MAGA World Planned a Blowout, 100-Days-of-Trump Party. Disaster Ensued.
And now, what’s being dubbed the ‘MAGA Fyre Festival’ is roiling conservative Washington.
Party Foul
LAST WEEK, THE CAREER OF CONSERVATIVE journalist Myles Morell hit a new peak.
As a reporter for the Daily Caller News Foundation, he had just scored what counts as a scoop in that world: He caught an irritated Rep. Ilhan Omar on video telling him to “fuck off.”
Then, this Wednesday, Morell walked into work and was swiftly fired.
The abrupt change in fortunes came thanks to an “official” celebration of the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s second term, one that was supposed to feature Republican members of Congress and even the president himself. The bash was a massive bust.
Instead of hosting GOP royalty, the event generated two police reports from ticket buyers. One man who was asked to help set up the event compared it to the disastrous Fyre Festival, and at least one embarrassing video of a man breakdancing with a puppet ricocheted across the Internet.
“I do not think the party was that bad,” Morell, one of the party’s organizers, told me.
Matthew Hurtt, a Republican operative and the chairman of the Republican committee of Arlington County, Virginia, disagreed. “This is 100 percent a grift,” he said, accusing the organizers of dangling the possibility of access to Trump officials in order to get people to buy tickets.
No one said Trump 2.0 would lack drama.
To understand how this all went to hell, it’s worth stepping back for a second. Donald Trump’s return to power has generated a boomlet in pro-Trump safe spaces inside the heavily Democratic capital metro area. Butterworth’s, a restaurant partially owned by Steve Bannon acolyte Raheem Kassam, has become a MAGA hangout on Capitol Hill. And for the deepest-pocketed Trump supporters, Donald Trump Jr. is launching a private social club in Georgetown with a $500,000 membership fee.
So it was natural, perhaps, that Morell and Republican activist Alysia McMillan wanted to put on a party of their own. The two planned to host what they described on the event’s now-deleted website as “the official celebration of President Trump’s first 100 days” at the newly Trumpified Kennedy Center.
Tickets for the white-tie event cost between $100 and $2,500. Invitations promised an “unforgettable evening” where “luxury meets excitement.” The event’s website said Trump and numerous other members of Congress had been invited, and could make appearances.
“There was a promise of access to individual guests, members of the Trump administration, and members of Congress,” said Hurtt.
But then the problems started. The first came when President Trump announced a rally in Michigan to mark his first 100 days on the same night as the event.
Having lost their maybe headliner, the party organizers then lost their venue. Just days before the event, they announced that the Kennedy Center contract had been canceled.
McMillan told me that the Kennedy Center, recently taken over by Trump allies, called off the event because of a contract violation, but declined to specify what it was. The Kennedy Center didn’t respond to requests for comment about why the contract was canceled.
Either way, it was canceled. And the party was moved to a slightly less glamorous venue in decidedly more soulless Arlington.
“The event was advertised as taking place at the Kennedy Center,” Hurtt said. “That sends a different signal to people.”
Problems multiplied from there. McMillan acknowledged that she asked attendees with comped tickets to bring bottles of alcohol to fill out the bar even though the website promised “premium drinks.”
Morell himself asked the husband of a photographer who had been hired to shoot the event to bring some alcohol himself. According to Instagram direct messages viewed by The Bulwark, the man then warned Morell to call off the party before a Fyre Festival–style debacle ensued.
“You’re charging big money for this thing and people won’t be getting what they paid for,” the man wrote, according to those messages.
Later, when the photographer, whose identity is being kept anonymous to protect her future business prospects, realized she wouldn’t be paid to shoot the party, she canceled. The Instagram account under Morell’s name subsequently sent a message to the photographer with the line “fuck you whore.” Both Morell and McMillan deny that Morell sent the message, but they won’t say who did.
Despite all the red flags, Morell and McMillan went ahead with the party in Arlington. No members of Congress showed up. Neither did Trump. An attendee who spent “hundreds of dollars” on her ticket filed a police report, and complained to the Washington Examiner that the event was a “grift” and “illegal.” Another ticket-buyer has also filed a report, according to Hurtt.
Video of the event showed a sparsely attended dancefloor, with a puppeteer lying down and breakdancing with a pink pussyhat-wearing puppet. Hurtt’s Arlington GOP posted the video online, describing it as a “textbook grifter operation.”
In an interview, Hurtt added that Morell represented an “archetypal goober.”
For her part, McMillan liked the puppet-breakdancing video.
“For it to be posted as an attack is quite baffling,” McMillan said. “I’m seeing people dancing around, smiling, having fun.”
Notably, none of the attendees appeared to meet the event’s strict dress code: “Gentlemen should wear a black tailcoat, white shirt, white bow tie, and formal shoes. Ladies should wear a full-length evening gown with elegant accessories.”
Morell and McMillan say they put on a successful event, and have since been targeted by Hurtt and other well-connected Republican operatives. McMillan said she didn’t make money from the event, but declined to offer specifics on the party’s finances or attendee numbers.
But that apparently wasn’t enough to save Morell’s job. Two days after the Washington Examiner covered the event, Morell was canned. A spokesperson for the outlet declined to comment, saying it was a personnel matter.
McMillan, for her part, said she has only one regret from the event: Because it was so hectic, she didn’t get to play any Trump trivia.
Epstein files heat mounts for Bondi
IT’S BEEN MORE THAN TWO MONTHS SINCE Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Epstein binders debacle at the White House.
Now, this week, a couple of incidents suggest that the pressure on Bondi and the Justice Department to finally release something interesting about the case has ratcheted up to a new level.
On Tuesday, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) suggested in an interview with Benny Johnson that the Epstein files had been destroyed. If the Justice Department had anything good, Comer said, it would’ve been released already.
Also on Tuesday, I went to an event right outside the Justice Department for the launch of a very unofficial group called the “Department of Government Accountability,” a motley collection of January 6th activists, parental-court discontents, and at least one Pizzagate promoter.
Speaking at the event, right-wing activist Ivan Raiklin accused Bondi of focusing too much on cable news hits on “Faux News,” and not enough on releasing the Epstein files. Like many of his increasingly disgruntled fellow travelers on the right, Raiklin believes that the files will implicate a wide swath of liberal celebrities. He called the attorney general Pam “Blondie.”
But maybe the harshest indictment of Bondi comes from Liz Wheeler.
The conservative YouTuber was one of the original recipients of the Epstein binders that Bondi put together and disseminated early in the administration. But now Wheeler has become a Bondi critic, asking in an interview with right-wing activist Laura Loomer whether the attorney general should’ve been fired immediately after the binders incident.
“Should Pam Bondi have been fired for her severe lack of judgment, for her mismanagement of the Epstein binders debacle back in February?” Wheeler asked.
How’s that for gratitude? For her part, Loomer, who didn’t receive a binder, rather condescendingly welcomed Wheeler to the Bondi-skeptic camp.
“I’m grateful that you now realize that you guys were used as props, and you have come to the same realization that I realized the day that you were invited to the White House,” Loomer siad.
On Wednesday, Bondi scoffed at Comer’s idea that the files have been destroyed, and said the FBI is still reviewing them.
But Wheeler, for one, has already started to suggest any files that remain will be a letdown.
“High-ranking officials in the FBI told me, off the record, there is nothing in the Epstein files,” Wheeler said on her show Wednesday.
I laughed out loud at the person calling it a grift, because there were no officials there they could talk to about their grift. It is ok to grift others, but when I get grifted, that should be a crime.
We live in the most stupid time.
SNL might have to quit. How could they top this.?