The frustration at dEcORa, a neon-lit Covington bar whose spray-painted concrete pillars and kaleidoscope art underscore its eccentric name, did not take long to surface. Nathaniel Showalter, 34, captured the mood when he told the Associated Press, “I absolutely do not regret voting for Trump in 2024. I can’t wait for him to get out of office.”
Over the course of the evening, the group — all men in their 20s and 30s, ribbing each other and slipping into impersonations of Trump or conspiracy theorist Alex Jones — unspooled a litany of grievances that traced a line from the battlefield to the ballot box. Michael Gartman called the administration’s prosecution of Operation Epic Fury “a complete betrayal of his promises,” and the sense that foreign policy has been captured by the defense industry and pro-Israel donors was a recurring theme that night.
Logan Edge, a 30-year-old gun lobbyist with a Lincoln-esque beard, performed an impression of Trump talking about billionaire megadonor Miriam Adelson — “Oh Miriam, she’s over there, she loves Israel, maybe more than America” — before dropping the mimicry and adding, “You can’t piss on my shoes and tell me it’s raining.” Edge later described visiting Arlington National Cemetery with his father, a veteran of Desert Storm and Iraq, to find his father’s friends. “You can get on the Metro and go to the next Metro stop and the first thing you see is Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, and I said to my dad, ‘Look what you’re about to see.’” He paused. “It brings tears to my eyes.”
The generational alienation extended to military service. When Andrew Cooperrider’s 14-year-old son, Leo, suggested he might enlist in the Navy to train as an underwater welder, Cooperrider said, “I said absolutely not. Not with everything going on, my son is not getting into the military right now and go fight these wars for these psychopaths.” Angel Figueroa, 27, who served in the military, described the fear of losing friends stationed in the Middle East. “It would devastate me to see one of my friends getting bombed one day and what, I have to see their box now?”
Elijah Drysdale, 27, wearing a backward cap over a red mullet, said the fact that a military draft had even entered public discussion “speaks volumes to me, and it’s why we need a change in leadership.” He later pushed back against the argument that Trump’s second term had moved the party in a positive direction, saying, “I think that he broke a lot of his promises. This isn’t the party that we want, this isn’t the party that we voted for, or thought we were voting for.”
TJ Roberts, the group’s leader and a 28-year-old state representative, was the rare attendee who said he was pleased with Trump’s presidency, arguing that the Republican Party “under President Donald Trump is without doubt the best Republican Party I have seen in my entire lifetime, the old order is dead.” When someone interjected, “It’s dying,” Roberts retorted, “No, it’s gone.” Still, even Roberts acknowledged a disconnect: “There seems to be a concerted effort to keep the next generation out on the right,” he said. “There’s this sense of entitlement among the establishment on the right. ‘Well, I’m better than the alternative.’ Well, sure, but a stomach flu is preferable to stomach cancer. I’d rather have neither.”
The group’s discontent has been amplified by two deaths — one political, one literal — that they see as setbacks for their wing of the party. Andrew Cooperrider argued that while Trump “started the establishment’s downfall,” he is also “only being kept alive now by him,” citing Trump’s continued embrace of figures like Sen. Lindsey Graham and his primary campaign against Massie. Massie, a libertarian-leaning congressman who clashed repeatedly with Trump, lost his primary on Tuesday to Trump-backed challenger Ed Gallrein, a loss the Covington group called devastating.
They also mourned the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA. Roberts described Kirk as “kinda like a mediator, so Trump understood where young Republicans were coming from,” and noted that no clear heir has emerged to carry that role inside the administration.
At the end of the night, the group surveyed a political landscape in which they felt outflanked. “We cannot really fight the left until we defeat these old, boomer Republicans,” Edge said. “The left is organized, the left is institutionalized, they’re smart, they’re tactical, they’re not a joke, they don’t play. We look at our own organization on our side and say, ‘We’re a little lost.’” Roberts added that younger Republicans have been reluctant to mobilize because “for so long, the right has been joking about their promises,” creating “an endless cycle. Eventually that cycle has to break.”