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For those just joining us, this is the latest installment in my ongoing Among the Believers project, an effort to spend time inside conservative spaces and understand the people who inhabit them.
In Part 1, I described my infiltration of a Republican women’s patriotic gala in Orange County. There were balloons. So many balloons. There was Lee Greenwood. So much Lee Greenwood. There were speeches about Christian values, armed citizens, and California’s imminent collapse under Democratic rule.
Mostly, though, there were Republican women.
I’d arrived armed with a head full of questions and a vague ambition to better understand how people whose politics I oppose make sense of the world. What I wasn’t prepared for was how quickly the interview would turn around.
After the speeches, attendees spilled out onto the hotel's pool deck for a cocktail reception. Strings of lights glowed overhead. Wine glasses clinked. Republican women in stars, stripes, and rhinestones mingled beneath the palm trees.
Spotting three women gathered around a cocktail table, I approached with the first of my carefully prepared questions already loaded in the chamber.
I never got the chance.
“What brought you here tonight?” one of them asked.
“Um…” I said.
"I'm proud to be an American," I half-sang. The song had burrowed into my brain.
“Where at least I know I’m free,” another woman full-sang, completing the lyric.
Just like that—instant rapport! My first positive interaction of the evening. Maybe these people weren’t so bad after all, I thought. For one fleeting moment, I considered registering Republican.
Then another woman gushed, “I love that song!”
The feeling passed. My political realignment was over.
Then I answered honestly. Well, honestly-ish.
“I’m relatively new to Orange County, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to learn a little more about local politics.”
“You’ve come to the right place,” one of them said. “What do you want to know?”
“All you need to know is to vote Republican,” another declared.
The three women clinked their wine glasses.
They had offered the perfect segue to the questions I’d prepared earlier, questions designed not merely to understand how Republican women see the world, but to coax them into explaining beliefs that are rarely questioned within their own circles.
“What issue matters most to you right now?” I asked.
“The economy,” one woman said immediately. “My kids are doing everything right and they still can’t afford a house.”
“Everything costs more,” another agreed. “Groceries, insurance, utilities. It just keeps going up.”
The third took a sip of wine. “Honestly? Keeping California livable for families.”
“In what way?”
“Affordable. Safe. A place where young people can actually build a life.”
“And the border,” one of the others added. “I don’t think that’s controversial. Every country needs borders.”
“I just want people to follow the law. Come here legally, work hard, pay your taxes. That’s how it ought to be.”
“What are you most worried about?”
“My grandchildren,” one said. “I worry they won’t have the opportunities we had. We’re taxing people out of the state.”
“That too many people are taking advantage of the system while everyone else pays for it.”
“That we’re becoming so divided nobody can even talk to each other anymore. We need to keep the culture stable.”
Heads nodded around the table.
“What do you hope will be different a year from now?”
“I'd like politicians to spend less time fighting and more time fixing things.”
“I’d like groceries and gas to stop costing so much.”
"Government should do the basics well, stay out of people's lives, and stop wasting money."
“And maybe a few more Republicans elected in California,” another added, prompting laughter from the rest. Another round of clinking glasses.
Not wanting to be rude, I tapped my glass of ice-diluted Diet Coke against theirs, sacrificing a small portion of my leftist credibility in the process.
Looking back on the evening, I came to think of these women as MAINLINE REPUBLICANS. They worried about housing costs, inflation, grandchildren, and California's future. They were partisan, certainly, but not especially ideological. Republicanism seemed less a crusade than a habit, a community, and a worldview inherited over decades. Had I left the gala after speaking with them, I might have concluded that Republican women were motivated primarily by practical concerns and garden-variety partisan loyalties.
The next group would disabuse me of that notion.
Before the evening was over, I would encounter two other species of Republican woman. They occupied the same gala, applauded the same speakers, and voted for the same candidates. But the similarities ended there.
The next group of women would come to occupy a very different category in my mind: MAGA HARDLINERS. Younger, louder, and marinated in online conservative culture, they approached politics less as a civic responsibility than as a never-ending battle against the forces they believed were destroying America.
Feeling encouraged by my initial success, I set off in search of another table. At the edge of the patio sat five women who appeared to be in their twenties and thirties, making them considerably younger than most of the guests I had encountered so far. They were arranged on padded outdoor sectionals around a circular fire pit that, at the moment, sat unlit.
Suddenly, I became acutely aware that I was a middle-aged man approaching a group of women half my age for reasons that would be difficult to explain in a court of law.
They looked as though they had stepped out of an Instagram reel documenting a bachelorette weekend. Long, carefully styled hair. Ample makeup. Spray tans calibrated somewhere between Newport Beach and Mar-a-Lago. Designer handbags rested beside margarita glasses the size of birdbaths. They were laughing loudly, taking selfies, and appeared far less interested in local ballot measures than in getting pleasantly over-served before whatever adventures awaited after the gala.
I started with the opening line that had worked so well with the group I’d just left.
“I’m relatively new to Orange County, and I thought this would be a good opportunity—”
I was interrupted by a platinum blonde woman in a bright red dress who looked to be in her early thirties and had clearly invested a significant amount of time and money in remaining in her early thirties.
“...a good opportunity to find a sugar baby?” she said, finishing my sentence for me.
She raised her cocktail in salute to her own joke. The table rewarded her with a chorus of approving whoops.
I confess to sucking in my stomach and standing a little straighter. I immediately felt creepy.
“What issue matters most to you right now?” I asked.
The answer came back almost instantly: schools.
“They’re indoctrinating kids.”
“Oh my God, yes.”
“Into what?”
She took a sip of her drink.
“Everything. Gender stuff. America is evil. Boys can be girls. Girls can be boys. Pick a lane.”
Everyone laughed.
“This country’s in a fight for its soul,” another woman added.
“Exactly.”
A third woman jumped in.
"They're trying to erase everything normal."
“Everything normal?”
“Everything is backwards now,” one woman said, gesturing with her margarita for emphasis. “Women are told careers are more important than our men. Having kids is optional. Men are toxic. Mothers are oppressed.”
A woman beside her nodded vigorously.
“Yes! Nobody wants to say that.”
“You agree?”
“Completely.”
She leaned forward.
“I always wanted to be a wife and mother. That’s literally all I ever wanted.”
“And that’s enough for you?”
“My husband leads our family. I take care of our home. We’re happy.”
Another woman raised her glass. “Nobody’s allowed to say it.”
“We’re all thinking it,” another said.
“We just said it,” someone pointed out.
The table erupted in laughter.
“What are you most worried about?” I asked.
“That we’re losing the country.”
Several women nodded.
“How?”
The blonde in red answered first.
“Have you seen TikTok?”
The table laughed.
“No, seriously. These kids hate America. It’s brainwashing by the Left. They hate America.”
“They don’t even know why they hate America,” another woman said. “They’ve just been told they’re supposed to.”
"Teachers are indoctrinating kids. They're teaching little boys they're girls."
“We’re raising a generation that has no idea what made this country great in the first place.”
“What do you think made this country great,” I asked.
“Faith and family,” one woman answered.
A woman who had been quiet most of the conversation finally spoke.
“Jesus!”
“That’s actually true,” another said.
"I'm worried about my future kids," one woman said, taking a gulp of her tequila slushie.
“Because of the economy?”
She shook her head. “No. Because of the culture.”
“The culture,” another repeated darkly.
The word hung over the table like everyone understood precisely what it meant and nobody needed to define it.
“What do you hope will be different a year from now?” I asked.
“I hope people wake up.”
The answer came so quickly it sounded rehearsed.
“Wake up to what?”
“What’s happening.”
“Which is?”
She laughed. “How much time do you have?”
The others joined in.
"People laugh when we say Deep State. Fine. Call it whatever. Bureaucrats. Career government. Those people never leave. Doesn't matter who wins. They're still running everything."
“The people running this country hate regular Americans.”
“I’d like people to stop apologizing for being American,” another woman said.
A woman sitting on the edge of the fire pit reached the bottom of her margarita and sucked noisily through the straw, searching unsuccessfully for liquid that no longer existed.
“I’d like conservatives to stop playing defense all the time.”
“Preach” one of her friends said.
The table fell quiet for perhaps the first time all evening.
As if on cue, the fire pit suddenly ignited with a loud whoosh.
The women erupted in cheers.
Whether it was divine affirmation or a programmable thermostat was impossible to say.
During my time with the group, two of the women peeled away in search of the restroom, leaving me with the remaining three. One of them wore a bright pink MAGA hat perched atop carefully styled dark hair. Apropos of nothing, she said:
“I vote the same way my husband does. He and me are one flesh, so honestly, I would be okay with giving up my right to vote because I know he would represent me well.”
I assumed she was joking.
She wasn’t.
Another woman nodded. “If my husband’s the head of the household,” she said, “and he was voting on behalf of our family, I’d be fine with that.”
The missing women returned from the restroom.
“We need another round,” one announced. The others immediately agreed.
“We’re heading to the bar,” one of them said, looking at me with an expectant expression.
I suspected that if I joined them, my entirely hypothetical sugar-daddy status might cease being hypothetical. I sensed that “We’re heading to the bar” was less an invitation to continue our conversation than an opportunity for me to finance the next round.
Fortunately, the evening’s next scheduled event intervened. Guests were being called into the ballroom for dinner. I wished them a pleasant evening.
The ballroom was festooned with balloons. I’ll let the reader guess the color.
We were assigned seats at round tables of eight. Once everyone had settled in, I found myself surrounded by six women in their forties through sixties and a lone gentleman in his mid-sixties who seemed determined not to make eye contact with me.
The hard rolls, the cold butter that resisted all attempts at spreading, and the salad swimming in vinaigrette did nothing to dampen the spirits of four women at my table who had thoughtfully migrated their poolside cocktails into the ballroom and supplemented them with generous pours of wine. The evening's patriotism was increasingly well lubricated.
After sufficient discussion of dresses, husbands, and a certain woman named Gloria, who was not present but had apparently committed a series of unforgivable social protocol violations, I found an opening for my questions.
“What issue matters most to you right now?” I asked.
“We’ve taken God out of everything,” one woman said.
Heads nodded around the table.
“Look around.”
I looked around.
“Kids identifying as cats.”
“That’s not actually happening,” I said.
“Well, maybe not cats. But you know what I mean.”
I did not.
The examples came quickly after that.
Pride flags. Pronouns. Woke. Open borders. Men in women’s sports. Abortion. Falling birth rates. Pornography. TikTok. Divorce. Hookup culture. Homelessness.
A woman somehow connected Taylor Swift to all of this, though I lost the thread somewhere between the Eras Tour and the Book of Revelation.
“It all goes back to God,” another woman explained.
“All of it?”
“All of it.”
The certainty was impressive.
Between them, the women had developed a unified field theory of social decline in which every modern problem, from gender identity to student debt, could be traced to insufficient church attendance.
“People are searching for meaning,” one woman said.
“Exactly.”
“They’re filling the hole with politics.”
“Or social media.”
“Or therapy.”
“Or veganism.”
I looked down at my sun-dried tomato ravioli, the evening’s vegetarian option.
I quickly recognized my tablemates as the third group in my emerging taxonomy: CHRISTIAN PATRIOTS, women for whom politics was ultimately subordinate to faith.
“What are you most worried about?” I asked.
“People have stopped caring about each other,” one woman said immediately.
Several nodded.
“There’s no compassion anymore,” another woman said.
“People have become so judgmental.”
“We've lost grace.”
More nodding.
“Nobody thinks about anyone but themselves.”
I ate a ravioli.
“What would helping each other look like?”
“People need to learn responsibility.”
“People need to get back to Christian values.”
“Love thy neighbor,” one woman said.
Several nodded approvingly.
“What does that look like in practice?” I asked.
“Well, for starters, we need to stop rewarding people for making bad choices.”
Another woman jumped in.
“The government gives away too much.”
“Way too much.”
“People need consequences.”
The conversation drifted toward welfare recipients, homeless people, immigrants, and eventually refugees. The women described themselves as compassionate throughout. Compassion, in this case, rarely translated into mercy.
One woman stabbed a fork at her Chicken Toscana.
“I know it sounds harsh.”
The phrase “I know it sounds harsh” appeared to function as a warning label for the sentence about to follow.
“But honestly, if families get separated, that’s the consequence.”
Several women nodded.
A second woman shrugged.
“You break the law, there are consequences.”
“Exactly.”
A third woman shook her head sadly.
“My heart breaks for them.”
She immediately began explaining why they should be deported.
“I don’t enjoy saying it,” a fourth woman added.
The women spent the next several minutes discussing policies that sounded suspiciously like things they enjoyed saying.
By this point in the evening, something had become apparent.
So far, no one had talked about Donald Trump. The resentments, suspicions, and sense of cultural siege that fueled his rise were ever-present, but his name never came up.
The disease no longer required the original host.
As slices of lemon raspberry cake were placed before us and several women requested decaf coffee, I was preparing to ask this table my final question about the future when the table's attention abruptly shifted to someone standing behind me and, appropriately enough, to my right. It was Young Kim, the Republican congresswoman from my district and, judging by the enthusiasm around the table, the district of several of the women as well.
As I shared in Part One, Young Kim and I have a long-standing one-sided relationship in which I periodically inform her office why I believe she is wrong about something. This has occurred through email, letters, website forms, and twice in person. It occurred to me that if she or her handler knew who I was, this might become awkward.
A little context. Kim originally campaigned as a pragmatic moderate, part of a long tradition of Republican politicians in purple districts who speak like centrists at home and vote like partisans in Washington. When she ran in 2020, her message was “Working Across Aisles” and delivering “Bipartisan Solutions.” She especially touted her support for veterans and victims of domestic violence.
During the recent midterms, however, she dropped the pretense altogether, spending millions on television ads, mailers, and lawn signs branding herself a “100% Trump Republican,” even featuring doctored video of Trump praising her by name. She also supported legislation that severely cut healthcare for veterans and opposed protections for women and children under the Violence Against Women Act.
The moderate had become a mascot.
Like many Republicans navigating the Trump era, Kim has proven far more adept at reading political winds than resisting them. Her most consistent principle appears to be political survival.
She worked the table with the polished ambiguity of an elected official trying to appear deeply familiar with people she may or may not have ever seen before, uncertain whether these women were old friends, reliable donors, prospective donors, or some combination thereof.
A young woman in a navy suit stood beside her. She looked vaguely familiar. Was she the staffer I had previously cornered about ICE? Or deportations? Or Iran? Or the Big Beautiful Bill? After a while they begin to run together.
When Kim’s eyes met mine, I took my shot.
“You’re really leaning into being a ‘100% Trump Republican’ this campaign,” I said, leaving her to decide whether it was praise or criticism.
“Of course,” she said, smiling broadly at the women around the table.
“I’ve always supported President Trump. I’ve always been very clear about that.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I’ve always supported common sense policies.”
I looked at her expectantly.
“Safe communities. Strong families. Economic opportunity,” Kim replied, sounding like a yard sign.
“This is a women’s event. What do you see as your record on women's issues?”
She smiled.
“I think people want results.”
It was the sort of answer that could survive almost any political climate because it referred to nothing at all.
Unfortunately for her constituents, the policies themselves were far more specific. And while this story is about Young Kim, readers will likely recognize versions of it playing out in congressional districts, state legislatures, city councils, and county governments across the country.
Trade wars raised prices. Economic uncertainty rippled through small businesses, retirement accounts, and household budgets. Immigration crackdowns destabilized immigrant communities. Cuts to education and research threatened students, educators, and researchers. Congress relinquished authority while the executive branch amassed more of it. Abroad, Kim stood by as Trump pursued unnecessary military conflicts that made an unstable world more dangerous, pushed energy prices higher, and burdened American families with the economic costs of war. Add to that her votes against measures benefiting women and veterans, and the result was a remarkably broad range of consequences. Kim somehow distilled it all into two words: “common sense.”
Sensing my window was closing, I squeezed in one more question.
“Will you be leaning into your support for Trump during the general election?”
“I think voters know where I stand,” she said with a smile.
They don’t. That’s the point.
And like that, she was off to the next table.
After dessert, the six women drifted off to make the rounds at other tables, presumably to discuss how declining church attendance was responsible for the dry Chicken Toscana or to continue the prosecution of Gloria.
I looked over at the lone other man at the table, who had spent the evening avoiding eye contact and contributing little beyond the occasional nod. I had practically forgotten he was there.
With the women making the rounds, only the two of us remained at the table for the moment.
To my surprise, he looked up and said something I couldn’t hear.
“Sorry?” I said.
He repeated it.
I pushed back my chair and moved beside him.
“I said you asked better questions than most reporters.”
I laughed.
“That’s a low bar.”
“Yes it is.”
He took a sip of coffee.
“You know what the problem is?”
“What’s that?”
He glanced around the ballroom.
“Nobody wants to admit they’re tired.”
“Tired of what?”
He shrugged.
“All of it.”
He ticked off examples.
“Trump. The people who hate Trump. Fox News. MSNBC. Fundraisers. Social media. Every election is the most important election of our lifetime.”
He shook his head. “I’ve lived through twelve of those.”
He looked down into his coffee.
“I didn’t vote for Trump because I love the guy. I voted because the other option seemed worse. Truth is, I don’t trust either party. Washington doesn’t care much about people like me. I thought maybe he'll shake things up. Maybe not. Turns out he made things worse. Way worse. Nothing ever really changes. I don't think either party knows what they're doing. I'm just tired."
He continued without prompting.
“The older I get,” he said, “the less I think people vote for what they love and the more I think they vote against what scares them.”
He looked around the ballroom. “That’s true for everybody.”
I nodded.
As I left the gala, I found myself thinking about the four groups I had encountered.
The evening had introduced me to MAINLINE REPUBLICANS, MAGA HARDLINERS, CHRISTIAN PATRIOTS, and finally, through the quiet man at my table, what I came to think of as the RELUCTANT RIGHT.
The research suggests Trump voters are not a movement so much as a coalition. Looking around the ballroom, that felt exactly right.
The Mainline Republicans worried about affordability and their grandchildren’s future.
The MAGA Hardliners saw enemies everywhere and politics as a form of cultural combat.
The Christian Patriots viewed nearly every problem through the lens of faith and moral decline.
And the Reluctant Right had simply been doing this long enough to distrust certainty itself.
They disagreed about causes. They disagreed about priorities. They even disagreed about what was wrong with America. Yet all four had arrived at the same destination.
Perhaps the quiet man was right. People vote less for what they love than against what frightens them.
Fear, however, is only an explanation. It is not a justification.
Throughout the evening I heard endless discussions about values, morality, family, faith, patriotism, and saving America. What I heard far less about were the people who would bear the cost of the policies being advocated.
The immigrant family.
The deported student.
The refugee turned away.
The woman denied autonomy.
The LGBTQ teenager told they don’t belong.
The child growing up in a country with fewer rights than the one their parents inherited.
The teacher afraid to teach honestly.
The scientist whose research disappears.
The veteran denied care.
The federal worker fired for doing their job.
The journalist labeled an enemy.
The political opponent.
The stranger.
The easiest person in the world to sacrifice is someone you’ve never met.
People rarely support cruelty because they believe they are cruel. They support it because they have found a way not to see the people it happens to.
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Next in Among the Believers
Last weekend, I embedded myself with one of the most sought-after groups in American politics.
They’re courted relentlessly, misunderstood constantly, and capable of changing the political future of the country.
I’m writing that story now.
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In the middle of writing my Among the Believers series, I was laid off from the company I helped build. Read about it. ↓
I Was Laid Off This Week. And I Blame Trump.
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May 8
Since Trump returned to office, companies pulled back. Budgets froze. Contracts stalled. It turns out businesses don’t actually enjoy uncertainty. (Though the trillion-dollar corporations willing to flatter, fund, and orbit Trump like anxious courtiers seem to be doing perfectly fine.)
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