical face, and the MAGA cap was simply too wide for my head; it made me look like a child trying on adult clothes. I tried narrowing the cap at the back, and it was even worse. The front of the official fifty-five-dollar MAGA cap is made from a stiff, sturdy fabric, and instead of curving around my head it stood up straight, perched on top of my forehead, making my face look even longer and weirder than it already does. I tried jamming the cap as far down on my face as it would go, until the brim was covering my eyebrows, and while I no longer appeared to have a head like a banana it now badly obstructed my vision and made me look like some kind of demented freak. The problem wasn’t with the official fifty-five-dollar MAGA cap. Millions of people had worn these things without any issue whatsoever. The problem was with me. My head had the wrong shape. I put the cap back in my bag and walked out onto Fifth Avenue, deeply self-conscious, hoping against hope that no one would sneakily unzip my backpack and see the bright-red shame inside.
It was a weird time. Trump had won the election, but he wasn’t yet in office; he just loomed over the world like a great orange moon. I was in America to watch him collide with the Earth. But it was an especially weird time in the impact zone, Washington, D.C. Minutes after I arrived in the city, I was accosted on the subway platform at Union Station by a middle-aged woman surrounded by four or five enormous and expensive-looking suitcases. “Sorry,” she said, “but, sir, could you please help me?” I said sure. “I just need to get out of here,” she said. “I need you to put me on the next train to New York City. Can you do that for me? I have fifty dollars. Just book the train and I’ll pay you back.” I said I’d see what I could do, but all the available trains seemed to cost a lot more than fifty dollars. “I could get you a bus,” I said. Her eyes widened in shock. “A bus?” She grabbed her suitcases and started storming off down the platform. “I’m going to talk to someone else,” she announced, “because”—and here she threw back a spiteful glance in my direction—“I am sick of you and your shit!”
I don’t even know if she was particularly mad. Leaving made a lot of sense, because this city had become an occupied zone. A baffling maze of checkpoints and security fences had spread all across the center of town, closing off ordinary residential streets for no obvious reason. Some intersections were blocked by soldiers with their big armored Humvees. The soldiers stood around in the freezing cold, sometimes moving traffic cones around. They didn’t seem to be there for any particular reason, just to let you know that deadly, serious things were afoot. It felt like there’d been a coup. But the streets of this cold, forbidding, sealed-off city still teemed with the red-hatted horde. Roving gangs of sweet old ladies in MAGA bobble hats. More hats on the tan-colored women in tan-colored coats and tan-colored hair who seemed to be wandering at random through the streets, vaping and scrolling on their phones. Lunatics bellowing in the night. “TRUUUUUMP! TRUUUUUUUMP!” Rickshaws veered around the military checkpoints, blasting “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People, each with a wholesome middle-aged white couple grinning in the back. Meanwhile all the actual Washingtonians I saw were scurrying around in the shadows, having furtive little dinners in far-suburban restaurants. Most of the residents of D.C. are nice upright liberals who work for nice evil institutions like Brookings or the I.M.F. or the International Directorate for Tearing Small Holes in Mosquito Nets, and for a long time they’d ruled the world. But now their city had fallen to a barbarian king, and his warriors were everywhere, milling gently around.
The real activity would not be taking place on the streets. Every time a new president collides with Washington, D.C., there’s a brief spate of galas and bacchanals around the crash site. My plan was to spend the weekend before the inauguration trying to get into as many of these parties as possible. Maybe I couldn’t experience the strange pleasures of the new era for myself, but I could try to surround myself with the people who did. I wanted to know what it was like to get what you want.
My first stop was the All American Ball, which was held in the basement of the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill, a four-star hotel. Some of the inauguration parties were inner-circle events, terrifyingly exclusive, in which the incoming president and whomever he currently trusted could lick their eyeballs behind multiple layers of armed security. The All American Ball was not one of those. Attendance was open to whoever felt like stumping up five hundred dollars for a ticket (or eight hundred fifty dollars for the V.I.P. mixer). This intrigued me: Who would pay that kind of money to go to a party full of total strangers? And why?
I did not have an easy time at the All American Ball. In fact, I barely managed to make it through the door. As soon as I found myself in the Hyatt Regency’s ballroom, this huge, crowded, brightly lit space, I froze. A sudden disorientation. Who were all these people? The Trump movement is, like the eighteenth century or a Pride parade, one of those rare situations in which men dress louder than women. Trump has unearthed a buried current of masculine exuberance. Men in American flag tuxedos with American flag bow ties, men with two or three flags shoved into the buttonholes in their lapels, men in bizarre combinations of black tie and cowboy costume, one man wearing a patriotically decorated crown of thorns. They filled the room, chattering like a cloud of flies. But they weren’t what made me suddenly short-circuit in the doorway. That was the women.
The women were dressed more simply than the men, in ordinary MAGA hats and ball gowns, but the clothes weren’t the point. These women had gone beyond fashion; their business was the flesh. The ballroom was full of the most magnificently artificial women I’d ever seen. Handsome older blondes in their forties and fifties and sixties, all trimmed and tucked into immaculate sleekness, with ball gowns wrapped around their bodies like cling film. Noses and jawlines shaved pert and delicate. Lips tastefully plumped. Their hair fell in waves around their soft, slender shoulders, and every one of them carried a pair of sumptuous, globular, milkless breasts. These women had been precision-engineered. Suddenly I understood that I was in the presence of the new. I’d read recently that as a genuine art form, painting only really dated to the fourteenth century. There were still painters before that, but they were basically just craftsmen: A church needed a new fresco of the Virgin Mary, so they’d hire a local painter to do the job, and that was that. His name would not be remembered. But seven hundred years ago, people started caring about the technique more than the object. This is not just a painting of the Virgin Mary; it’s a painting of the Virgin Mary by Duccio di Buoninsegna. I’d wondered, at the time, what new art might be hatching out of our own era. At the All American Ball, I discovered my answer: It’s plastic surgery. Just like painting, plastic surgery is a kind of grand blasphemy. Perfect, shining, ageless beauty, our response to the half-formed and perishing creations of God. Maybe one day, when our descendants dig up these cyborgs, still encased in their imperishable Botox skin, they won’t care whom the body once belonged to. Look at the work on the jawline there, look at the elegance of the nose job—it’s a Doctor Tatarian, one of the finest of the Miami School . . .
Anyway, this was a strange place with strange people, but it still felt somehow familiar. When I was eleven years old, my North London boys’ school invited the students of a few North London girls’ schools to our lunch room for an evening of awkwardly rocking back and forth to Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me.” I spent most of the evening hanging out despondently by the big bowl of crisps while a girl I’d decided to fixate on rocked awkwardly with someone else. At the end of the night he’d shown me the little scrap of paper on which she’d written her parents’ home phone number, and then he grinned the evil grin of one of nature’s winners. It felt like my innards had been torn out with a cannonball. I thought I’d outgrown that feeling, but as soon as I poked my head into the Hyatt Regency’s ballroom, I found myself shedding the last twenty-three years like a snake. Here was another big room, full of strangers, blaring with 2000s pop music. It was my job to talk to these strangers. More than that, though, I wanted to be able to melt seamlessly into the crowd. I knew immediately that I could not.
But here, standing right by the door, was Gregor. An enormous, globe-shouldered, hunched-over man, in an enormous ill-fitting black undertaker’s suit and an enormous white hat with the number forty-seven in enormous golden figures. He also wore a great pair of glasses that curved like goggles around his head. Maybe it was the lenses, which looked thicker than bulletproof glass, or maybe it was just him, but his eyes seemed to be pointing in radically different directions at all times. Like a chameleon’s, independently swiveling through three hundred sixty degrees. He must have seen me dithering: He swooped in to grab my hand in one huge charitable mitt. Gregor told me his name, and immediately started telling me everything else about himself. He worked as a programmer in the chemicals industry, and he was the only Trump supporter in his office. “But they can’t get rid of me!” he said. “I’m the only one who knows how to do my job!’” His eyes wheeled like gyroscopes. Lips flopping in flabby enthusiasm. He was an intensely awkward person, but in his company all my anxiety suddenly vanished. Instead, I pitied him. It was so decent of me, I thought, to be giving this poor weird man the time of day. But then I discovered that while I had been busy privately pitying him, Gregor had ushered a couple that had just arrived into our conversation. The husband was a doctor from Arizona. Gregor, tongue practically lolling out of his mouth, asked what the doctor thought of R.F.K. Jr. The doctor liked him, but he had some reservations about his stance on water fluoridation. Apparently the studies R.F.K. Jr. cited failed to take into account the background mineral content of tap water. And then Gregor was beckoning over a wizened old man who’d spent a long, distinguished career writing opinion pieces for local newspapers and now had a fifty-follower Substack called The Ornery Outlaw. The doctor and his wife chatted genially with the Outlaw, and Gregor yapped and licked his lips, and none of them were throwing even the slightest comment in my direction. Eventually I realized I was just looming on the edge of someone else’s conversation, so I left.
I was standing at an uncomfortable loose end in the middle of the ballroom when the show began. From the stage on the far end of the room a female voice suddenly started belting out the “Star-Spangled Banner”; half the crowd immediately stood to attention, hands on their hearts, while the other half—with a similar instinctive military efficiency—whipped out their phones and started filming. After the last lusty wails had faded, our emcee bounded out onto the stage. Presiding over this year’s All American Ball was Sean Spicer, whom you might remember as Donald Trump’s White House press secretary from January to July 2017. The rumor goes that Trump fired him because of Melissa McCarthy’s portrayal on S.N.L., which would, if true, make Spicer the only person successfully mocked by S.N.L. in maybe a generation. He had been humiliated. But here he was, back in town. Nobody was talking about bringing Sean Spicer into the second Trump administration, but he could still host a Trump-themed party for people in weird suits. He told some vague jokes and expressed some vaguely positive sentiments about the new regime before bringing on a shrunken, shiny-bald Lee Greenwood, who croaked his way through “God Bless the U.S.A.” before Spicer bounded back onstage again to hand out some meaningless awards. Before he was Trump’s press secretary, Spicer had been a naval officer, then a lobbyist, then a political strategist. Serious jobs, but none of those mattered anymore. Whatever he does now, he will always be a prop in the Trump show. This is the kind of man Donald Trump is: Those six months Spicer had spent with him, before being lazily tossed away—those six months will define the rest of his life. For a moment, he got to bask in the golden light of Trump. It must have been bliss.
Meanwhile, my attempt at journalism was not going well. I discovered that it was almost impossible to actually talk to the attendees of the All American Ball. All across the room, they were constantly bouncing into each other, shaking hands, and then coming apart, seemingly at random. When I tried to introduce myself, they would simply say things and then wander off. I shook hands with a goateed man in a cowboy hat in line for the bar. “I’m Sam,” I said. “You ever watch a show called Blacklist?” he said. “Check it out. It used to be on C.B.S., now it’s on Netflix. Blacklist. Just watch the pilot. You’ll be hooked.” And then, apparently forgetting all about his drink, he slipped away into the crowd. Another man introduced himself. “You think I’m old,” he said happily, “you should see my aunt. She’s one hundred three!” And then he was gone too. In desperation I tried it myself. I told the next person I met, entirely unprompted, that my great-uncle had invented the Uzi. He gave a mild, polite “Ahh.” Well, it had to be someone’s uncle. I told another that I had spent a year studying martial arts at the Shaolin Monastery. He grinned pleasantly. “Let’s go Trump!” he agreed.
Through all of this, out of the corner of my eye, I kept catching glimpses of Gregor. Each time, he was talking to another handsome older woman in a skin-tight ball gown. Gregor’s eyes would roll and his lips vibrate, and then the handsome older woman would laugh and lightly touch his arm, or twirl her hair around one finger, or flutter her lashes in his direction. He was in his element. It was all so easy for him. And meanwhile I was stuck exchanging idiocies, comparing aunts, just because I lacked his natural grace and infectious charm . . .
In the end, there was something slightly glum about the All American Ball. According to my ticket, the event was supposed to last until midnight, but by 10:30 there was already a crowd spilling onto the forecourt of the Hyatt Regency, all accidentally getting into each other’s Ubers. I spoke to some of them; they all said that they’d had a perfectly nice time, but they’d just flown in from Orlando or Topeka or Colorado Springs, they’d come here to show their support for Trump, and now they were ready for bed. And then they’d wander off, in a direction chosen seemingly at random. The hotel staff tried to bellow everyone into line. “Ladies and gentlemen, please remain on the sidewalk! Ladies and gentlemen, if you do not remain on the sidewalk, it will take longer for everyone to get in their cars!” The crowd would not be controlled. They were not angry, not violent, not drunk, not disruptive, but they would not be controlled. A neutral, passionless mob of middle-aged Americans wandering mildly around.
The next day, on the eve of the inauguration, Donald Trump held his last-ever pre-presidential rally—assuming he doesn’t run again—at the Capital One Arena in downtown D.C. The rally interested me. To actually look on the man at the center of all these swirling passions, even if he was just an orange dot in the distance: Maybe that would feel like something. Some electricity in there, the tingly erotic prickling of the new regime. So I went.
I arrived at the Capital One Arena four hours early. I’d expected there to be a minor scrum of Trump supporters already camped outside the building, all yelling at each other and trying to jostle their way in. I was prepared for this; I’m a decent jostler myself. In fact, though, there was just a silent, somber line stretching around the corner from the arena, down H Street, locked behind a spiky security fence. On the other side of the street, a great mass of grim and gray-faced people was marching in silence away from the arena. They were trying to find the other end of the line. I marched with them. We turned around a corner, and then another. Somehow we still hadn’t reached the end. Somewhere near Judiciary Square the line had become gnarled, tangled up in itself, and two cops were trying to tease the strands apart so everyone was in the right place. We kept on plodding. I knew that the Capital One Arena had a capacity of twenty thousand. Had I walked past twenty thousand people? Hard to tell. But after a while I stopped expecting to ever see an end to the line. It was my job to walk along this parade, to glance at all of the thousands of faces arranged silently along the sidewalks of Washington, D.C.; that was it. For maybe half an hour, I shuffled along in the great shuffling mass. Turned right onto Pennsylvania Avenue. Past the Canadian embassy, with its slightly pleading banners—NEIGHBOURS, ALLIES, PARTNERS, FRIENDS—locked behind more security fences. Maybe a block further, the train ended. Without a word, the great grim mass merged into the silent, somber line. I estimated that when the doors opened in two hours, it would take another hour for me to file all the way back and into the arena. Total of three and a half hours to see Donald Trump. It would be worth it, I decided.
After about an hour standing motionless in line, I felt the temperature plummet. My fingers turned red and started swelling like sausages, and when I tried to distract myself by going on my phone I found that I couldn’t really control them anymore; they just flopped numb against the screen. Instead of toes, I now had a bunch of ice cubes rattling around in my shoes. My teeth chattered. My ears blared like sirens. I hadn’t really packed for an American winter, but I had brought a hat. Tepidly, I tried putting on the MAGA cap I’d bought in New York. It still didn’t fit. I took it off again.
There were two guys selling T-shirts that said DONALD F*CKIN’ TRUMP on one side and I’M BACK BITCHES on the other. They wandered up and down our section, chanting the two slogans plus a few other phrases in a kind of rocking, lolling rhythm that, over the long wait, slowly started echoing in my brain. “Get your Trump shirt! I’m back bitches! Not available in Target! Not available in Walmart!” An elderly woman a few paces in front of me bought one. They took cash or Venmo. “Oh, Venmo,” she said. “I’m not a cash girl. Because of China.”
After another hour, it started snowing. No big magical Christmas-card flurries, just a gray frozen drizzle that melted on my skin and dripped down the back of my neck. Soon my feet were soaked. Toes squelching in the chilly damp. I put the MAGA cap back on. I took it off again. Just ahead of me was a quiet, polite group of eighteen-year-old boys who’d told me that they knew each other from online and didn’t want to say much more than that. One of them idly, tenderly drew a swastika in the condensation clinging to another’s raincoat. The decorated one yelped when he saw it. Started brushing it away. “Get that shit off me,” he said. “Not in public, dude.”
Shortly into my fourth hour, it hailed. We all stood patiently in the same spot we’d occupied since the morning as globs of ice bounced against my skull. Every so often something appeared to be happening: The line would jerk and move forward maybe ten or twelve feet. Whenever this happened I’d briefly convince myself that this was it: The ripple had finally passed down to me and any moment now I’d be eating hot dogs in the warm, dry arena. But every time, the shuffle forward would last a few brief seconds and then stop. Maybe people up ahead were giving up and dropping out, or maybe collapsing in the street.
Fifth hour. The sky was starting to get dark now. All in all, I’d moved maybe two hundred yards up the street. There was a vent up there. People would nip out of the line and hold their feet over the warm, moist air. I went. Stood with four strangers around the vent, all of us staring silently at the billowing steam, like animals at a watering hole.
As we approached hour six, the police cruised by with a loudspeaker. The arena was full to capacity, they said. We could keep lining the sidewalks if we wanted, but it wouldn’t get us anywhere. We were too late from the start. We’d never had a chance. And just like that, the line I’d been standing in all day broke apart, and with mild shrugs we all wandered back to our hotels.
I realized that I had been going about things the wrong way. I’d thought I could experience the strange pleasures of Trump by buying a hat, attending a ball, going to a rally, but none of those things were at the center of it, not anymore. According to my schedule, I was supposed to spend the following day attending the inauguration itself. I even had a ticket, a thick milky card framed in purple. But there wasn’t going to be an inauguration. Not a proper one. The temperature was still dropping, and Monday was going to be even colder; whichever committee decides these things had decided to move the whole ceremony inside the Capitol. Obviously the Capitol couldn’t admit all of the two hundred thousand people who’d originally had tickets for the event. There would be room for maybe a thousand of them, the ones who actually mattered. As for everyone else, the faithful masses who will pay through the nose for a terrible party, or shiver in the freezing rain just to show their support—an official had announced that our tickets now had purely commemorative value. Meanwhile, Trump himself had been busy. On the night before the All American Ball, he announced $TRUMP, the official Donald Trump cryptocoin. A meaningless, useless, worthless string of numbers, which only has value if you believe in the person selling it. Two hundred million digital tokens were released; within hours their price had skyrocketed. At the peak of this entirely speculative market, the Trump Organization started selling off its coins, at which point the price collapsed. Trump made something like a hundred million dollars off the venture, but a lot of other people were left holding on to basically worthless assets. All in all, Trump had robbed eight hundred thousand of his supporters of a cumulative two billion dollars.
Maybe Trump had always been a huckster, but there’s a difference between something like Trump University and a crypto pump-and-dump. In a crypto scheme, a good chunk of the victims know that the speculative asset they’re buying is utterly worthless, but they imagine that they’re the ones in the know, who see through the scam. They’ll get out before the crash, while the rubes will be left holding the bag. Other scams play on your credulity; this one plays on your cynicism. Trump was telling us that his second term would not be like the first. The first time around, he had been a populist. His enemies called him a demagogue; his boosters called him a working-class billionaire. MAGA had something to do with bringing back factory jobs in Ohio. Throughout his first term the entire establishment hated him; the media hated him; the tech platforms were attempting to delete all his supporters off the Internet.
This time around, his inauguration had been funded with a million dollars each from Facebook, Google, Apple, Uber, and Amazon. His prime constituency wasn’t in the Rust Belt anymore, and it wasn’t even the dog groomers and boat dealers and family doctors I’d met at the All American Ball. Old-fashioned rubes, still lingering from a lost age. There were entirely new breeds of person at work that had barely even existed in 2016. Entrepreneurial hustle himbos from South Florida. Sorority phrenologists. A.I.-generated it-girls. People who only consume raw milk, organ meat, and adrenochrome. People who think they’re in on the great American scam. The ideological core of Trump’s second administration is the notion that some people are intrinsically better than others. Pale eyes, strong gonial angle, high I.Q., Herrenvolk physique. Trump’s historic role is to prevent these people from being democratically overwhelmed by the sea of dysgenic trash that makes up the population at large. So much for the little guy.
If I’d failed to find the flows of white-hot Trumpian desire I was looking for, if I’d just encountered the vague patience of animals filing slowly into an abattoir, it was because I’d made a rookie mistake. I’d tried to find the meaning of Trumpism in the people who’d simply voted for him. But those people didn’t matter. I needed to start partying with the elites.
My next party was co-hosted by the Free Press, Uber, and X (formerly Twitter). It was held at the five-star luxury boutique Riggs Hotel. The evening featured cocktails and canapés by Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who has a flagship two-Michelin-star restaurant in the basement of the Trump International Hotel in New York, along with more than sixty other fine dining restaurants across five continents. He’d done a margarita, a martini, and a gimlet. I knew I had come to a terrible, terrible place within about twenty seconds of ordering. At the bar, waiting for my martini, I overheard two men in blue suits chatting to each other. “You been to any of the good parties while you’re here?” one said. “Yeah,” the other replied. “Last night I was at Peter Thiel’s house. I guess that was”—and here he made a sickening little gurgle that must have been a laugh—“pretty cool.” Clearly these people were operating on a novel hierarchy of coolness. I drank my martini and ordered another.
Mingling only produced further horrors. A man named Oren told me that he thought he knew me. “I don’t remember your name,” he said, “but I’ve definitely seen your face. Yeah, I definitely recognize you.” He definitely didn’t, but he was being polite. “Let me try to place you. Were you at Techspo?” I was not. He named some other tech industry events I’d also somehow failed to attend. Oren ran a startup that made augmented-reality combat environments for I.D.F. soldiers. He wasn’t particularly interested in Trump’s inauguration; he was here because he’d heard Peter Thiel might be coming, and he was hoping for some venture capital. Did I know Peter Thiel? Eventually it became impossible to conceal the fact that I did not come from his world. I didn’t have a startup and I wasn’t a venture capitalist; I was just a freelance writer, totally incapable of doing anything for him. To Oren’s credit, he didn’t walk off immediately. He spent two whole minutes gradually winding down our conversation while his eyes darted around the room, looking for anyone more useful he could talk to instead. When he’d fully disentangled himself, I struck up a conversation with someone who looked a little more promising. Bad choice. He was also an Israeli, and his startup wanted to make orbiting weapons platforms that could destroy entire cities from space with tungsten rods.
I did end up meeting one of the elusive financiers whom everyone was here to network with. It wasn’t on purpose; I thought I was just chatting to another nondescript thirtysomething in a sea of nondescript thirtysomethings. I asked what he did, and he laughed and told me exactly how many billions he managed. I said I was a writer. “That’s cool too,” he said. “You’re making changes in the thought sphere.” I wanted to make changes to his thought sphere, ideally with a rock. Instead I just finished my martini. Credit to Jean-Georges Vongerichten: They were very drinkable. One more.
Eventually I did start seeing people I recognized, although most of the time I wished I hadn’t. At one point I found myself directly in front of the stunted goblin-form of Éric Zemmour, wiry tufts of hair coming out of his ears and a blonde girl one-third his age draped over his shoulders. Later I witnessed the great bulk of Conor McGregor moving like an iceberg through the sea of startup Israelis. But the worst was when I turned a corner for the bathrooms and almost collided with Ted Cruz. Senator Cruz had his hair gelled back and a shiny tux on; he’d pimped out his outfit with a few small garish touches. There was something viscerally upsetting about the sight of him. But apparently there was more to come.
I’d taken temporary shelter with a little knot of journalists, who told me that Elon Musk—who was, after all, one of our hosts—would apparently be dropping in. They all had their questions ready, just in case they managed to snatch five seconds with him. What was I going to ask him if I got the chance? I thought about it for a moment, wobbling slightly. I couldn’t really think of anything. The journalists looked at me like I was an imbecile. Richest man in the world, Svengali of the new regime, right in front of me, and I wouldn’t have anything to ask him? But I wouldn’t. There’s nothing inside his head that I want to get out. I didn’t see any point in trying to peer past Elon Musk’s mask to glimpse the fetid little creature twitching beneath. The man is so transparent, guileless; it’s all already there on the surface of his public persona. Maybe I wanted to know what it was like to have so much but to still be so desperate for approval and attention. Mr. Musk, why are you still unhappy? But he didn’t strike me as the kind of person who’d have any real insight into his condition. At best, he’d say something stomach-churning about memes.
Musk never showed, although there was a small frenzy around his brother Kimbal. But in one of the darker, quieter zones of the party I found someone I wanted to talk to very badly: former Conservative Prime Minister Liz Truss.
If you don’t remember Truss—and there’s no reason why you should—she led my country for forty-nine days in September and October of 2022, making her the shortest-serving leader in British political history. Two days after appointing her as prime minister, the queen died. Not the best augur. Two weeks later, Truss announced an ambitious budget, in which the country would borrow billions of pounds to pay for a tax cut for the highest earners, an idea so stupid that even the I.M.F. had problems with it. Shortly afterwards, the pound crashed to its lowest-ever level against the dollar, and the international bond markets started imposing the kind of borrowing costs usually reserved for central African kleptocracies. Truss flopped about for a while after that, but within a month her own party had forced her out of office. Ever since, I’ve been a huge Liz Truss fan, because she lived through an incredibly rare human experience. There have only ever been fifty-eight prime ministers, and she was one of them. She made it to the peak of power; she controlled the nuclear submarines that skulk the seas. On her command, millions would die. It took her a lifetime to get there, and then in a matter of weeks it was unanimously decided that she was totally unfit for the job, and she was unceremoniously shunted back down into the muck with everyone else. What was that like?
I’d almost managed to ask her a few months ago at the Spectator’s summer party in London. I’d told her I was a huge fan of hers, but I’d been interrupted before I could explain why. This time she wasn’t getting away. “Liz,” I told her, “we’ve met before.” As soon as I mentioned the Spectator, though, her face hardened. Apparently, she blamed the Spectator for flushing her out of Downing Street. She asked if I was a Spectator journo, and I admitted that I’d written for them. But just for the arts pages, I explained, film reviews, stuff like that. She gave a hard little laugh.
“Oh yeah,” she said. “I believe you. Sure.”
“Really,” I said. “I don’t have anything to do with the political side. My politics are totally different anyway; I basically came out of the Corbynite left.” This didn’t impress her.
“So is Keir Starmer an enemy, then?” she said.
I thought about this for a moment.
“Sure,” I said. “Keir Starmer’s an enemy.”
“Who else are your enemies?” she said. “Name them.” Clearly this was some kind of test.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t really have any enemies.” Another hard little laugh.
“Yeah right,” she said.
I named a left-wing journalist I disliked for entirely personal reasons, which barely appeased her.
“More,” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Who are your enemies?”
Liz Truss went off like a rocket. She started counting her enemies on her fingers; besides Keir Starmer, they included prominent members of the Conservative front bench, senior figures in the British media, and George Soros. She’d been practicing. She had a list. These were the people who’d turned her world to ashes. It wasn’t her fault, she’d done nothing wrong, it was all them.
My chat with Liz was a very depressing encounter, but it wasn’t even because of Liz herself. What was really unbearable was the presence of her lickspittles. There were three of them forming a protective shield around her, nodding and mmhmming to everything she said. At one point I asked Liz if she saw her future in Britain or America. One of her lickspittles cut in. “Wherever it is,” he said, “you’d better watch out, because it’s going to be amazing.” I left the conversation feeling lightly ill. Imagine being so genuinely pathetic that you’ll try clinging to the coattails of the most catastrophic failure in British political history. But everyone in this room was exactly the same. They’ll toady for anyone. All these people in their expensive suits, drinking designer cocktails, all of them with arms out, mouths open, groveling for anything, a sliver of venture-capital funding, a crumb of access, an email address, anything at all. Let me give you my card! They’d mortgage their dignity to Liz Truss. How far would they debase themselves for someone with actual power? Please, Mr. Thiel, spit in my face! The lowest, most undignified people on Earth. I was surrounded by them. The loud clamor of their networking. Parasites! Bottom-feeders! Sluggish brown fish with their faces suckered against the glass of the aquarium, and a tongue that flicks frantically up and down, sucking the slime off the walls! I had another martini.
After that my memory starts to blur a little. I think I ranted about the Free Press’s editor, Bari Weiss, to someone who may or may not have actually been Bari Weiss herself. “Your one job,” I said, “if you’re going to start a magazine, a publication for words and thoughts, is to never throw parties like this.”
Then I was talking to the head of politics at a major media company. I must have said something about how generally pointless and empty I found the whole realm of politics from top to bottom, because she was telling me about how politics was actually great.
“It’s the power to change people’s lives,” she said, “to really make a difference in the lives of millions of people.”
“Yeah,” I said, with a derisive snort, “life. But it’s all just displacement, all this piddling politics; you’re just trying to avoid what’s really there. Forget life. What about death?”
“I think life matters,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, “sure, but what about death?”
By then it had occurred to me that I could reply to anything with “What about death?” and I’d always win, so I did. Later I was in a taxi, and a girl was half-screaming at me from the back seat. My mouth was so incredibly dry.
“You think you’re original,” she said, “but it’s all just the same warmed-over bourgeois Jewish neurotic crap.” She had a point.
While the Free Press/Uber/X party was going on at the Riggs Hotel, the Watergate had been hosting Passage Publishing’s Coronation Ball. Passage is a racist press. I’m not just saying this as an insult; I think they’d describe themselves the same way. They re-issue a frankly bizarre collection of out-of-copyright works: Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft, but also Ernst Jünger, Joseph Conrad, and the Hardy Boys. Their main stock-in-trade, though, is publishing physical editions of blog posts by Nick Land, Steve Sailer, and Curtis Yarvin. Nick Land, the most interesting of the bunch, is a British philosopher who took so much speed at jungle raves that it turned him racist. Steve Sailer is a former data analyst who dedicated his life to pointing out aggregate statistical differences between racial groups. Curtis Yarvin is a computer programmer who’s devised a utopian political system called neocameralism, in which the liberal constitution is replaced by a total corporate dictatorship with one monarchical C.E.O. at the top.
Not so long ago, if you entertained these sorts of ideas, all your friends and coworkers would stand around you in a big circle and bludgeon you to death with iron rods. The online right had been dominated by anonymous internet shitposters, and the standard move was to stereotype them all as pasty, suppurating weirdos, typing out frenzied screeds from their mothers’ basements. But times have changed. Everything that was unthinkable has become thinkable, everything that was unsayable has become sayable, and the Coronation Ball was a kind of grand coming-out party for the newly respectable ideologues of the online right. They could book out a famous hotel. They could feed themselves scallops and steak. They could look at each other in the full light of physical reality. It turned out that a lot of these pasty, suppurating weirdos were actually well-groomed men with advanced degrees, and quite a few were hot girls with expensive wardrobes. As far as they were concerned, Trump’s victory was their victory. Their minor online ecosystem had become the brain trust and style guide for the next regime. So they had a ball about it. Someone brought a Saint Bernard, and the girls all knelt down to pose for selfies with the huge animal as it dozed. It seemed like a good symbol. A big expensive dog. Brute animal power. Thick, luxurious fur.
Two things lightly marred the Coronation Ball. The first was that during his speech, Steve Bannon—exiled remnant of the first, populist, analog Trump administration—effectively declared war on the Silicon Valley techno-reactionaries. These people pretend to have a deep attachment to the old spirits of nation, people, and liberty, he said, but really they just want to import enough Indian programmers to summon a gnashing A.I. chaos-god from beyond the veil of time. A lot of those Silicon Valley types were in the room. They’d put a lot of work into making it safe for someone like Mark Zuckerberg to get on board with the movement, and now Bannon was on stage saying Zuckerberg ought to be in jail. Awkward. The second sour note came from the Saint Bernard, which roused itself halfway through the night and sprayed a large quantity of doggy diarrhea all over the floor.
I was not at the Coronation Ball. But I did make it to the afterparty.
The afterparty was hosted by the Remilia Corporation, which I’ll try to describe as briefly as possible. Remilia is an edgy art collective that grew out of an online group chat. The people behind Remilia were brought together by their shared frustration with the corniness and enforced mediocrity of the mainstream art world. They wanted to build something new, deliriously online, toying around in the zone of indistinction between esoteric knowledge and outright schizophrenia. They have at points been accused of being a cult. They produce digital tokens of big-eyed anime girls called Miladys and all their artists’ statements are translated into Chinese. They say things like “I want 2 be Garish we must LARP so hard that the RP is shed off and we are finally just LAing Real Love is not about snuggling and watching movies together. It’s about dying to yourself to bring true benefit to at least one person.” The afterparty was announced online as the MILADY INAUGURATION RAVE DC, held in an UNDISCLOSED LOCATION. You could only get in if you either owned a Milady or had a pin from the Coronation Ball. The last line of the announcement read NO JOURNALISTS. Image of an anime girl holding a gun. There were hundreds of replies, all from people with Milady avatars—each of which cost around two thousand dollars—just saying “Milady.” They do this a lot. They like impenetrability. They like repetition. They like the combination of optimism, cutesiness, cultishness, and violence. When I regained consciousness, I was in the bowels of the undisclosed location, among the people who say Milady.
Apparently, while I was on alcoholic autopilot I’d managed to get myself into an intense discussion about the aristocracy. I was in a dense thicket of people, some in black tie, some dressed as if to signal that they thought black tie was actually beneath them, and one very intense-looking young man was telling me that the only way to save art was to resuscitate the aristocracy.
“Wait,” I said, “what are you talking about?”
He was talking about the aristocratic spirit, about effortless natural superiority, about idleness as the crucible of beauty, about beauty as the virtue of warriors.
“But aristocrats don’t make art,” I said. “Aristocrats are posh twits. Even when they were the ruling class they were still philistines. All the art was made by ordinary burghers, just like now. Have you ever met an aristocrat?”
He had not. He was from New Jersey. I told him that a distant cousin of mine had actually married into the landed nobility, which was true. When I was a kid I’d been to visit them in their ancestral pile in the Welsh countryside.
“Aristocrats are old guys with beat-up Land Rovers who smell of wet dog. They spend half their time dealing with ovine diseases. Negotiating with supermarkets. Their place was probably worth less than the average house in Jersey City.”
I don’t think he took this in the spirit I intended it. His eyes were bright with wonder. He was talking to a man who had practically touched the natural superiors of the earth.
“How do I become an aristocrat?” he said.
“You can’t,” I said.
“No,” he said, “but really, how?”
“You can’t!” I said. “You’re from Jersey. Literally the only point of the whole thing is that you can’t. That’s what aristocracy means. It means you’re not allowed in.”
I thought he’d be crushed, but he wasn’t. He gazed up at me in sheer delight. The wonder of hierarchy. I excused myself and fled to the bathroom, where I turned on the tap and sucked down the cold, cold water out of my cupped hands.
Despite my general condition, I knew where I was. The UNDISCLOSED LOCATION was Butterworth’s, a bar on Capitol Hill that had been opened specifically to provide the next generation of Republican staffers—pudgy, rosy-cheeked twenty-three-year-olds who all imagine themselves as brutal horse-riding steppe warriors—with a place to hang out. (All the most fun bars have overt partisan political affiliations.) What worried me slightly was the NO JOURNALISTS bit. I might have been a sozzled and ungainly journalist, but I am still technically a journalist, and I knew that a few people on the online right were passingly aware of my existence. What would they do to an interloper like me? Brief visions of my head planted on a spike, dozens of savages in tuxedos dancing around it as they chanted their barbarous chant: “Milady.” “Milady.” “Milady.” So I was not entirely comfortable when I emerged from the bathroom to find two young men staring me down.
“You’re Sam Kriss,” they said. I considered denying it. Undignified.
“I am,” I said.
“We work for Curtis Yarvin,” they told me. The previous year, I’d had a bit of a back-and-forth with Yarvin. I’d written an essay accusing him of being a sub-literate, intellectually incurious utopian whose blueprint for a perfect society would, if enacted, end up leading to mass death. He’d produced two essays about me; in the first, he accused me of being a Hamas supporter; in the second, he accused me of being insufficiently sympathetic to the German side in World War II. I think I came out on top, but there’s more than one way to win an argument. The youths who worked for Curtis Yarvin advanced on me.
“I love your writing,” one of them said.
“Bro, I gotta say, you absolutely destroyed Curtis,” said the other. They were fans. It turned out that there were a lot of people who liked my writing at the MILADY INAUGURATION RAVE DC. I spent a good chunk of the night being passed around the party like a bag of coke. The previous night, at the All American Ball, this had been the only thing I’d wanted, but now I wasn’t entirely sure how to feel about it all.
Not just because these people were all on the weirdo fringes of the right, and were therefore my political enemies. It went deeper than that. The Milady rave wasn’t as bad as the Free Press party, but it did still feel fundamentally off, hollow, like certain load-bearing parts had been made from cardboard.
What I’m talking about is the guy in the robes. I did the obvious as soon as I was introduced to the guy in the robes, and asked him what the robes were all about. He was wearing a getup that was clearly supposed to look mysterious and pagan but actually reminded me of the cassock of an Anglican vicar. He smiled the smile of someone who’d been asked this exact question sixty times that night, and who’d worn the robes for exactly that purpose.
“The robes are for the ritual, of course,” he said. “To welcome the new king.” He had a gentle, honeyed British accent. The voice of an unfunny comedy on Radio 4. I pointed out that everyone here had come to welcome the new king, but he was the only one doing it in robes.
“Ah,” he said contentedly. “I’m welcoming the new king in the manner of the Northern Tribes. I am one of the Northern Tribes; that is how I identify myself.”
And who are the Northern Tribes?
“Oh, the Nordics. Danes, Celts. Aryans. I suppose you could sum up what I believe in the two words blood and soil.” He’d chosen those words deliberately. I suppose the idea was to get people like me to connect the phrase to the Nazis and freak out about it, at which point he would have, somehow, won. I pointed out that there were a lot of people with the blood of the Northern Tribes on the soil of Britain, and most of them didn’t wear robes; they wore tracksuits. Eventually it emerged that the guy in the robes believed that there was a continuous esoteric cultural substrate stretching back to the druids of pre-Roman Britain, and he was its inheritor. But the ultimate content of his secret knowledge was simply that people are better off in their own countries and among their own kind.
At this point the crowd was thinning out. Dawn was only a few hours away; at noon Donald Trump would return to his throne. An employee bustled past, collecting glasses.
“Whoa,” she said. “What’s with the outfit?” The guy in the robes smiled indulgently.
“The robes are for the ritual, of course,” he said. “To welcome the new king.”
He hadn’t always worn those robes. The guy in the robes had once been a major player in the underground club scene in 1980s London. He’d been in a band with Leigh Bowery. He’d put on parties where half-naked performers sewed frozen chickens to their chests. He had once been a freak in an interesting, culturally generative way. Obviously that kind of avant-gardery has since lost most of its bite. It’s all been commodified, safely packaged into an inclusive and welcoming mainstream culture, where we all celebrate everyone’s right to express themselves with whatever poultry they want. The guy in the robes was against the world that had torn out his fangs. But he’d lost his creative armory in the process; all he had left was this limp fascist drivel.
I think everyone at the Milady rave was doing some version of the same thing, from the Remilia Corporation on down. The Remilias were completely right about the corniness and the enforced mediocrity of the mainstream art world; unfortunately, like almost everyone who takes a brave stand against the mainstream art world, their response was to just reproduce the forms of internet meme culture and call it art. But this stuff sucks. Behind all the esoteric-schizo branding, there’s nothing there. It’s not enough to object to the tedium of the mainstream—you have to make something less tedious. And abandoning established forms and then lazily defaulting to the Internet as the nearest available object is already just another corny, mediocre art-world cliché.
This was the cardboardiness of the whole evening. Something limp and lazy and joyless at the heart of it all. I wasn’t the only journalist to make it into the place; we’re like cockroaches, we’ll slip in through the floorboards. One week after the inauguration, New York’s cover story was “The Cruel Kids’ Table,” by Brock Colyar, who also reports from Butterworth’s. Colyar writes that the young reactionaries are “not disenfranchised or working class or anti-elite or many of the other adjectives used to describe Trump supporters since 2016. Rather, they are young, imposingly well connected, urban, and very online.” Colyar writes that these people are also mean—they make nasty jokes about Mexicans and trans people. But this is how these people want to be perceived: confident, cavalier, sadists, your natural betters. The piece didn’t mention the graying, defeated man in his silly robes.
My overwhelming sense was that all the soldiers of the new regime were lost. Maybe, on balance, it’s good that they had the freedom to say retard now, if they wanted. But all they knew to do with that freedom was to just keep saying it. They were out of ideas. Just as much as the guy in the robes, they were playing dress-up. Put on a tux: Look at me; I’m an aristocrat. But you’re not. You’re from New Jersey.
I woke up on Inauguration Day with a thick layer of death coating the back of my throat. The whole city was bright and glittering, globs of ice like diamonds strewn across the street. It hurt my head. I pulled the curtains closed in my poky hotel room. Watched the inauguration on T.V. while eating a rotisserie chicken with my hands. The festering hours. Onscreen there were marching bands, pimply Marines goosestepping around the Capitol, all the dumb parping pomp of state. Eighteenth-century cosplay. Sillier every year. Later, Trump gave another speech at the Capital One Arena. Beforehand, a group of Israeli hostage families had been invited up to the stage, and then when Trump went up they still stood there, looking serious, some with tears in their eyes, some clutching photos of their lost family members, while the President of the United States rambled about wind turbines. “If you’re into whales, you don’t want windmills. They’re the most expensive form of energy that you can have by far. And they’re all made in China, by the way, practically all of them. And they kill your birds, and they ruin your beautiful landscapes. But other than that, I think they’re quite good, right? Heh. No, remember when we used to joke and kid? When we were kidding? But we don’t kid anymore.” He kept talking, while the Israelis just stood there. What else could they do? Like the cyborgs at the All American Ball, and the rubes at the rally, and the lackeys at the Free Press party, and the schizos at the Milady rave, they had chained themselves to this man. “We’re going [to] be going over the beautiful Oval Office,” said Trump. “One of the great offices in history. Even if it wasn’t beautiful, it’s the Oval Office, but it is beautiful and we love the Oval Office.” The hostage families clapped with everyone else. For better or worse, this was their guy.
Just before sunset, I walked down to the National Mall, where the inauguration would have taken place, if it had taken place. There were five round MAGA-capped women inside the Lincoln Memorial, cackling and whooping as they posed for photos holding up the flag of the State of Texas. I don’t know if this was supposed to be some kind of commentary on the Civil War. Probably not. Outside, there was no one. No protesters, no partiers, no tourists. A sterile zone. I crunched along the thick crust of ice over the reflecting pool. In the distance, the Capitol glowed pink in the last weak pulses of the day. Flags flapping bravely in the silence. American twilight. Goodnight U.S.A.
I had one last event on my calendar. Substack was hosting a “celebration of new media” at Dirty Habit, a “globally inspired New American restaurant and bar in a hip, edgy hotel space.” I’d thought I could use the event to talk to some of the libs, the Matt Yglesias types, the data-driven policy wonks who had been so notably absent throughout my whole time in America. The story went that the Trump faction was triumphant, and the old managerial caste was in disarray, but I’d discovered that the triumph was all hollow inside, so maybe the disarray was too. But the libs were notably absent from the Substack party. I did meet a cheerful blonde woman who said she liked my writing. I asked what she did. “I’m an Undersecretary of State under Marco Rubio,” she said. “Or I will be, if the Senate confirms me.” She’d made a million dollars on crypto. She was excited to get to work. Her brief was going to be free speech. Spreading the right to say retard across the world.
Later we were joined by a slightly grim-faced, jowly, meaty man I was certain I’d seen before. The conversation went on for a while before I finally worked out who he was. “Sean Spicer!” I said. “I saw you at the All American Ball.”
“That’s a great crowd,” said Sean. “A great gig. I love it there.”
I didn’t believe him, but I had more pressing questions. I wanted to know something about his erstwhile boss: “When Donald Trump moves into the White House, how much stuff is he going to bring with him? Does he have a lot of furniture? Tchotchkes?”
I’d found it hard to imagine that he’d have much. Trump struck me as the kind of person who could flit between different suites around the world, all of which had already been stocked with tailored suits and luxury watches. Everything he’d need, but nothing really his own. When you own enough property, eventually you stop having a home.
“I don’t know for sure,” said Sean, “but Donald always traveled light. He doesn’t have a lot of stuff, no.”
Emphasis on the Donald. First-name basis. He had felt that golden light. We talked about the last Trump inauguration, back in 2017. The Undersecretary of State showed us a photo of herself from then, in a long dress and a MAGA cap.
“It looks great on you,” Sean said. A quiet note of longing.
“I couldn’t get the cap to work for me,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Sean, “me neither. You gotta have the right kind of head.”
“It’s the material at the front,” I said. “It’s too stiff, it doesn’t sit right over the top of my head.”
Sean gave a sigh of commiseration. The sigh of the lumpy-faced man.
“Oh, that’s not a problem,” said the Undersecretary of State. “You just need to go in with some nail scissors and cut out the stiff material from underneath. It’s a separate panel. Then the cap has more give.”
“That’s not going to work,” said Sean.
“Sure it is,” said the Undersecretary of State.
“No!” said Sean. He was suddenly turning red. “It won’t work! The hat doesn’t work! It just doesn’t look good on me, okay? It never will! Stop talking about the hat!”
Sean Spicer turned away in a huff. I think that was the only truly honest thing I’d heard anyone say all weekend. It must have felt good.
