Pro-Trump politico CJ Pearson, centre, poses with attendees of his “Cruel Kids Summer” party in July. Photo / Maxine Wallace, The Washington Post
“It’s a Maga summer, baby, let’s GO!”
CJ Pearson was perched atop a set of stairs, overlooking a crowd of hundreds, in a massive lofted apartment near H Street NE on a sweltering July afternoon.
He wore a bone-coloured suit from Suitsupply, looking like he was aboard a Biscayne Bay cruise.
He yelled into a microphone as the guests – a collage of congressional staffers, conservative content creators, and assorted Washington arrivistes, all dressed in white – erupted in cheers.
Pearson was throwing this party, called “Cruel Kids Summer”, as a burlesque of a New York magazine cover story from January that had included a photo from Pearson’s inauguration weekend party with the headline “THE CRUEL KIDS’ TABLE”.
Six months later, Pearson was still miffed about the fact that the reporter had said that “almost everyone” in the new young conservative scene was white, that the cover photo from his party depicted a nearly all-white tableau – and that he, a black man, had not been interviewed.
“The media accused me of throwing an all-white party,” he told his guests at another point, later in the afternoon, exaggerating. “So we threw an ALL. WHITE. PARTY.”
United States President Donald Trump’s Washington faces a problem right now, in his opinion: too many receptions, not enough parties.
Pearson, 23, is a party guy – who attended the University of Alabama, where he pledged Theta Chi and left with a firm grasp of how a bad gender ratio can mess up the vibe.
Of Republican events, he says, “It’s always like, 70% men, 30% women, which is not even fun for the girls at that point”.
He can often be spotted at social gatherings around town sporting a red velvet blazer.
He’s a new presence in the capital, but also a very old one: an ambitious young scenester who seems to be counting down the years before he is eligible to run for Congress.
Formally, he’s a consultant. He is also a prolific poster, with social feeds calling diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts a “disease” and arguing that Trump’s recent deployment of federal troops in DC will “save countless black lives”.
And he is one of several black Maga figures vying for status and influence after an election in which Trump, long seen as an avatar of the white working class, returned to power on the strength of a more diverse coalition.
This has inspired a new and hopeful belief on the right: that Trumpism is now youthful, sexy, multiracial. And fun.
The Cruel Kids Summer party was being sponsored by Meta, Pearson said, and held at a brick-walled loft apartment building owned by child actor-turned-crypto entrepreneur Brock Pierce, who rented the space to Pearson.
The event will end up costing US$80,000 ($136,630), though Pearson didn’t say how much of that Meta covered, and the company did not respond to requests for comment. Soulja Boy was scheduled to perform. Pearson said he expected Kash Patel, the FBI Director, to stop by.
Before entering the loft, guests were offered cans of fruit punch-flavoured hard seltzer, which were chilled but somehow went down warm. Inside, there were issues of Foreign Affairs magazine, a box labelled “horse medicine supply”, a shelf with books about Robert F. Kennedy jnr and what appeared to be a taxidermied bison wearing a white “Make America Party Again” hat – one of 375 Pearson had made for the occasion.
On a wall of a sitting room, there was a painting of Pierce wearing an orange fedora. Real-life Pierce was also there, wearing a real-life orange fedora. He described the apartment’s decor as a mix of Americana and “steampunk”.
He gestured at a giant chandelier. “From the Waldorf Astoria in New York,” he said over blaring Euroclub music. Mr Saxobeat blended, somehow, into Billie Jean.
Upstairs, past a security guard checking wristbands, there was a lofted area, where Pearson’s friends, like Xaviaer DuRousseau, an on-camera personality for PragerU, and Janiyah Thomas, the Trump 2024 campaign’s black media director, were lounging.
DuRousseau is 28 and would love to become “the right-wing Oprah” or “a conservative combination of Dr Phil and Wendy Williams”.
Born in Chicago and raised in rural Illinois, he now lives the upmarket cosmopolitan life of a modern content creator in Los Angeles, sipping Erewhon smoothies and posting videos to his more than 500,000 Instagram followers.
Topics include Juneteenth (“There is no such thing as a black Independence Day, but if that’s what you wanna call Juneteenth, then I don’t wanna see y’all twerking on a boat on July Fourth”) and the recent American Eagle ad campaign with actor Sydney Sweeney (“Hot white people, this is your sign to stop being ashamed of your Caucasian excellence”).
At the party, he was wearing a cream camp-collar knit shirt and rectangular shades, carrying a miniature portable fan.
“There’s so much opportunity for me here to get involved more in consulting,” DuRousseau said a few days later, pondering his future over an iced almond matcha latte. (Maybe he’ll go to business school? He’s not sure.) He was setting up networking coffees with people here in DC so he can get more into policy work.
Thomas was sitting at a sofa in the VIP section, under a skylight, in a strapless white top and white boot cut pants. She is also a consultant and says she is currently working with a criminal justice reform group, a company in the sports-betting world and a celebrity (she doesn’t say which).
Thomas, 27, also recently competed in the Miss District of Columbia pageant as Miss Penn Quarter and is planning to start a podcast on politics and culture soon. She’s not a big poster or party person, but she does see the value in trying to influence politics through culture.
One thing the GOP needs, in her view: more black surrogates making the case for their party anywhere a camera is pointing, the way Symone Sanders or Al Sharpton frequently appear on MSNBC. “They don’t shut up. And they never go away. And Republicans need to be doing that,” she told us later.
Thomas grew up in what she describes as a liberal family in Fort Mill, South Carolina, but her views shifted as she read up on black political thought at the University of South Carolina.
She was struck by Malcolm X’s admonitions about two-faced white liberals – that they can pretend to be allies to black people, but at the end of the day are seeking power just like conservatives.
“At least with Republicans,” Thomas said, “you know what you’re getting.”
Like Pearson, Thomas and DuRousseau see Trump’s gains with black voters – 15% in 2024, up from 8% in 2020, according to a study by the Pew Research Centre – as a potential turning point for Republicans.
DuRousseau says he believes that people in the black community have been “brainwashed” to think that they must support the left. Barack Obama, Thomas says, “made the chokehold even tighter”.
With rappers like Soulja Boy coming out and performing at conservative events, DuRousseau thinks more like-minded black people will feel encouraged to join the party, so to speak. “It’s simply a domino effect,” he says.
In this version of the story of the Trump 2.0 coalition, Pearson and his pals are not just savvy young politicos partying on the dime of a tech company. They are the vanguard of a new GOP – a party that managed, at least last November, to pull out of its demographic death spiral by appealing to a younger, less monochromatic generation of Americans.
“They’re showing people that being a young conservative doesn’t just mean you’re out in the middle of the country, like, working on a corn field,” says Annemarie Wiley, a former cast member on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills who now makes conservative content.
“We’ve got to build a tent,” Pearson says several days before the party, over lemonade at Ned’s Club, a swank downtown spot where he is a member, “because there are no more white voters for us to get.”
Before Maga came along, he explained, “it was a faux pas” to identify as Republican. “It was cheugy. It wasn’t fun. And I think that we’re doing all we can to rework that narrative and rebrand it.” (Did we mention he’s a consultant?)
“It was cool to vote for Obama in 2008. It was really cool to vote for that guy,” says Harry Sisson, a Democratic content creator who frequently spars with Pearson online. “It was cool to vote for Biden in 2020, and Republicans have, unfortunately, I think, swung that back to them.”
Raven Schwam-Curtis, a Chicago-based creator who was part of a cadre of influencers attending the Democratic National Convention last year, sees figures like DuRousseau and Pearson as using the subversiveness of being black and Republican to position themselves as the new cool kids.
“What they’re doing is the equivalent of ‘We’re not like the other girls,’” she says, making it clear she’s opposed to their message. “It’s essentially a rebranding of the hipster thing: ‘Most black people vote for Democrats, but I’m voting for Republicans, and here’s why you should listen to my deviation from the norm, because, actually, you’ve been duped.’”
At 4.12pm, Soulja Boy, wearing a white Polo Ralph Lauren jacket, emerged to his 2008 hit Turn My Swag On. Other Pearson bashes have featured Waka Flocka Flame, who posted in support of Trump for President during the campaign, and Kodak Black, whose nearly four-year prison sentence Trump commuted in 2021.
Soulja Boy was wearing sunglasses and holding what looked like a thick blunt between his fingers. It was not his first rodeo in Trump’s Washington. The rapper, now in his mid-30s, performed at the Crypto Ball over inauguration weekend. Afterwards, he explained that the organisers paid him “a bag” and remarked that Trump, unlike Obama or Kamala Harris, put money in his pockets.
Soulja Boy didn’t make any political statements, and he didn’t respond to a shouted question about his feelings on Maga.
What he did do was perform Crank That (Soulja Boy) while Thomas, DuRousseau and Pearson (who was 4 years old when the song came out) danced along with their other friends. (Most of the other guests did not Crank That.) Later, having done his job and presumably got his bag – Pearson wouldn’t share Soulja Boy’s fee, citing a non-disclosure agreement – the rapper departed the gig wearing a white “Make America Party Again” hat.
In national politics, black conservatives have “the hardest line to walk,” says Jennifer DeCasper, executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
A former longtime aide to Senator Tim Scott (Republican-South Carolina), DeCasper hired Thomas to Scott’s short-lived 2024 presidential campaign and became a mentor figure.
DeCasper hasn’t been to one of Pearson’s parties – “I probably have never been invited because I’m too old, frankly, and not cool enough,” she said in an interview – but she does seem to understand the need to undo the stigma of belonging to a supposedly white party.
“No black person wants to lose their black card, right?” she said. “When we get pushback from our brothers and sisters, it hurts. Even if we think the policy that we are advocating for is correct, we don’t want to lose our black cards.”
Thomas remembers being “in tears” after Trump, speaking at a conference of black journalists during the campaign, suggested that Kamala Harris was using her racial identity in an opportunistic way – that his Democratic opponent suddenly “made a turn” and “became a black person” after she spent years promoting her Indian heritage, in his words.
“And you know what?” Thomas said, “I went on TV the next morning and I defended it, because he didn’t say nothing that black Twitter ain’t been saying … He gets the culture.”
What kind of culture is Trump promoting with his policies, now that he’s back in office?
While Trump has signed executive orders supporting HBCUs and establishing a White House initiative on those institutions, his Department of Education has targeted colleges that engage in diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
The Administration has sought to wipe those initiatives from every other corner of the federal government, too, and it has ended temporary legal protections for immigrants from Haiti and Cameroon.
At the Justice Department, the civil rights division has shifted from combating racial discrimination against minorities to combating “woke ideology”.
The White House has ordered a sweeping review of eight museums, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the President criticised the Smithsonian for focusing too much on “how bad slavery was”.
DuRousseau has some notes for his fellow conservatives. “Calling everything DEI: That needs to go,” he said.
He pointed to an episode earlier this year, when an article about Jackie Robinson’s military service briefly disappeared from a Department of Defence website amid a purge of content promoting DEI. Questioning the success of every hardworking black person, he said, “just feels racist at that point”.
A week after the party, Pearson, DuRousseau and Thomas all spoke at a conference for black conservatives – which Thomas helped organise – at a Hilton in Alexandria, Virginia.
There were fewer people in the ballroom than there had been at the loft, but enthusiasm for the Trump presidency was high. Various panellists cheered the Administration’s willingness to consider reclassifying marijuana as less dangerous than other drugs at the federal level.
Some warned about the danger of contraband vapes from China proliferating among black youth. A formerly incarcerated man spoke with gratitude for the “opportunity” to be confined at a private prison owned by one of the conference’s sponsors.
Pearson came onstage for a “fireside chat” about “Gen Z and the age of influencers”. He had good news for his fellow black conservatives.
“I’ve never seen so many celebrities who are so vocal about being pro-Trump and being Republican. You know, folks like Waka Flocka, Kodak Black, Soulja Boy,” he said, name-checking rappers that have performed at his own parties. (Soulja Boy’s publicist told us that the rapper supports Trump like he would support any president, but is not a political person.)
“… And so I think we’ve got to embrace culture. We got to reach America’s young people where they are, because our message is a winning message, but the only way that we’re actually going to get that message in front of them is if we actually send it their way.”
He thinks he’s helping with that. In August Pearson launched Right Influence, a company that will work with conservative content creators. He says his group is working with Maga-world clients such as the Heritage Foundation, the American Conservation Coalition and Michigan gubernatorial candidate Representative John James (R).
As for his own political future, Pearson may end up seeking a more traditional path of influence in Washington. “In three years, I’ll be 26,” he told us. “So that would be 20 - that’s 2028. So that’s a presidential election year. That’s also the earliest I could run for Congress.”
By his count, over 450 people came to the “Cruel Kids Summer” party – even if Patel did not end up showing.
Pearson would like to host more of them in the future – his dream musical number is Drake – but the only thing the event really reinforced, he said, is that he wants his future wife to plan their whole wedding. “I just want input on the guest list,” he said. “That’s all I need.” (He is single.)
All the Republicans need is for their newest guests to keep showing up to the party. And maybe also to bring a plus-one.
Between February and August, Pew clocked a small downturn in Trump’s support among black Americans, and the future of the Trump coalition without Trump remains a question. But Pearson’s July bash had at least one person who was considering her feelings about Maga, sitting near the exit.
Jaylen Isaac, a 27-year-old teacher in DC, found out about Pearson’s party through her friends. She’s a liberal – the Democrats were all she knew growing up, she said – but she doesn’t want to base her political choices just on old traditions.
Parties like Pearson’s were more realistic about who they were catering to, she said. On a table in the kitchen, spilled-over French fries surrounded a mound of leftover McDonald’s burgers sitting in their wrappers.
“They know that we like McDonald’s,” Isaac said. “They know that we like beer. They know that we like Drake.”
Republicans knew how to have fun without making people feel like misfits, she said.
“When you’re seeing people that you usually don’t see at certain parties,” she said, “it’s like, maybe things aren’t so bad, and maybe we are being blinded, and we need to actually come out and see what’s really going on.”
Sign up to Herald Premium Editor’s Picks, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-Chief Murray Kirkness picks the week’s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here.