The shadow president paced around the stage after his speech, sunglasses on, mouth frozen in a grin, raising a chainsaw overhead to the delight of an adoring crowd as a large rectangular canvas made its way from the back of the audience toward him. He grabbed the painting, visibly thrilled. On the canvas, as onstage, he was the focal point. Beams of light emanated from his head, which the artist had superimposed over scenes from the world his real-world counterpart had promised to build: an astronaut surveying a barren red planet, a futuristic civilization complete with flying cars. In the painting, he wore a suit and tie. His real-world attire was more casual: a black blazer over a novelty T-shirt that read “I’m not procrastinating, I’m doing side quests,” a gold chain, his signature “dark MAGA” hat, and the aforementioned sunglasses. In the painting, he was triumphant. Onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), however, Elon Musk had appeared incoherent. Fifteen or so minutes into the interview, a reporter in the media pit turned to me and mimed smoking a joint, mouthing, “Is he high?”
Still, the audience was in his thrall. At one point, when all Musk could manage to say was “Yeah, um. So. I mean, really,” someone in the crowd shouted, “We love you!” They gave him a standing ovation before he spoke and another after.
CPAC, as it’s advertised, is an annual show of right-wing unity, an occasion that brings together elected officials and lobbyists, influencers and their legions of adoring fans, all under the mantle of a harmonious conservative movement. It makes sense, then, that Musk would be welcomed into the ever-expanding MAGA coalition, especially as CPAC’s attendance dwindles. But this year, a big conference and lineup of afterparties couldn’t hide the internal conflicts of the movement: a tech oligarch at the helm of a “populist revolution,” a man who has all but abandoned most of his children, being praised during a panel on CPAC’s staunch “pro-family” stance; the insular America-first rhetoric and the increasing presence of an “international CPAC movement” that pads out the thinning crowds. This is, in some ways, the logical conclusion of the movement that began in Trump Tower a decade ago, when the future president descended a gilded escalator in his namesake building and vowed to fight for the common man. President Donald Trump’s supporters have long been willing to look past contradictions and dissonance — but some diehards are beginning to feel the strain.
Hours before Musk’s non-speech, I had interviewed the artist who painted the portrait of Musk, a man named Seth Leibowitz. “It needs an update. It’s been sitting in a box for a couple years,” Leibowitz said of the painting, which he had completed in 2019. “He’s more relevant now, but actually, I’m afraid of him being a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
In what would become a running theme of the weekend, Leibowitz expressed both his fears of Musk’s transhumanism — the use of technology to enhance human abilities — as well as support for the tech mogul’s current role in Washington. Musk’s short-term plans to dismantle the federal bureaucracy, embodied in the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, are in keeping with long-standing conservative goals. But Musk’s long-term designs to create a brood of super-babies and upload his consciousness into the cloud don’t exactly sit well with the religious right.
Leibowitz mentioned Neuralink, then told me about a Spanish professor from the 1950s who once stopped a bull from charging him by neuralizing its brain. “They have nanobiosensors in our bodies right now,” Leibowitz told me. “They don’t need to put a chip in your brain to monitor our brain activity.” Despite his fears, Leibowitz had high hopes for DOGE — “We need more transparency,” he said — though he remained wary of Musk’s broader political aspirations. “I’m hoping that Elon doesn’t think he can wiggle his way in and someday be the next president of the world.”
My encounter with Leibowitz was little more than an accident. I ran into him in the lobby of the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center, the annual home of CPAC, while seeking a brief moment of respite from the day’s festivities in the form of barbecue with some young members of the Log Cabin Republicans. (On my way out the sliding glass doors, I walked past Laura Loomer, the right-wing provocateur who has become a close ally of Trump.) Over Bloody Marys, I told the small group about my encounter with the Musk-skeptical artist who had nonetheless painted his portrait, an image that embodied the contradictions of the burgeoning tech-right alliance.
“These are not good people. They’re weird,” Logan Sajdowitz, a 22-year-old from Wisconsin, said of Silicon Valley’s newly conservative billionaires. “And I’m not a huge fan of the trad-cons, but at least they have a coherent ideology. The tech right is just fucking… I don’t know.” Sajdowitz admitted his position is unusual for this crowd. “I should be at Principles First right now,” he continued, referring to the staid “Never Trump” conference taking place across the river the same weekend.
As Sajdowitz and I discussed whether Musk’s DOGE was hurtling toward a full-blown constitutional crisis, a pair of British men on the other side of the table silently passed a banana-flavored vape back and forth. Before I left, one of them showed me a video of him and Liz Truss, the short-lived prime minister of the United Kingdom who has become a CPAC fixture, dancing together at a gay bar. They had missed Truss’ speech, but we all agreed we’d tune in for Musk’s, which had been announced earlier that day by Mercedes Schlapp, wife of the embattled CPAC chair, Matt Schlapp.
“We have a very special guest who’s going to be here during the conference,” Mercedes said that morning, minutes before Vice President JD Vance was supposed to take the stage. “Kind of like, a tech titan, maybe…” — strange, I thought, not the first words I’d use to describe Vance, though he does come from a venture capital background — “…responsible for DOGE,” she teased. “Elon Musk will be here on the CPAC stage!”
But first, it was Vance’s turn. The crowd erupted in a “USA! USA!” chant before he had a chance to speak. His conversation with the lady Schlapp largely focused on immigration and the border, which he described as the source of all our social ills, including government overspending. Kicking off what would become a popular refrain over the course of the weekend, Vance praised Musk’s cost-cutting efforts at DOGE. “Why are we spending money on progressive modern art projects centered around toilets in Afghanistan?” Vance asked the incredulous audience. (Other speakers used the same Mad Libs-esque construction: [woke] [project] in [foreign country]. For Megyn Kelly, who dedicated a significant portion of her 20-minute speech to discussing Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, it was trans operas in Colombia; Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) chastised the government for sending “millions of dollars to Guatemala for sex changes.” Attorney General Pam Bondi kept it vague, alleging that USAID money was “likely going to terrorist organizations.”) “Let’s turn off the spigot and spend the American people’s tax money on the American people’s priorities,” Vance declared, to thunderous applause.
The room emptied out after Vance spoke. The CPAC crowd, it seemed, wasn’t interested in hearing Bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor explain why cryptocurrency is “inherently conservative.” Trump had headlined the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, seven months earlier, drawing MAGA diehards to what was once an industry event, but the inverse did not appear to be happening. Outside the main stage, on “media row,” people lined up to get their pictures taken with My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell, while the Open Source AI Foundation’s table failed to attract much interest. Eventually I, too, got bored of Saylor’s speech and went downstairs to grab a muffin. In line at the cafe, I overheard a recently liberated January 6th prisoner I’d met the night before claim someone had stabbed him while he was locked up. I also ran into Joe Allen, the tech correspondent for Steve Bannon’s War Room, who offered to introduce me to the big guy himself.
Allen, a tech skeptic who had previously told me that Musk and Peter Thiel “represent an ideology that is fundamentally hostile to human life,” walked me over to the set where Bannon was recording his show, but it was clear I wouldn’t be getting an interview anytime soon. Bannon got mobbed by supporters who started singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” as soon as the cameras stopped rolling.
On my way back to the main stage, I ran into a former groyper I’d met at last year’s CPAC who told me he had gotten roped into collecting signatures for a petition calling for Trump to run for a third term. (According to a press release issued by the Third Term Project, “extended leadership can be crucial during times of national crisis and economic development.”) I got back to my seat as Truss said the UK needs “Elon and his nerd army of Muskrats” to take a hard look at the “British deep state.” Foreign dignitaries, too, were there to pay fealty to both the de facto and the de jure presidents. Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of the former Brazilian president, told the audience that a Brazilian federal court’s “illegal fake news investigation” into Musk that led to X being temporarily banned in the country should make us all, “I don’t know, maybe scared.”
A few hours after the younger Bolsonaro urged CPAC attendees to defend free speech at home and abroad, Schmitt, the Missouri senator, told Mike Davis — the president of the Article III Project who was in the running to be Trump’s attorney general — that 60 Minutes, the CBS show, “ought to get sued for what they did to President Trump in the interview.” Brendan Carr, the newly appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission, was supposed to join Schmitt and Davis to discuss “The Takedown of Left Tech,” according to the CPAC agenda, but was inexplicably missing. There was plenty to talk about without him, including potential antitrust challenges to big tech companies like Facebook and Google, and Musk’s work at DOGE. “The Democrats are losing their minds because of DOGE and these efforts to strip away their power,” Schmitt said. “And they should! Because the people of this country elected one person to run the executive branch, and he gets to make decisions on personnel and policy.”
For a moment, it was unclear if he was referring to Trump or Musk.
When Trump first took office eight years ago, Musk was nowhere in sight. The liberal bogeyman of that era — for a little while, at least — was Steve Bannon, the executive chair of the far-right Breitbart News. The populist standard-bearer served as Trump’s chief strategist during those first eight months of 2017, and he continues to wield power in the extended MAGA universe, despite no longer being part of Trump’s inner circle. (As part of their falling-out, Bannon received the Trumpian appellation “Sloppy Steve” in 2018.) Bannon now hosts Steve Bannon’s War Room, a daily show distributed via the right-wing cable channel Real America’s Voice.
In this second Trump administration, Bannon, rather than being the epicenter of power, is instead riling up Trump’s base from the sidelines and channeling his everyman ire toward Trump’s new allies, the Silicon Valley elites — the “oligarchs,” as Bannon calls them — who, he claims, are trying to buy Trump’s favor with money. This cronyism sits ill with him; it is at odds with the essential ideology that Bannon espouses. Bannon is anti-immigration, legal or otherwise; he supports trust-busting and opposes the neoliberal order. His worldview, in other words, cannot be reconciled with that of even the most right-wing Silicon Valley venture capitalist or CEO — he is at odds, even, with Musk, Trump’s new right-hand man. Indeed, less than a week prior to CPAC, Bannon called the Tesla CEO a “parasitic illegal immigrant.” I wanted to understand what Bannon made of Trump’s newfound support among the Silicon Valley elite, whether tech moguls are using Trump for his power or he’s using them for their money, or all of the above. More than anything, I wanted to know what the MAGA base, the white-haired boomers in sequined jackets and College Republicans in rumpled suits, made of the apparent rift between two of Trump’s most outspoken supporters.
The masses, it seems, don’t see the power struggle happening, and those who do don’t really think it matters. Most of the CPAC attendees I spoke to saw Elon not as a usurper of presidential power but an enforcer of it. The sentiment, expressed time and time again, was that Musk works for Trump and Trump works for us, the American people. DOGE, they told me, is about eliminating waste and fraud in the government — it’s about ensuring that Americans’ tax dollars are spent at home, not on queer puppet shows in Iraq.
Even Bannon, clearly understanding his audience, praised DOGE in his own CPAC speech, which came immediately after the chainsaw incident. “How did I draw the card to follow Elon Musk?” Bannon quipped. “You bring out the world’s richest man, Superman, and I’m supposed to follow it? Come on, man!” The audience was just as enraptured by Bannon as they had been by Musk, but the press section had already emptied out.
Now that Trump was in office, Bannon said, “Every day is Christmas day.” Musk, he claimed, had uncovered more than $55 billion of waste, fraud, and abuse, and it was all being done in the name of the people in this room, “the best of the American people.” But they could not become complacent, not even in victory. They needed to defend their gains. “Are you prepared to fight for Trump?” Bannon asked the audience. “Are you prepared to fight for this republic? Are you prepared to fight for this country?” They responded by chanting the words Trump yelled after nearly being assassinated in Pennsylvania: fight, fight, fight.
Before walking offstage, Bannon raised his right arm, ramrod straight, into the air, a motion that the average person in 2025 would identify as a Nazi salute. As with Musk’s so-called “Roman salute” in January, the gesticulation immediately kicked off the back-and-forth volley over what to call it. Bannon denied any untoward behavior. “I do that all the time,” Bannon told NBC News. “I wave to my crowd, because it’s all about them.” But it was all too much even for a French far-right politician, who canceled his CPAC speech in protest of the “gesture alluding to Nazi ideology.”
The hot ticket Thursday night was Bannon’s party at Butterworth’s, a French bistro in Capitol Hill that has become a MAGAworld hub since opening last October. At the hotel bar after Bannon’s speech, I encountered the zoomer Nazis I’d met at the conference last year, drinking white Russians out of disposable water bottles and scrolling through Instagram. The older members of the group had worked the door at Bannon’s CPAC 2024 afterparty. This year, they weren’t on the list. As I waited for my Uber, I heard a woman complain that she hadn’t been invited; a friend told her not to worry, she’d be fine. The line to get into the party was spilling out the door and around the block when I pulled up to Butterworth’s around 7:30, just 30 minutes after the festivities had begun. Raheem Kassam, an investor in the restaurant and the former editor-in-chief of Breitbart News UK, distributed hand warmers to the shivering masses and tried to stop people from sneaking in through the side door.
Inside, the restaurant was so packed I had a hard time moving through the crowd. The open bar had people acting out: a woman seized a microphone and started an impromptu karaoke session to the chagrin of the other partygoers; I spotted a young man sitting in a corner booth, a blonde woman perched on his lap. When they got up, her lipstick was smeared. It wasn’t even 9PM. Bannon’s remarks that night were brief. After he spoke, he ceded the stage to Lady Nogrady, a right-wing singer-slash-microinfluencer, who performed her song “Modern Day Holy War.” The man standing next to me screamed along to every word.
Overwhelmed by the sheer density of the crowd, I went outside for some fresh air. Two nuns followed shortly thereafter, squeezing past the throng of bodies in the restaurant. One of them said she was from “Commiefornia.”
The convention center was quiet the next morning; most people, I assumed, were sleeping off their hangovers. But the crowds barely grew as the day progressed. Reporters who had been covering CPAC since the Obama administration told me this was the smallest gathering they’d ever seen. The low turnout may have been due to the day’s agenda: Friday’s lineup featured programming from CPAC Japan, CPAC Australia, CPAC Korea, CPAC Hungary, and CPAC Israel; panels on the Iranian nuclear threat and alleged election fraud in South Korea; and speeches by a Mexican actor and the prime minister of Slovakia.
While these international leaders addressed small audiences, the American masses gathered in the hallway, eager to catch a glimpse of their favorite MAGAworld figures. CPAC, I realized, is sort of like a right-wing Disneyland, except instead of being photographed with Mickey Mouse, people were lining up to take selfies with the Navy SEAL who killed Osama bin Laden, or with Steven Sund, the chief of the Capitol Police during the January 6th insurrection who was signing copies of his book, Courage Under Fire: Under Siege and Outnumbered 58 to 1 on January 6, at the Smith & Wesson booth.
I was confused as to why Sund, whose book promises to tell “the full truth about what happened on January 6th,” would be welcome at the same conference that had held a vigil for the J6ers a year prior and ostensibly welcomed the liberated prisoners at this year’s event. CPAC had kicked out some J6ers on Friday for reasons that remain unclear; rumor was that, after being ousted, some of them went to the bar across the street from the convention center, where they spent the afternoon riding a mechanical bull. In any case, they were reinstated before the weekend’s end. On Saturday, I ran into Brandon Fellows, a J6er who was walking around the convention center in a fake Immigration and Customs Enforcement jacket, who told me he bought it on Amazon for $29.99 and used it to “scare illegals.”
Sund, it appeared, was a repentant cop: on Friday, he spoke on a panel about the “J6 Sham.” While Sund signed his books for MAGAworld, his former colleague, Michael Fanone — perhaps best known for testifying in the House’s January 6th investigation — made his own appearance at the Principles First summit across the river. There, Fanone was accosted by J6er and former Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio in the halls of the venue. The conference for Never Trump conservatives was evacuated Sunday after the hotel hosting it received a bomb threat from someone claiming to be Tarrio, who said four pipe bombs would detonate “as soon as the next door opens” in honor of “the J6 hostages recently released by Emperor Trump.”
Friday night, while the grown-ups attended the Ronald Reagan Dinner, the DC Young Republicans hosted a mixer in the hotel lobby bar. A lone man danced to “YMCA,” a MAGAworld favorite, as the other members of his table looked on. I decided to go to bed early in preparation for Trump’s “surprise” speech the next day. The president’s appearance hadn’t been announced, but the Secret Service presence had been, which was all the information anyone needed. The next morning, on the other side of the security line, I ran into James O’Keefe’s assistant, who told me he’d stayed out until 4AM partying with the CPAC Australia crew. He asked if I’d seen the guys who were handing out flyers for a party purportedly being hosted by Bannon and O’Keefe, the Project Veritas founder whose undercover activists covertly film members of the so-called “deep state.”
The assistant told me he had confronted the hucksters, who were charging an $80 cover for their party at Tom’s Watch Bar. O’Keefe, he told me — not for the first time that weekend — would be DJing the invite-only DOGE appreciation party, and the list would be tight. As we spoke, he pointed out the window, gesturing toward what appeared to be Trump’s motorcade as it sped down the parkway and toward us.
Saturday’s lineup was stacked, each speaker seemingly chosen to drum up excitement for the 47th president. Javier Milei, the austerity-loving president of Argentina who’d handed Musk the chainsaw two days earlier, returned for an encore. The crowd responded enthusiastically, deterred neither by the cryptocurrency “rug pull” scandal Milei is facing back home nor by the fact that his speech was entirely in Spanish. (Fortunately, there were subtitles.) Stephen Miller, the White House adviser who had been the brains behind many of Trump’s first-term immigration policies, vowed to get “illegals” out of the country and DEI out of our schools. Border czar Tom Homan found himself swarmed by supporters in the hallway, one of whom chanted “families can be deported together” as passersby lined up to have their picture taken with the man orchestrating Trump’s mass deportations. As I looked for an exit, I was intercepted by a man who asked if this was my first CPAC and boasted about the VIP tickets he’d snagged for last year’s Turning Point USA conference, the annual young conservative gathering hosted by Charlie Kirk, before asking if I was familiar with Elon’s work at DOGE.
“The capacity for cognitive dissonance and to be comfortable with it is seemingly limitless.”
Downstairs, Joe Allen, the War Room tech correspondent, told me this may be my last chance to interview Bannon. As we waited for War Room to finish filming, Allen and I returned to our discussion of whether Bannon-style populism was incompatible with Musk and the rest of the tech-right.
The CPAC attendees I had interviewed certainly didn’t think so. Oscar Flores, a Republican candidate for a local election in his native San Francisco, told me it was like two guys who “will get in a bar fight, and soon thereafter, they’ll start sharing beers and it’s all fine and dandy.” His friend, a real estate agent who declined to be named, said Musk would eventually “bend the knee.” A woman in an oversized Trump mask, who I had spotted all weekend roaming around the convention center with two similarly masked friends, told me she was a fan of Bannon and Musk alike. “It’s like anything else, you don’t agree with every single thing about another person,” she told me when I asked for her thoughts on Bannon’s criticisms of Musk.
Allen was less sanguine. “The capacity for cognitive dissonance and to be comfortable with it is seemingly limitless,” he told me as we waited for Bannon. “What is really striking about Musk and many in the Republican leadership is how nakedly many of them exhibit their elevation — or their aloofness — from the good and evil of the masses. It’s unsettling, because there’s not really been much of a revolt against it.” Even some on the Bannonite “populist nationalist” right, he said, are disquieted by Musk’s behavior and beliefs but “accept it as a politically expedient advantage for now, I guess under the assumption that it can be reversed, or that Musk can be saved, or that the designs of Musk and the other accelerationists that are applying so much pressure and influence on the Trump administration can be avoided down the road.”
But Allen himself wasn’t so sure. “It’s going to be a dry desert on the other side of that mirage,” he said, before walking me over to the War Room stage. When we arrived, Bannon was once again surrounded by fans who had lined up to receive his blessing. After hearing I had questions for him about the tech-MAGA coalition, Bannon promised to speak to me as soon as the meet and greet was over. While we waited, Allen and I ambled over to a carnival game sponsored by Real America’s Voice, where he handed me a toy bow and arrow and told me to give it a try. I failed to hit the ball floating in front of “forever wars.” After a few false starts, he hit “DEI” and “illegal immigration” in a single shot.
My interview with Bannon began before I knew it, with Bannon telling me, “Your thesis is flawed,” although I hadn’t yet asked a single question. (He had clearly taken issue with my mention of the “tech-MAGA coalition.”)
“This is a populist nationalist movement. When you get the tech boys in — and this is my fundamental disagreement with them — they’re not populist and they’re not nationalist.” Individual tech bros, he continued, could hop on the Trump train if they really believed in it, “but the business is a globalist business. They think of it globally,” he told me. (In Bannonworld, globalism is not a good thing.) Bannon said he understood the need to build a “big coalition” and called himself a leader in the effort to bring Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s supporters into MAGA’s expanding tent.
Bannon suggested that the tech titans who threw their support — and money — behind Trump’s inauguration were opportunists whose politics shifted with the wind. “They were all progressive Democrats until 11 pm, Eastern Standard Time on the fifth of November,” he said. “Once it was evident that Trump won, all of a sudden they became MAGA.” In reality, he claimed, the Silicon Valley elite are “techno-feudalists” whose companies should be broken up. “I support Lina Khan, she’s like, my hero,” Bannon said of the former Federal Trade Commission chair, who’d brought antitrust suits against Google and Microsoft. (Musk has publicly attacked Khan on X.) And Trump, Bannon claimed, has stocked the FTC with “neo-Brandeisians,” antitrust champions who would dismantle the tech oligarchy.
“We want to break up Google. We want to break up Facebook. We want to break up Twitter. We think they’re too powerful and too centralized,” Bannon said. “Their whole concept is not capitalism. Their concept is, instead of markets and profits, it’s digital platforms, and they’re rent-seekers. They have total control, and they look at people as digital serfs.” Silicon Valley’s tech elite, he continued, made their money from venture capitalists who redistributed wealth upward by raiding Americans’ pension funds; when their bank failed, they demanded that the government bail them out.
And what about Musk, the object of his criticism and recipient of multimillion-dollar government contracts? This was a “quite complex relationship,” Bannon said. “I disagree with him on so much that’s fundamental, however — and this is very important for people to understand — Elon backed our play. If Elon had not backed our play, the president still would have won, but it would’ve been a much rockier road.”
Musk has two “tactical nuclear weapons in modern politics” in the form of “unlimited money and a media platform that he can, being a ‘free speech absolutist,’ push what he wants to push and shut down what he wants to shut down,” Bannon told me. And isn’t it better to have a guy like that on your side? “Elon wrote $50 million every month for five months. That’s never happened before in American history,” Bannon said. “When they talk about huge donors — [George] Soros on the left, the Adelsons or the Mercers on the right — these people are writing $100 million, $150 million checks, that’s over a cycle. He wrote it in five months.” In other words, Musk’s exploitation of digital serfs might be bad, but at least his money is going to something good.
DOGE, Bannon said, is ultimately the manifestation of the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” a term Bannon himself coined during the first Trump term. The way he sees it, DOGE is an instrument of populist nationalism, an agent of change for the world Bannon wants to build.
Nevertheless, he’s still wary. “He’s, look, he’s a force of nature,” Bannon told me. But he’s also “the leading transhumanist in the country.” Musk and other transhumanists, Bannon told me, are investing in technologies that will widen the gap between the rich and poor: “advanced chip design, quantum computing, CRISPR, gene splicing.” Eventually the gaps between rich and poor will go beyond the material, penetrating our genetic makeup. There’s nothing less populist than that.
“He swears he’s a populist nationalist,” Bannon said of Musk. “I want to see that. I do think, inside of that madness, I think there’s something that can be honed for good.”
These conflicts and contradictions, heightened as they are, matter little to the average CPAC attendee. Trump is their guy, Bannon is their guy, and now Musk is, too. They believe everyone in MAGAworld is working toward a shared goal: the flourishing of the American people and the vanquishing of all enemies, foreign and domestic. During her conversation with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), which doubled as a taping of an episode of his podcast — at one point he asked everyone in the audience to subscribe — Attorney General Pam Bondi described the Trump administration as a big group of friends working together for the common good. From the outside looking in, it seems more like a royal court full of rival factions helmed by scheming viziers vying for the emperor’s favor. Still, they’re undoubtedly more united than their opposition.
Trump is still the king; everyone in his orbit recognizes him as the source of their own power. But as with the emperors of old who bestowed too much attention on an overbearing court favorite, a shadow is falling over his reign. In an unusual move, Trump’s name wasn’t included on the list of speakers, though everyone knew he’d be there. (Trump was supposed to speak at CPAC 2016 but pulled out at the last minute.) I wondered if he wanted his appearance to be a surprise like Elon’s had been, if the play for secrecy was indicative of a lingering insecurity that Musk was encroaching on the president’s spotlight. When Trump took the stage, the crowd went wild, as it always does, but it was still undeniable that Elon had stolen the show.
In the hotel lobby that evening, after Trump’s “surprise” speech and the afternoon prayer, I overheard people strategizing about how to get into the DOGE appreciation party if they weren’t on the list. An RSVP link was circulating in DMs and group chats before abruptly going dead. All anyone could say for certain is that it was being hosted by Sovereign House — the extremely online, far-right-adjacent New York City cultural event space — at a “private residence.” But lists, I had been told the night of the Bannon party, are malleable. (“I’m waiting for my guy to come through,” someone told me.) Anyone who was anyone would be at the DOGE party, as would those strangers and hangers-on who had managed to convince the keepers of the list that they were someone worth knowing. Those who couldn’t get on the list and past security, however, would find themselves paying $80 to get into Tom’s Watch Bar, which one attendee told me ended up being “just like the Bannon party last year, except less Nazis” and not as many big names.
That night, a small group of protesters gathered outside the Capitol Hill condo building where the DOGE appreciation party was taking place, an old school that had been converted into lofts by Brock Pierce, a child star turned crypto mogul. “You’re all Nazis,” one woman screamed at attendees through a megaphone. All the factionalism, the infighting, the irreconcilable ideological contradictions, didn’t matter from the outside. And the partygoers — united by collective relief and smugness about getting on the exclusive invite list — could also ignore the differences among themselves, especially since there was an open bar.
