Over the past several months, various news outlets have been prognosticating the flight of young conservative women from the Republican Party. In March, New York magazine focused on what it called “the young women leaving the new right.” Now Politico has suggested that a Turning Point USA conference in San Antonio, Texas this past weekend shows that “bubbling under the surface are divisions within the GOP that have enveloped the online voices of the young right and a budding disillusionment among young women with the second Trump administration. It’s all part of a growing divide between being “MAGA” in 2026 and being “America First.”
But that’s not what I saw at the very same conference. Far from abandoning Trump, the conference goers appeared to channel the defiant spirit of the fabled Texas cry, “Remember the Alamo!” When Riley Gaines, the champion swimmer turned MAGA advocate, declared that for the media nothing was worse than being a “Triple Trump” voter – “the most cancellable of offenses” – the ballroom was awash in cheers from the thousand or so young women attending the Women’s Leadership conference, organized by Erika Kirk. At several points they rose as one to give standing ovations to various speakers.
There has been a consolidation of a counter-counter-culture
It’s true that there weren’t many mentions of Donald Trump. But there wasn’t anyone bashing him from the stage, either. And there were plenty of booths outside the ballroom that were dedicated to promoting political activities on behalf of the GOP, including one that featured a Turning Point Action poster of a stylish young woman dressed in a polka dot dress and reading a document. The poster stated, “She reads the fine print and the ballot.”
The mood inside the ballroom was intensely serious, mixed with rock concert-style bursts of dry ice vapors to celebrate the entrances of everyone from former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany to Texas state senator Angela Paxton. Speaker after speaker invoked the urgency of submitting to their husbands – though it must be admitted that this was one topic that Paxton, who filed for divorce from her husband Ken, who is running for the Senate, on “biblical grounds” did not allude to during her address. Throughout, the focus was on the family – the need to procreate as early and as often as possible.
If anything, the meeting created the impression of the conversion, as it were, of the Marriott hotel into a temporary mega church – one in which the young parishioners were adjured not to falter or equivocate; rather, they should redouble their commitment to a higher cause. How the dynamic and poised speakers reconciled their leading roles in the conservative movement with their ostentatious avowal of submission, as far as possible, to the stronger sex was left unresolved. Not everyone seemed to think it was fair for the fairer sex to take a unilateral backseat. Perhaps “the first female president” would emerge from the crowd of young women, Gaines remarked. Or did she have herself in mind?
In essence, the meeting represented the consolidation of a counter-counter-culture. Make America Healthy Again booths vied with clothes merchants for business. In many ways the young acolytes seemed to have given a conservative twist to Timothy Leary ‘s old slogan, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”
Others wanted to drop in. On Friday a protester burst into the initial meeting to heckle Erika Kirk as a “pedophile protector” of Trump, and another demonstrator wore a mock mask of Charlie Kirk, falling onto the floor of the hotel in an attempt to replicate his assassination and shouting, “He deserved to die!” On Saturday, Antifa-led demonstrations took place outside the hotel, but they quickly petered out.
The contrast with the long tressed women in their prairie dresses, more than a few of whom were auditioning to become Trad wives was striking. The truth is that the opposition to Trump has nothing like the unified field theory of activism that the boisterous Turning Point celebrants demonstrated. If the conference was anything to go by, MAGA isn’t splintering. It’s doubling down.
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