The Scene
The cozy Capitol Hill restaurant — andfavorite MAGA clubhouse — Butterworth’s is closed on Friday mornings, so Nick Solheim let me in through a side door.
American Moment, the group he cofounded in 2021, was leading a training upstairs for a group of earnest young right-wing political staffers, 17 men and one woman. When I poked my head into the room, they were listening to one of the heterodox economists orbiting the Trump White House explain what is wrong with traditional notions of free trade.
These young conservatives are the vanguard of a new class in Washington that you encounter at the junior levels of federal agencies and congressional offices. It left me wondering: Where did all these very nice, very young, and very MAGA kids ?When I worked as a reporter in Washington during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, the ambitious young conservatives were involved in Republican politics at Penn or writing for the conservative student newspaper at Dartmouth. They would go on to become the so-called neocons — many of whom still occupy positions of power in conservative Washington, though their politics have shifted to better match President Donald Trump’s.
The members of this new generation are more likely to have grown up outside a city like Columbus, Ohio, and to have gone to state school or Christian college. Solheim, a compact, blond 29-year-old who is American Moment’s CEO, boasts he’s never admitted an Ivy League alumnus to his organization. In their jobs in the Trump administration and Republican congressional offices, American Moment’s fellows do a lot of answering the phones, and they always politely take a message and call back — sometimes with an outrageous Trumpian statement or hardline defense of ICE arrests to pass on.
“I came of age politically when it was really important to have sharp elbows, and I just don’t see that in these young conservatives,” said Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, who calls American Moment “one of the most important organizations in the conservative movement today.”
Solheim started American Moment with Jake Mercier and Saurabh Sharma, the latter of whom left the organization for a senior role in Trump’s presidential personnel office. The group, which had a $2 million budget in 2024, hasn’t sought or gotten much publicity: Sharma said on American Moment’s podcast in 2023 that if he had his preference, “this would be a completely dark-arts project, almost like a glacier. You’d see a tiny 10% poking out over top, and the rest of it would happen without any attention whatsoever.”
By then, he said, they’d trained about 1,500 young conservatives; that number, Solheim said, is now several thousand. (Earlier this month, Solheim would only let me in for a brief, off-the-record peek at the training.)
Their goal has been to bring the Trump generation of young people to Washington. That has partly meant broadening the pipeline beyond those with elite credentials. The program has clear ideological tests: Applicants should oppose immigration, free trade, and foreign adventures.
“Our goal is to create 10,000 Stephen Millers,” Solheim said on the podcast last September. He told me the hardline Trump aide is a model not only for his effectiveness, but also “because his career trajectory perfectly tracks what we’re attempting to achieve with our young people. From junior Senate staffer to assistant to the president, and everything in between.”
Much of their training is practical: The group takes in 15-30 paid fellows each semester in its most intensive, paid program, and teaches them to tuck in their shirts, shower daily, and network relentlessly. The training includes mock networking happy hours and credit cards with $100 to take people out to coffee. (Solheim himself favors Butterworth’s Vesper martini.)
The project is well-regarded inside the Trump administration, including by Vice President JD Vance, who was an adviser to American Moment in its early days. Vance’s former national security adviser, Andy Baker, is joining the group as a senior adviser.
“When people hire a fellow from American Moment, they know they are getting someone who has had ideological and intellectual formation with whom the principal may agree,” said Rachel Bovard, the vice president of programs at the Conservative Partnership Institute and a member of the group’s board. “And they know the standards of how you should behave.”
American Moment’s critics on the left and the right accuse the group of flying too close to the racism and nihilism of the online right. The group’s podcast guests have included Jeremy Carl, a Trump administration official whose confirmation faltered because his views on anti-white racism were seen as too extreme. In the spirit of Vance’s relationship with Tucker Carlson, Solheim and his allies avoid criticizing allies to the right.
But in the taxonomy of the young American right, there are degrees of difference. People involved in American Moment insist they screen for extremist tweets, telling their fellows to stay off the internet and avoid edgelord politics.
“You haven’t seen the Paul Ingrassia types come through American Moment,” said one Trump administration official, referring to a colleague who noted his own “Nazi streak” in leaked text messages.
White supremacist Nick Fuentes, meanwhile, groups American Moment on his enemies list with “neocons” and “Zionists.” He once delivered an extended racist rant directed at Sharma and the group.
“If you are at all adjacent to Nick Fuentes or anything he says, you are not getting in,” Bovard said. Instead, the group recognizes that “especially for young men, there’s this toxic stew of nihilism and Andrew Tate out there that can be attractive if you have nothing else. Some of the American Moment project is taking young men like that and giving them purpose.”
American Moment’s biggest challenge right now is identical to the one vexing Republican voters at the polls next month: Even if they find ICE’s sweeps inspiring, they feel betrayed by the Iran war. “A lot of the younger staff are pretty demoralized by the war,” notes one administration official. He and a former Trump administration official both told me they’d been counseling junior staff to play the long game.
“Those guys are showing up to work every day and carrying out a policy they disagree with,” the former Trump administration official said. “That’s the essence of government work.”
Ben’s view
There’s a daydream among Democrats and Republicans who dislike Trump that the party will return to something like “normal.” That may in some sense be true: The American Moment crowd has little in common with the political appointees at the higher levels of the administration, a motley crew often chosen for social ties and financial connections that’s currently reeling through a series of lurid scandals.
But my encounter with Washington’s new generation has persuaded me of how deeply this party is now shaped by the ideological pillars of MAGA. A few thousand experienced and competent staffers are the bedrock of any political movement. New Republican leaders will want experienced staff, and the bulk of young people getting that experience are MAGA now.
“They genuinely believe in a lot of these ideas that they believe got Trump elected and that propelled JD Vance — but they want these ideas to outlast both of them,” said Bovard. “It’ll take 20 to 30 years to see if they’re successful.”
Room for Disagreement
Older Republicans insist they aren’t yet done with their party’s civil war. A Republican operative of my generation who embraces the “neocon” label recently told me they remain confident that the US attack on Iran will be vindicated.
The best thing about the war, this person confided, was of course the damage it has done to the Islamic Republic. But the second-best part was having forced the American Moment kids to implement and sell the policy.
Notable
- Politico’s Ian Ward profiled American Moment in 2023.
- Solheim rallied his group this week around a Democratic senator’s suggestion that young conservatives could put themselves at risk by going into politics.