The MAGA kids are not all White

YOUNG REPUBLICANS

- THE WASHINGTON POST

“IT’S AMAGA 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.”

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 percent men, 30 percent 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.