A MAGA youth group is quietly training conservatives for jobs in President Donald Trump’s administration and says it aims to produce “10,000 Stephen Millers,” modeled on the White House aide.
The group is American Moment, a training program for young right-wing staffers that Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith profiled on Wednesday.
American Moment was founded in 2021, and its fellows now work in the Trump administration and in Republican congressional offices, according to the report. The group has become the pipeline feeding young MAGA staffers into the administration.
“Our goal is to create 10,000 Stephen Millers,” Nick Solheim, the group’s 29-year-old CEO and a cofounder, said on its podcast last September. Solheim told Semafor this week that the group has trained several thousand young conservatives so far.
“[H]is career trajectory perfectly tracks what we’re attempting to achieve with our young people,” Solheim said of Miller. “From junior Senate staffer to assistant to the president, and everything in between.”
The group, which had a $2 million budget in 2024, has not sought much publicity, Semafor reported. Earlier this month, Solheim let Smith in for only a brief, off-the-record look at a training.
The group’s cofounders also include Saurabh Sharma, who has since left for a senior role in Trump’s presidential personnel office, according to the report.
“[T]his would be a completely dark-arts project, almost like a glacier,” Sharma said on the group’s podcast in 2023, describing how he would prefer it to run. “You’d see a tiny 10% poking out over top, and the rest of it would happen without any attention whatsoever.”
The group’s most intensive program takes 15 to 30 paid fellows each semester and teaches them to tuck in their shirts, shower daily, and network relentlessly, Semafor reported. Training includes mock networking happy hours and $100 credit cards to take people out for coffee.
The report noted that applicants are screened on ideology and should oppose immigration, free trade and “foreign adventures.” Solheim said he has never admitted an Ivy League alumnus to the program.
Rachel Bovard, a member of the group’s board, told Semafor, “When people hire a fellow from American Moment, they know they are getting someone who has had ideological and intellectual formation with whom the principal may agree. And they know the standards of how you should behave.”
The project is well regarded inside the Trump administration, Semafor reported. Vice President JD Vance advised the group in its early days, and his former national security adviser, Andy Baker, is joining it as a senior adviser.
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts called American Moment “one of the most important organizations in the conservative movement today,” Semafor reported.
“[E]specially for young men, there’s this toxic stew of nihilism and Andrew Tate out there that can be attractive if you have nothing else. Some of the American Moment project is taking young men like that and giving them purpose,” Bovard said.
In his analysis, Smith wrote that “a few thousand experienced and competent staffers are the bedrock of any political movement” and that “the bulk of young people getting that experience are MAGA now.”
Bovard explained that trainees “genuinely believe in a lot of these ideas that they believe got Trump elected and that propelled JD Vance — but they want these ideas to outlast both of them.”
“It’ll take 20 to 30 years to see if they’re successful.”
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