One night at a party in an East Village speakeasy, a pair of 20-somethings—high on youth and rail liquor—made their way to the bar’s single-occupancy bathroom, and proceeded to go at it. I know this because as I waited outside, the exuberant young man inside began to film the encounter. The bright light of his phone had reversed the effects of the bathroom’s one-way mirror to reveal a pantsless youth with a deeply unfortunate broccoli haircut, and a young woman in a MAKE AMERICA HOT AGAIN cap. When I mentioned the encounter to the event’s organizer, Raquel Debono, she clapped her hands and squealed, “I told you people find love at my parties!”
Debono’s path to party planning happened, in her telling, because she was bored. The MAGA gatherings she’d attended were stuffy. So last year, she started throwing parties under the auspices of a new movement—“Make America Hot Again”—to attract fun, sexy conservatives. The kind who might enjoy, say, low taxes and public fornication.
I have come to think of Debono, a 29-year-old lawyer turned influencer, as MAGA chic: a Chanel-wearing representative of the Barstool Sports corner of the womanosphere. She finds the president hilarious and supports his crackdown on illegal immigration, but she also believes that casual sex, abortion, and gay marriage are fine. “Literally do whatever you want; I don’t care,” she told me in one of our many conversations. I’ve found Debono fascinating because her attitude is so at odds with those of the more socially conservative women in her political party—women who like to advise their peers to prioritize starting a family over having a career, for example, and who talk about the importance of “submission” in marriage (and who might not, in other words, be so chill about a couple of sloshed singles getting it on in a bar bathroom). Debono and women like her have set off an angry debate about which kinds of women are in fact welcome in the MAGA tent.
For a decade, something particular to Donald Trump—his agenda, his vibe—has united America’s libertines and religious traditionalists under the same red cap. But now that coalition is cracking. Young women drove Democratic wins in three states earlier this month; and as Republicans argue over how to win back female voters, MAGA women are engaged in an existential clash about what, exactly, it means to be a conservative woman in 2025.
For Debono, the battle line is drawn between the irreverent, socially libertarian types like herself and the religious conservatives—or, to use Debono’s shorthand, the “city Republicans” versus the “tradwives.” This particular conflict, which plays out largely on social media, can feel mesmerizingly petty. But to those involved, the stakes are high. If the right wing doesn’t lighten up soon, Debono told me, “they’re going to push every woman out of the Republican Party.”
In person, Debono is chatty and unfiltered. Moments after I arrived at her party, in May, she pulled me in close and gestured toward a man nearby: “He’s so hot,” she whispered. “Doesn’t he look just like Patrick Bateman?” Debono’s Instagram account is a gallery of photos featuring her sipping cocktails in Miami and strolling through ritzy New York neighborhoods, with captions such as “Fat women are invisible, but so are poor men” and “Make Skinny Great Again.”
Like many Trump voters, Debono supports the president for reasons that are less to do with policy and more to do with the freedom to offend: “A lot of it comes down to political correctness,” she told me. She often refers to things she dislikes as “retarded,” and in a recent video, she announced that “as a general rule of thumb, I really don’t like Muslims.” The strangest thing about Debono’s MAGA activism is that she is Canadian. She couldn’t cast a vote for Trump. (“It’s crazy, I know,” she told me.) Still, Debono has managed to make American politics at least a part-time job. After working for a few years as a lawyer, she quit to consult for private companies and political campaigns, and to focus on her modest social-media following (a little more than 100,000 users on TikTok and Instagram combined).
Every influencer needs a niche, and Debono has found hers: “I’m a Sex and the City conservative,” she told me. She sees her role as showing women that there is more than one way to be a Republican. “Breaking news: you can have a job, a martini and still be conservative,” she posted earlier this year. “Sry @ trad wives.”
Debono draws a line, for example, at attending events for women put on by Turning Point USA. The conservative youth organization, she says, is both “creepy” and “cult-y.” Every summer, the group founded by the late Charlie Kirk brings together a few thousand young women to hear about being feminine rather than feminist. The event is an explosion of frilly femininity in which attendees, many dressed in sundresses and hair ribbons, learn about the benefits of homeschooling and menstrual-cycle tracking. Speakers at these events are women who encourage the revival of biblical womanhood, which typically involves modeling a gentle and quiet spirit (1 Peter 3:4) and submitting to one’s husband, as to the Lord (Ephesians 5:22–23).
[Read: The wellness women are on the march]
It is difficult to imagine Debono, whose spirit is neither particularly gentle nor quiet, thriving in such an environment. She admired Kirk’s work on college campuses, she told me, and loved watching his debates with students. But Turning Point’s messaging to women is predatory and hypocritical, she says: Plenty of Turning Point’s female contributors are single or work full-time as influencers and public speakers.
Women in the Turning Point universe have heard these critiques before, and some of them offer a slightly softer interpretation of the group’s message: “It’s not about either-or,” Alex Clark, a 32-year-old Turning Point contributor and podcast host, told me. It’s a promise that “women can have it all—but not at the same time.” Clark is not married and doesn’t have children, though she recently told an interviewer: “If I had the chance to become a wife and mother, but the show had to end tomorrow, I’m choosing wife and mother.”
When asked about Debono’s push for permissiveness, Clark was firmly opposed: “It’s not conservatism if a bunch of people are involved that aren’t conservative,” she said. Being conservative means something to Clark and her allies, and that something includes being pro-Christianity, pro-life, and pro–traditional marriage. Clark disagrees, for example, with the Trump administration’s plan to make IVF accessible to more Americans, because she believes that discarding unused embryos amounts to murder. “If that loses us some voters, then I can sleep at night knowing that I stood for the right thing,” she said.
Ultimately, Clark isn’t worried that Republicans will lose women forever: As more young men turn to the GOP, so will young women, because it’s their “natural instinct to follow strong men and strong leadership,” she said. In the meantime, Clark is focused on recruiting women by talking more about health and wellness. Her podcast, Culture Apothecary, features the occasional segment on conservative womanhood—“How to Nag Less & Let Him Lead”—but otherwise focuses mostly on food and Big Pharma: “How to Heal Your IBS in 30 Days (No Meds!).” Other conservative women have started similar projects. Evie Magazine, which was launched in 2019 as counterprogramming to girlboss outlets such as Cosmopolitan, offers a slightly less titillating range of articles, including modest fashion recommendations and sex advice marked with an asterisk: for married women only.
A universe of conservatives exists to the right of women like Clark. Over there in what I’ll call the “Ultra-Trad Zone,” hard-liners see some Turning Point influencers and contributors as covert feminists. And after young women voted overwhelmingly for Democrats this month, some of these ultra-trads argued that maybe the Nineteenth Amendment had worn out its welcome. There’s no way to make women more conservative, Savanna Stone, a 20-year-old married influencer, wrote on X. “You just take away their right to vote or make any political decisions.”
Perhaps now is a good time to acknowledge that the job of any commentator or influencer is to provoke engagement; those sweet, sweet rage clicks won’t harvest themselves! But whether their positions are genuine—or designed, first and foremost, to shock—doesn’t especially matter, because female voters see and hear these positions, and take them into account when they’re deciding which political party has their interests at heart.
The MAGA influencer Emily Wilson understands this, and she sees the right wing’s hectoring about women’s roles as a huge political liability: “We’re going to lose elections if we don’t agree to go to the middle ground,” she told me. Conservatives “put all this effort into shit that the public does not agree” with them on. Wilson, a former Democrat who now posts pro-Trump content on Instagram under the handle Emily Saves America, is known for sharing her own provocative—and sometimes genuinely bigoted—videos. (“Black fatigue is real,” she declares in one recent clip.) Wilson also believes that “marriage at a young age is not good” and sees herself as working to make the MAGA movement more appealing to women.
Not everyone appreciates Wilson’s efforts. This spring, she posted a video mocking “tradwife bullshit.” Discouraging women from getting an education or earning their own living, she said, makes them vulnerable to being “trapped by a man.” The video got millions of views and lots of angry feedback, including from Sarah Stock, a Catholic commentator and self-described Christian nationalist. “She is spreading a toxic, far-left feminist message about homemaking in general,” Stock wrote in a blog post. “If she were some random liberal girl, this wouldn’t matter, but Emily has about half a million followers on all of her platforms—all people who look up to her as a face of the conservative MAGA movement.”
[Read: Conservative women have a new Phyllis Schlafly]
Three months later, the feud between Stock and Wilson boiled over in the pettiest way possible: Stock got engaged and announced it by posting, “I won,” on X, next to a photo of her sparkling new ring. But Wilson couldn’t help herself. “The ring size 
,” she commented, before posting on her own page: “It’s gonna be hard to be a trad wife when your man can’t even afford a ring.”
The right wing erupted. A fashion designer dubbed Wilson “a disgusting feminist whore”; a Catholic commentator said Wilson was a “‘boss bitch’ with a body count higher than the national debt.”
Gentle spirits did not, in other words, abound. The whole exchange ended up serving as powerful confirmation for both sides. To Wilson and her supporters, the vitriolic responses were wildly disproportionate to the original ring insult. But to Stock, the back-and-forth simply proved that Wilson isn’t conservative. “I have no problem with infighting,” Stock told me later. “It exposes a lot of these people as frauds.”
This rift among women is not poised to split the MAGA movement in half. But so many people offering such wildly distinct definitions of womanhood makes it difficult for the party to communicate a clear message to persuadable women voters. The conflict also presents an important reminder about the fragility of coalitions: When Trump is out of the picture, will this uneasy mingling of “conservatism and coarseness” fall apart?
This month’s disappointing election results have Debono doubling down on her quest to win women and keep the tent big. She hopes to throw her Make America Hot Again events next year in every swing state, where she can register new Republican voters and give conservatives a reason to party. She dreams of building an organization that looks like Turning Point, she said, only with events that are “chic” and “not, like, cringe.” In September, Debono started consulting for Ethan Agarwal, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and candidate for governor of California, who also happens to be a Democrat.
Debono laughed when I expressed surprise at the choice. “He’s a moderate,” she said. It’s basic politics: “A Republican is not going to win in California.” Rather than aligning herself with a losing team, she has simply picked a more winnable fight.
The post The Rise of the ‘Sex and the City Conservative’ appeared first on The Atlantic.
