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It’s 9pm in downtown Phoenix, Arizona and the city is overrun by loud, enthusiastic Donald Trump supporters. Young men in cheap suits are ambling across Central Avenue in and out of hotels, women with overly made-up faces are clacking their heels down the sidewalk. Make America Great Again caps and badges abound.
This is the first night of AmericaFest, an annual festival of all things Christian and nationalist, run by Turning Point USA – the creation of assassinated activist Charlie Kirk. It’s only a week before Christmas, and the rest of the country is winding down and heading home after a chaotic year. But 30,000 conservatives have flocked to the desert to spend four days basking in their collective victory and debating America’s future.
I’ve come here to gauge the state of the MAGA movement after a year of Trump’s return to the White House, at a time when the focus of many young foot soldiers is turning to what – or who – comes next. But sitting at the bar at Hanny’s, a dimly lit, upmarket joint a block from the vast convention centre where AmericaFest is held, Nora Christine warns me I might already be too late. “I don’t want to say I’m part of MAGA because I think MAGA’s kind of dead,” she says. Christine, a conservative activist from Florida with a fledgling podcast, casts her eyes around the bar. “They’re not going to tell you that.”
The conservative coalition that propelled Trump back to the White House a year earlier has had a rocky few months. Some of it stems from people breaking with Trump over policy decisions; his bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities or his fraternising with regime change in Venezuela; his fondness for Big Tech and foreign worker visas, his initial reluctance to release the Jeffrey Epstein files.
while answering audience questions at a campus.Shutterstock
The Heritage Foundation, a large and important conservative think tank, imploded over its president Kevin Roberts’ decision to support broadcaster Tucker Carlson after he lent his massive online platform to young white supremacist Nick Fuentes. As well as prompting mass walkouts and resignations at Heritage, the episode put a spotlight on antisemitism in the MAGA movement, and sparked a debate about how wide the coalition’s “big tent” could be.
Lurking in the background is another question: can this hodgepodge collection of Trump Republicans, working-class and less-educated voters, evangelicals, young men, the online right and others stay united beyond Donald Trump? And who would be the best person to try to hold that bloc together?
Erika Kirk, who became chief executive of Turning Point after her husband Charlie was killed, answers that question emphatically in her opening address. “We are going to get my husband’s friend J.D. Vance elected for [president number] 48 in the most resounding way possible,” she tells the cheering crowd.
But back at the bar, Nora Christine isn’t so sure. “I think we’re too fractured,” she says. “We’ve fractured over multiple issues, from Israel to [far-right populist politician] Marjorie Taylor Greene to even now with Erika Kirk and [conspiracy theorist] Candace Owens. I think we’re very, very fractured.”
With Trump in power and a country to run, it feels like there should be bigger fish to fry than the internecine squabbles between MAGA television personalities and online activists. But no. “People are losing friendships over it,” Christine says. “It is pretty serious.”
On a street near the convention centre, two eye-popping vehicles are parked a block from one another. A van splashed in neon pink writing offers a QR code for Unmasking the Mark, a multipart film purporting that the COVID-19 pandemic was calculated to bring about the End Times. Up the road, a Tesla Cybertruck has been repainted as a monument to Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA.
Inside, it’s a jungle. People cram onto escalators heading down towards the main ballroom, the exhibition hall and “media row”, where the nation’s myriad conservative networks and podcasters have temporary studios to broadcast to their niche but growing audiences. Fox Nation is here, as is The Daily Wire, One America News and Steve Bannon’s War Room. A fledgling brand called FourG Media also has a stand; the four “Gs” in question are: “God, Gas, Guns and Glory.”
To understand the contours of the MAGA movement, you first have to understand its magnitude. People come to it from any and all corners of this sprawling country, from Trump loyalists to old-school Republicans who drank the Kool-Aid, from TikTok influencers and grifters to the far-flung nooks and crannies of the conspiratorial alt-right. Plenty of them are here at AmericaFest.
US political analysts talk constantly about the duelling Republican and Democratic coalitions: who is in them, and whether they will be motivated to show up to vote. In presidential elections, the coalitions can swing significantly depending on the individual; Joe Biden rallied support from black and Latino men, but they did not turn out for Kamala Harris, for example.
The MAGA coalition is a broad church. There is a theory among some conservative thinkers that the movement should have “no enemies to our right” – that is, it should welcome, or at least not ostracise, fringe dwellers who deal in conspiracy theories, antisemitism and bigotry of many stripes. When Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts released a video defending Tucker Carlson for platforming a white supremacist, he said: “The American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right.”
At AmericaFest, that assertion was directly challenged from the opening beat. Ben Shapiro, a high-pitched, fast-talking Jewish conservative who co-founded The Daily Wire and has more than eight million followers on X, told the capacity crowd they had an obligation to clarity, honesty, specificity in public debate – and to condemn and call out people in the movement who failed to do so.
“The conservative movement is in serious danger … from charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracy and dishonesty, who offer nothing but bile and despair,” he said. “These people are frauds, and they are grifters, and they do not deserve your time. And they are something worse than that – a danger to the only movement capable of stopping the left from wrecking the country wholesale.”
Shapiro went on to call Candace Owens’ pronouncements “retarded” and dismiss MAGA stalwart Steve Bannon as “a man who was once a PR flak for Jeffrey Epstein”. He shamed Tucker Carlson for giving a platform to Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate and Nazi apologist Darryl Cooper: “Hosts are indeed responsible for the guests they choose and the questions they ask those guests.”
Carlson, who spoke later that evening, said he couldn’t believe he was hearing calls for people to be denounced and de-platformed at a Turning Point USA event. “I thought that was the whole reason we were against the left,” he guffawed. “We did everything we could to usher in a new time – where you could have an actual debate. This kind of was the whole point of Charlie Kirk’s public life, and I think that he died for it.”
Kirk loved fielding questions from audience members; it’s what he was doing when he was shot and killed at a university campus in Utah in September. After Shapiro’s fiery speech, a young man in a blazer, crisp white shirt and jeans approached the microphone and asked why Shapiro considered Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty in 1967, during the Six-Day War, to be irrelevant to the US’s modern-day relationship with Israel.
The US government accepts that the attack, which killed 34 Americans, was a mistake caused by Israel wrongly identifying the ship. But it remains a staple of antisemitic conspiracies and one frequently cited by Fuentes on his livestreams. Shapiro pushed back, querying the man’s motives for bringing up a six-decade-old incident.
The young man didn’t give a clear answer and disappeared into the crowd. But The Atlantic tracked him down – his name was Nicky Rudd, a student from a Christian university in Texas, and he told the magazine that while he didn’t agree with everything Fuentes said, “To deny the influence of Nick Fuentes is to deny what millions of Americans are thinking.” In a recent video on his Instagram, Rudd claims Americans have woken up to the reality that Israel is “subverting our sovereignty”. Shapiro, he says, is “Israel First”.
Of the issues dividing the MAGA world, Israel is arguably the most potent – particularly in the way it cleaves young from old. In August, a University of Maryland poll found about one in five Republicans aged 18 to 34 felt the Trump administration’s policy was too pro-Israel, and that Israel’s actions in Gaza were genocide or akin to genocide. Another 14 per cent said Israel was committing major war crimes, but it did not amount to genocide. On both questions, another 30 to 40 per cent of young Republicans were uncertain.
That is a potent audience for someone like Fuentes. The 27-year-old may not be a household name across middle America, but here in MAGA heartland, everyone knows him. He has branded his own army of fans, the “Groypers”, who unite around a reactionary, trolling, supposedly edgy blend of antisemitism, misogyny, racism and homophobia.
Candace Owens, another conspiratorial right-wing podcaster and influencer, has suggested the man charged with killing Charlie Kirk was not acting alone and could have been in cahoots with foreign entities such as the French or Israelis. Her unsubstantiated claims, made in the immediate aftermath of a tragedy, have contributed much to the rift in the MAGA/conservative ecosystem since Kirk’s death.
At Hanny’s bar, I meet 30-year-old Mark Lukridge, an articulate fintech guy from Dallas who, a few weeks after AmericaFest, becomes communications director for the Dallas Young Republicans. He says he listened to Nick Fuentes’ appearance on Carlson’s show and reckons the young white supremacist “doesn’t come off that bad”.
But wait a minute: isn’t this the same guy who reckons “Hitler was awesome”? Lukridge jumps right in. “Oh, he loves Joseph Stalin … and he’s obviously an extreme misogynist. You listen to the guy speak, right – OK, clearly I don’t agree with what he’s saying here, but he does command the attention of a lot of people who are just pissed off with mainstream politics of being politically correct, especially young white men. That’s why he’s attracted such an audience – because there’s a space for that.”
Lukridge keeps a foot in both camps. He doesn’t subscribe to the Candace Owens conspiracy about Mossad being involved in Kirk’s assassination; there’s not enough evidence. But he likes Tucker Carlson, saying Carlson doesn’t bow to the dogma to always “praise Israel” or that everything the US does should benefit Israel.
“If you really look at Israel and their objectives – and truthfully, I don’t know a lot about the Israeli movement and our core relationship with them – but I stand firmly in the belief that we vote our officials in office to make decisions on behalf of us,” Lukridge says. “I’d like to know that our tax dollars go toward decision-making that promotes us and has our best interests in mind, rather than a foreign nation.”
By contrast, Nora Christine, the woman who said MAGA was fractured and “kind of dead”, clearly believes the conspiracies around Kirk’s death. She won’t tell me exactly what she thinks, but she makes a salient point: in right-wing circles, the advent of conspiracy theories has shaped a conspiratorial mindset.
“You told us to question COVID,” she says. “You told us to question JFK’s assassination. You told us to question the election. And now you’re telling us not to question the biggest assassination since JFK? That’s a problem. And I think that’s what’s going on right now.”
As I walk into the conference the next day, a volunteer hands me a copy of an evangelical book titled Freedom: Truth Wins. I ignore a stall offering me the opportunity to “debate a Libtard”, and bypass several signs inviting me to “pray here”, to head to the exhibition hall: an alternative universe where you can join the conservative phone network Patriot Mobile (“mobilising freedom”) or sign up to Frontline21, a ministry preaching “biblical masculinity” through five core tenets: moral courage, servant leadership, sexual integrity (no porn), brotherhood and stewardship.
I’m momentarily surprised to see several US government sponsors with stalls: the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the Secret Service. They’re on a recruiting drive. An ICE agent in khaki uniform won’t tell me his name but does pose for a photograph in front of a “special response team” armoured vehicle, used in immigration raids in cities such as Los Angeles and Minneapolis.
Nearby, there’s a tent called Prove Me Wrong, where young influencers or budding politicians can debate their peers. It’s what Charlie Kirk was doing when he was shot at Utah Valley University; there’s also a photo of that event, taken in the minutes before his death. The spectacle is a little macabre.
Conservative commentator Michael Knowles, another Daily Wire personality who boasts more than a million followers, is seated on a small stage fielding questions from students. One young woman introduces herself as Chelsea from New Jersey and asks whether the US should implement free healthcare, as in Canada or the UK.
Knowles is incredulous. “Should America have universal socialised healthcare like Canada?” he repeats, as the crowd erupts in loud boos. He says the US system is bad but still preferable to Canada’s, citing its tolerance of medically assisted dying, which accounts for about 5 per cent of all deaths. “I’ve long observed that Canada is America’s evil top hat,” Knowles says. “We should leave them be and not adopt their terrible practices.”
Internet personalities are everywhere, marked by their VIP lanyards. Xaviaer DuRousseau, an African American influencer wearing sparkly pinstripe pants and black sunglasses, tells me how he turned from a lifelong liberal who marched in the Black Lives Matter protests and voted for Bernie Sanders into a card-carrying MAGA enthusiast after watching right-wing videos and realising “the truth”.
Another man is dressed top-to-toe in an orange-brick patterned suit. Blake “Brick Man” Marnell is famous for clambering on stage with Trump at rallies; the loud suit represents his support for building a wall along the US-Mexico border. When I ask him about the fractures afflicting the MAGA movement, he answers with a thoughtful gravitas that doesn’t quite match his attire. “Whenever you’re out of power, you’ve all got to band together to get back into power, then when you’re at the top, some squabbles come out,” the 61-year-old says. “These are not new discrepancies in thought, it’s just now we have the luxury to entertain them because we’re the party in power.”
Brick Man believes the so-called fractures are overstated. But he also touches on another important point: the MAGA movement has attracted a lot of attention-seekers looking to make hay out of its success and its power. “There are certainly differences of opinion, and certain people are trying to drive wedges in those opinions,” he says. “For the most part, the people doing that are not doing that for the good of the movement. They’re doing that for their own personal gain, and to elevate their own profile, and to profit off of being controversial.”
It’s a Friday, and back in Washington, the nation’s political class is focused on that evening’s deadline for the Department of Justice to release the so-called Epstein files – documents from its sex-trafficking investigation into now-dead financier Jeffrey Epstein. Despite saturation coverage in the media, it barely registers here at AmericaFest. When I meet 20-year-old Shelby Sylvester and her 52-year-old aunt Brandi Barton from the deep red state of Oklahoma, what they really want to talk about is petrol prices.
“Do you know how much gas is in Oklahoma?” says Barton. Sylvester finishes her aunt’s sentence: “$US1.95 [a gallon] right now. Do you know what it was about a month ago? Probably $US3.80, $US2.80.” In fact, the average price in Oklahoma has only come down about 40 cents a gallon over the past year – but it has fallen significantly from Biden-era highs.
Sylvester doesn’t like hearing people say that Trump hasn’t done anything to lower the cost of living. “Tell that to your gas prices … To me, it really just shows that he does care about the American people, and he’s going to make sure it gets done.”
The two of them would vote for Trump again in a heartbeat if they could. If not, Sylvester thinks J. D. Vance is the next best thing. “He knows how Trump runs,” she says. “He’ll have Trump in the back of his ear telling him what to do.”
It feels far too early to be thinking about the 2028 election. But Erika Kirk kicked off the conference by vowing to make Vance the next president. Steve Bannon, who spoke on Friday, insists Trump will torpedo the constitution and run again. But for most people here, Vance is the heir apparent, and minds are already turning to how he can win and what kind of president he might be.
Out on media row, Ben Shapiro is doing a live event for his own network. I’m standing beside the makeshift studio with a throng of supporters, many of whom are taking photos, or posing for selfies with Shapiro in the background. It’s clear that, for many people here, he’s an icon.
Shapiro says there is an ideological vacuum in the American conservative movement right now because its leader, Donald Trump, has no ideology. “That’s not who he is – he was always a pragmatist. And any attempt to abstract a Trumpism from Trump was always going to fail because Donald Trump is a set of really good impulses – but impulses. Nobody would call President Trump a philosopher.
“What that means is, in the absence of a cohesive vision, the Republican Party has fallen into a lot of different conversations about a lot of different issues, and all that stuff has been opened up, and all those conversations are going to have to take place in a pretty robust way.”
Shapiro’s problem with that style of leadership is that it allows the so-called frauds and grifters to creep in and dilute the movement: people who are not really conservative or who hijack conservatism for their own ends. “A movement without principle is not a movement at all,” he says. “It is an agglomeration of people who are following whoever happens to be the leader that day.”
Trump, Shapiro says, brought together a “disparate and weird” coalition of voters through the sheer force of his personality and charisma. He says it would be a “massive, massive mistake” for any politician – Vance included – to assume they will inherit the coalition of their predecessor.
“Hillary Clinton tried to do this with Barack Obama. ‘His coalition is my coalition, I don’t have to campaign in Wisconsin, all the people who voted for Barack Obama will vote for me.’ Obviously, that failed.
“J. D. Vance’s coalition is not going to be identical to Donald Trump’s. Donald Trump is a once-in-a-generation figure. If the vice-president believes that he is simply going to be able to walk into Donald Trump’s coalition … he’s missing that Trump is unique, and he’s also missing the nature of electoral politics.”
For Shapiro, Vance’s strengths are his intelligence, his abilities behind the podium and his penchant for debate. But his weaknesses are likely to be among black voters, Hispanics, Asians and perhaps even blue-collar workers – despite his well-publicised working-class roots. Trump, the purported billionaire, somehow built a rapport with that demographic despite his own privileges.
“What I’d love to see from the vice-president is: what are the contours of his leadership?” says Shapiro. “What does he want America to actually look like? What are the policies you want to pursue? And then you can define a coalition within those boundaries.”
Vance has that opportunity on the final day of the conference, a Sunday, when he delivers the closing address. After 72 hours of squabbling over the size of the MAGA tent and where to draw the line on bigotry, it is widely assumed the vice-president will weigh in – and he does so. But he does not condemn the antisemites or bigots. Vance argues the best way to honour Charlie Kirk’s legacy is to avoid doing something Kirk refused to do when he was alive. Therefore, he says, “I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to de-platform.” He concludes by telling people not to be discouraged by the infighting. “Wouldn’t you rather lead a movement of free thinkers who sometimes disagree than a bunch of drones who take their orders from [billionaire Democrat donor] George Soros?”
The Vice President hopes to float above the fray, much like he did when Politico revealed how a dozen Young Republican leaders were exchanging deeply racist messages in a Telegram group chat. The texts ranged from professing love for Hitler to calling black people monkeys and n—-rs. Vance said it was a case of “kids” doing stupid things, “especially young boys” – although most of the participants were reportedly aged 24 to 35.
Unlike some conservative events, AmericaFest is not a male-dominated environment: at the outset, Erika Kirk proudly announces 54 per cent of the 30,000 attendees are female. But a lot of time and energy is spent talking about young men: how they are suppressed and disenfranchised by the narrative of “toxic masculinity”, and what can be done to empower them in an era when they are supposedly disadvantaged.
At a bar on Friday night, I meet 30-year-old Jonny Toups from Little Rock, Arkansas, who is having drinks with male and female friends. He’s keen to chat about the consequences of “the demonisation of white males”, as he calls it. “You’re gonna get a generation of young white men who are not gonna care any more and say, ‘Well, you know what, sure I’m racist, we’re the better people,’ ” Toups tells me.
“That vein in the Republican Party or conservative movement right now is a reaction to all those years of, ‘You’re racist, you’re homophobic’ or whatever. I don’t think that’s the right reaction, so I like that Ben [Shapiro] kind of called it out. But I also think it’s important to understand why people feel that way and meet them where they’re at, and say, ‘Hey, it’s not skin colour, it’s ideology’ … It doesn’t matter the colour of your skin or your orientation as long as America is your blood, you put God first, you put country first. That’s what we care about.”
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