A little over a year ago, a new class of Trump supporters arrived in Washington to celebrate the dawn of the president’s second term. They were fashion-conscious, politically incorrect and ready to party. They were heralds of a youthful MAGA coalition that was supposed to be more fun than the young fogies of the old right and the uptight killjoys of the contemporary left.
To his enthusiastic young loyalists, Trump’s narrow yet decisive victory in 2024 marked a cultural realignment that rejected the liberal agenda in favor of something ostensibly cooler: freedom and hedonism, checked only by the (very much desired) encumbrances of traditional family values.
How about now?
“We were cool for 2½ minutes — that time has passed,” says Arynne Wexler, 32, a commentator and comedian who had been among those announcing the vibe shift last year.
Some might argue that the moment of MAGA cool lasted longer than that. Others might insist that it was overhyped from the start. But just over a year into its supposed run of cultural predominance, MAGA has arguably entered its cringe era.
A little over a year ago, a new class of Trump supporters arrived in Washington to celebrate the dawn of the president’s second term. They were fashion-conscious, politically incorrect and ready to party. They were heralds of a youthful MAGA coalition that was supposed to be more fun than the young fogies of the old right and the uptight killjoys of the contemporary left.
To his enthusiastic young loyalists, Trump’s narrow yet decisive victory in 2024 marked a cultural realignment that rejected the liberal agenda in favor of something ostensibly cooler: freedom and hedonism, checked only by the (very much desired) encumbrances of traditional family values.
“We were cool for 2½ minutes — that time has passed,” says Arynne Wexler, 32, a commentator and comedian who had been among those announcing the vibe shift last year.
Some might argue that the moment of MAGA cool lasted longer than that. Others might insist that it was overhyped from the start. But just over a year into its supposed run of cultural predominance, MAGA has arguably entered its cringe era.
Think of FBI Director Kash Patel, partying in the locker room with the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team amid criticism for mismanaging bureau resources and mangling high-profile manhunts. Think of Attorney General Pam Bondi assembling a coterie of influencers with binders purportedly stuffed with fresh details about Jeffrey Epstein, only for those influencers to discover that the contents had been previously released. Think of the injected, implanted and veneered “Mar-a-Lago face,” a look that’s about as subtle as a 90,000-square-foot ballroom. Think of Trump aides agreeing to pose for a Vanity Fair photo shoot — not because of the unflattering photos, but because they’d burnished their reputations as outsiders who don’t need validation from the mainstream media. Think of the White House communications team using clips from “SpongeBob SquarePants” and “Call of Duty” to hype a bombing campaign against Iran that’s unpopular in key corners of Trump’s coalition. (These examples are informed by conversations with people inside of MAGA. Those outside the movement surely have lists of their own.)
Think, perhaps above all, of the “All-American Halftime Show,” the alternative Super Bowl entertainment offering from Trump-aligned Turning Point USA. The prerecorded show featured headliner Kid Rock bouncing across a stage alongside intermittent blasts from sparkler cannons and smoke machines. And while many of Trump’s supporters praised his performance of his quarter-century-old hits, an influential, vocal corner of MAGA couldn’t stand it.
What the f--- was that?” Nick Fuentes, the far-right provocateur, said on his show, referring to the Turning Point event. “If that’s the best we have to offer, honestly, I’m switching sides.”
Quality assessments aside, the audiences for the dueling halftime shows served as a reminder that MAGA culture warriors have only so much control over what much of Americas sees — or, crucially, enjoys. Bad Bunny’s performance got an estimated 135 million live views and set a record for global viewership in the 24 hours that followed, according to Roc Nation, which produces the halftime show. Meanwhile, only 6.1 million viewers watched Turning Point’s effort live on YouTube, and the organization reported 25 million viewers across platforms overall.
“You can celebrate different backgrounds and still love this country,” conservative influencer Emily Austin said about Bad Bunny’s performance on X. “That’s exactly what this Super Bowl performance did.”
As you’d expect, not everybody agrees that MAGA has lost its cultural cachet. Several mentioned the movement’s recent alliance with the rapper Nicki Minaj, who made her MAGA debut at a Turning Point USA conference in December and has hung around the president’s inner circle ever since. “That’s one of the biggest cultural wins for a Republican politician since Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley were together in the Oval Office,” said Alex Bruesewitz, a 29-year-old Trump adviser.
There are also those who acknowledged the cringe but refused to criticize specific individuals on the record. “Anyone putting themselves out there — I’m never going to be mean about that,” said Jayme Leigh Franklin, 27, a co-founder of The Conservateur, a right-leaning lifestyle website. “Some people were mean about the TPUSA show, but they’re at least trying to change the culture. What are you doing?”
And there are others still who think none of this matters because the left, to them, remains the vanguard of cringe.
But back to the MAGA side. How exactly do we talk about this, and why are some on the right catching cringe? Maybe it’s just that the vibes, simply put, are off. What the wince-worthy examples share is some kind of chasm — between expectation and outcome, between performance and reality, between hype and truth. The gulf between those things, perhaps, is where MAGA lost its sauce.
What made MAGA cool in the first place, even fleetingly? Natalie Winters, the 25-year-old co-host of “War Room,” blamed — who else? — the mainstream media for overselling its aura.
“I think you guys made it a thing,” Winters said.
She was alluding to the deluge of articles from early last year, when those heady inaugural celebrations had seemed to presage a new conservative epoch. The genre’s buzziest entry had been “The Cruel Kids Table,” a New York magazine story that suggested Trump 2.0 would be a kind of edgelord’s revenge, the mainstreaming of MAGA not only politically, but culturally as well.
The idea of MAGA as a version of hip conservatism had been fermenting long before the first notes of “Y.M.C.A.” rang out at last year’s inaugural balls. During Joe Biden’s presidency, MAGA was reveling in a kind of unapologetic authenticity that disregarded norms, manners and, most of all, your feelings. This was the era of Elon Musk buying Twitter, restoring accounts that had been banned by the hall monitors and declaring that comedy is “legal” again on the platform. It was the era of Kid Rock (there he is again!) shooting cases of Bud Light to protest the brand’s advertising partnership with a trans influencer. (They called this unapologetic attitude “based.”) To some, the left looked unhappy by comparison — a bunch of pronoun-pushers whose attempts to foster inclusivity were stifling.
Plus, there was something forbidden and transgressive about MAGA in exile, a necessary condition for countercultural coolness.
“Right-wing politics were kind of the last taboo,” says Jonathan Keeperman, the founder of Passage Press.
Trump’s new coalition united various cliques who’d had it with the establishment. The hot girls struck an alliance with the MAHA crowd, who infused some au naturel hippie vibes into a party that otherwise had none. There were the Dimes Square hipsters, who fashioned an anti-woke art scene with a traditional Catholic influence. There were the A-Gays, as the New York Times called them, gay men wielding power inside and outside the administration; the “Black Republican mafia” seeking political sway by day and throwing parties with famous rappers by night; the contrarian elites of Silicon Valley, rebelling against “wokeness” and government oversight.
Some saw Trump’s return as a cultural reset, with taste-making privileges reverting to the kids in the red hats. “We are the zeitgeist now,” Caroline Downey, another Conservateur co-founder, proclaimed at the publication’s “Make America Hot Again” party in April.
From that high point, a decline might have been inevitable. “In culture, it’s bad to sell out and become popular, but in politics, that’s what you want — that’s the whole game,” Keeperman said. For those who loved MAGA’s transgressive appeal, he continued, they “now have to share their politics with their boomer uncle who watches Fox News.” Ick.
And there’s another problem: “We treat American culture like a giant oppo dossier,” Winters says. “We’re good at attacking culture, not at creating our own.” And in the absence of that, MAGA finds itself falling into a pattern for which they excoriated the left: cancel culture.
MAGA’s enduring cultural artifact is not something the movement created, but rather, its creator: Trump himself. Back in the early Trump years, his political style was new, shocking and meme-able. Think of how often people, including those who disliked the president, began punctuating phrases with: “Sad!” Think of how he altered the meaning of bright red hats. Think of the TikToks of MAGA youths doing Trump’s stilted fist pump of a “Y.M.C.A.” dance. As for the septuagenarian’s kitschy personal tastes — that was simply part of his lore.
“Donald Trump is the coolest person to live in modern times, objectively speaking,” says Bruesewitz, the young Trump adviser.
For the MAGA faithful, when the president does it, that means it’s not cringe.
What is cringe are efforts to ape him — his manner of speaking, his disregard for conventional rules of grammar, his gaudy taste. “A lot of people in our movement try to imitate the president,” says Janiyah Thomas, 28, who served as the Trump campaign’s Black media director in 2024. “That’s where some of the cringe is starting to come from. You can’t outdo the original.” (Sad!)
The original is getting older and less popular. Among the youngest voters the decline in his appeal has been especially sharp. Between February 2025 and last month, the president’s approval with adults under age 30 has dropped from 44 percent to 29 percent, with a slight decline (34 percent to 30 percent) among people in their 30s, according to Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos polling. In that under-40 cohort, last month’s survey found support for the MAGA movement itself at under 20 percent.
Popularity and approval might not be the exact same thing as “cool,” but some of the administration’s moves seem to have bummed out some newcomers who had rallied around MAGA. The MAHA coalition has threatened divorce over a recent executive order to increase production of a weed killer they thought Trump would ban. The administration’s handling of the Epstein files disillusioned some first-time Trump voters. And then there’s the war in Iran, which may be more exciting to Washington hawks than to the Trump voters who had been moved by his stated aversion to “endless” wars abroad.
“Outsiders were the coolest part of the movement, and they stopped listening to those people,” said Bart Hutchins, 35, a co-owner and chef at Butterworth’s, a MAGA-friendly hot spot on Capitol Hill. “They kicked MAHA in the face and started listening to Lindsey Graham. The thing that was never cool is now in the driver’s seat.”
Winters, the “War Room” co-host, borrows a term from psychology: “preference falsification.” It’s when people misrepresent their true feelings or beliefs due to social pressure or fear of consequences. One of her major pet peeves is the fact that she believes many Trump supporters know MAGA is looking cringe, but won’t call it out for fear of retribution.
She sees a new frontier in “based.”
“What is cool now,” she said, “is being brave enough to critique the administration for not fulfilling their campaign promises.
To his enthusiastic young loyalists, Trump’s narrow yet decisive victory in 2024 marked a cultural realignment that rejected the liberal agenda in favor of something ostensibly cooler: freedom and hedonism, checked only by the (very much desired) encumbrances of traditional family values.
How about now?
“We were cool for 2½ minutes — that time has passed,” says Arynne Wexler, 32, a commentator and comedian who had been among those announcing the vibe shift last year.
Some might argue that the moment of MAGA cool lasted longer than that. Others might insist that it was overhyped from the start. But just over a year into its supposed run of cultural predominance, MAGA has arguably entered its cringe era.
A little over a year ago, a new class of Trump supporters arrived in Washington to celebrate the dawn of the president’s second term. They were fashion-conscious, politically incorrect and ready to party. They were heralds of a youthful MAGA coalition that was supposed to be more fun than the young fogies of the old right and the uptight killjoys of the contemporary left.
To his enthusiastic young loyalists, Trump’s narrow yet decisive victory in 2024 marked a cultural realignment that rejected the liberal agenda in favor of something ostensibly cooler: freedom and hedonism, checked only by the (very much desired) encumbrances of traditional family values.
“We were cool for 2½ minutes — that time has passed,” says Arynne Wexler, 32, a commentator and comedian who had been among those announcing the vibe shift last year.
Some might argue that the moment of MAGA cool lasted longer than that. Others might insist that it was overhyped from the start. But just over a year into its supposed run of cultural predominance, MAGA has arguably entered its cringe era.
Think of FBI Director Kash Patel, partying in the locker room with the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team amid criticism for mismanaging bureau resources and mangling high-profile manhunts. Think of Attorney General Pam Bondi assembling a coterie of influencers with binders purportedly stuffed with fresh details about Jeffrey Epstein, only for those influencers to discover that the contents had been previously released. Think of the injected, implanted and veneered “Mar-a-Lago face,” a look that’s about as subtle as a 90,000-square-foot ballroom. Think of Trump aides agreeing to pose for a Vanity Fair photo shoot — not because of the unflattering photos, but because they’d burnished their reputations as outsiders who don’t need validation from the mainstream media. Think of the White House communications team using clips from “SpongeBob SquarePants” and “Call of Duty” to hype a bombing campaign against Iran that’s unpopular in key corners of Trump’s coalition. (These examples are informed by conversations with people inside of MAGA. Those outside the movement surely have lists of their own.)
Think, perhaps above all, of the “All-American Halftime Show,” the alternative Super Bowl entertainment offering from Trump-aligned Turning Point USA. The prerecorded show featured headliner Kid Rock bouncing across a stage alongside intermittent blasts from sparkler cannons and smoke machines. And while many of Trump’s supporters praised his performance of his quarter-century-old hits, an influential, vocal corner of MAGA couldn’t stand it.
What the f--- was that?” Nick Fuentes, the far-right provocateur, said on his show, referring to the Turning Point event. “If that’s the best we have to offer, honestly, I’m switching sides.”
Quality assessments aside, the audiences for the dueling halftime shows served as a reminder that MAGA culture warriors have only so much control over what much of Americas sees — or, crucially, enjoys. Bad Bunny’s performance got an estimated 135 million live views and set a record for global viewership in the 24 hours that followed, according to Roc Nation, which produces the halftime show. Meanwhile, only 6.1 million viewers watched Turning Point’s effort live on YouTube, and the organization reported 25 million viewers across platforms overall.
“You can celebrate different backgrounds and still love this country,” conservative influencer Emily Austin said about Bad Bunny’s performance on X. “That’s exactly what this Super Bowl performance did.”
As you’d expect, not everybody agrees that MAGA has lost its cultural cachet. Several mentioned the movement’s recent alliance with the rapper Nicki Minaj, who made her MAGA debut at a Turning Point USA conference in December and has hung around the president’s inner circle ever since. “That’s one of the biggest cultural wins for a Republican politician since Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley were together in the Oval Office,” said Alex Bruesewitz, a 29-year-old Trump adviser.
There are also those who acknowledged the cringe but refused to criticize specific individuals on the record. “Anyone putting themselves out there — I’m never going to be mean about that,” said Jayme Leigh Franklin, 27, a co-founder of The Conservateur, a right-leaning lifestyle website. “Some people were mean about the TPUSA show, but they’re at least trying to change the culture. What are you doing?”
And there are others still who think none of this matters because the left, to them, remains the vanguard of cringe.
But back to the MAGA side. How exactly do we talk about this, and why are some on the right catching cringe? Maybe it’s just that the vibes, simply put, are off. What the wince-worthy examples share is some kind of chasm — between expectation and outcome, between performance and reality, between hype and truth. The gulf between those things, perhaps, is where MAGA lost its sauce.
What made MAGA cool in the first place, even fleetingly? Natalie Winters, the 25-year-old co-host of “War Room,” blamed — who else? — the mainstream media for overselling its aura.
“I think you guys made it a thing,” Winters said.
She was alluding to the deluge of articles from early last year, when those heady inaugural celebrations had seemed to presage a new conservative epoch. The genre’s buzziest entry had been “The Cruel Kids Table,” a New York magazine story that suggested Trump 2.0 would be a kind of edgelord’s revenge, the mainstreaming of MAGA not only politically, but culturally as well.
The idea of MAGA as a version of hip conservatism had been fermenting long before the first notes of “Y.M.C.A.” rang out at last year’s inaugural balls. During Joe Biden’s presidency, MAGA was reveling in a kind of unapologetic authenticity that disregarded norms, manners and, most of all, your feelings. This was the era of Elon Musk buying Twitter, restoring accounts that had been banned by the hall monitors and declaring that comedy is “legal” again on the platform. It was the era of Kid Rock (there he is again!) shooting cases of Bud Light to protest the brand’s advertising partnership with a trans influencer. (They called this unapologetic attitude “based.”) To some, the left looked unhappy by comparison — a bunch of pronoun-pushers whose attempts to foster inclusivity were stifling.
Plus, there was something forbidden and transgressive about MAGA in exile, a necessary condition for countercultural coolness.
“Right-wing politics were kind of the last taboo,” says Jonathan Keeperman, the founder of Passage Press.
Trump’s new coalition united various cliques who’d had it with the establishment. The hot girls struck an alliance with the MAHA crowd, who infused some au naturel hippie vibes into a party that otherwise had none. There were the Dimes Square hipsters, who fashioned an anti-woke art scene with a traditional Catholic influence. There were the A-Gays, as the New York Times called them, gay men wielding power inside and outside the administration; the “Black Republican mafia” seeking political sway by day and throwing parties with famous rappers by night; the contrarian elites of Silicon Valley, rebelling against “wokeness” and government oversight.
Some saw Trump’s return as a cultural reset, with taste-making privileges reverting to the kids in the red hats. “We are the zeitgeist now,” Caroline Downey, another Conservateur co-founder, proclaimed at the publication’s “Make America Hot Again” party in April.
From that high point, a decline might have been inevitable. “In culture, it’s bad to sell out and become popular, but in politics, that’s what you want — that’s the whole game,” Keeperman said. For those who loved MAGA’s transgressive appeal, he continued, they “now have to share their politics with their boomer uncle who watches Fox News.” Ick.
And there’s another problem: “We treat American culture like a giant oppo dossier,” Winters says. “We’re good at attacking culture, not at creating our own.” And in the absence of that, MAGA finds itself falling into a pattern for which they excoriated the left: cancel culture.
MAGA’s enduring cultural artifact is not something the movement created, but rather, its creator: Trump himself. Back in the early Trump years, his political style was new, shocking and meme-able. Think of how often people, including those who disliked the president, began punctuating phrases with: “Sad!” Think of how he altered the meaning of bright red hats. Think of the TikToks of MAGA youths doing Trump’s stilted fist pump of a “Y.M.C.A.” dance. As for the septuagenarian’s kitschy personal tastes — that was simply part of his lore.
“Donald Trump is the coolest person to live in modern times, objectively speaking,” says Bruesewitz, the young Trump adviser.
For the MAGA faithful, when the president does it, that means it’s not cringe.
What is cringe are efforts to ape him — his manner of speaking, his disregard for conventional rules of grammar, his gaudy taste. “A lot of people in our movement try to imitate the president,” says Janiyah Thomas, 28, who served as the Trump campaign’s Black media director in 2024. “That’s where some of the cringe is starting to come from. You can’t outdo the original.” (Sad!)
The original is getting older and less popular. Among the youngest voters the decline in his appeal has been especially sharp. Between February 2025 and last month, the president’s approval with adults under age 30 has dropped from 44 percent to 29 percent, with a slight decline (34 percent to 30 percent) among people in their 30s, according to Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos polling. In that under-40 cohort, last month’s survey found support for the MAGA movement itself at under 20 percent.
Popularity and approval might not be the exact same thing as “cool,” but some of the administration’s moves seem to have bummed out some newcomers who had rallied around MAGA. The MAHA coalition has threatened divorce over a recent executive order to increase production of a weed killer they thought Trump would ban. The administration’s handling of the Epstein files disillusioned some first-time Trump voters. And then there’s the war in Iran, which may be more exciting to Washington hawks than to the Trump voters who had been moved by his stated aversion to “endless” wars abroad.
“Outsiders were the coolest part of the movement, and they stopped listening to those people,” said Bart Hutchins, 35, a co-owner and chef at Butterworth’s, a MAGA-friendly hot spot on Capitol Hill. “They kicked MAHA in the face and started listening to Lindsey Graham. The thing that was never cool is now in the driver’s seat.”
Winters, the “War Room” co-host, borrows a term from psychology: “preference falsification.” It’s when people misrepresent their true feelings or beliefs due to social pressure or fear of consequences. One of her major pet peeves is the fact that she believes many Trump supporters know MAGA is looking cringe, but won’t call it out for fear of retribution.
She sees a new frontier in “based.”
“What is cool now,” she said, “is being brave enough to critique the administration for not fulfilling their campaign promises.
