Make America The '90s Again

Inside the subterranean caverns of the hottest, most secretive club in Donald Trump’s Washington, a pair of ring girls stepped into a miniature octagon.

It was the night before cage fighters would bloody each other in a much larger octagon on the White House’s South Lawn, and many of the GOP’s top echelon had been mingling for hours at a pre-party inside Executive Branch, the luxe private club founded by Donald Trump Jr. and his investment-firm compatriots Omeed Malik and Chris Buskirk. Guests snacked on caviar kept chilled by an ice sculpture in the shape of the club’s logo, the most recognizable patrons cordoned off in a side room fashioned as a library.

Just before 11 p.m., the crowd flocked ringside as the women bounced signs teasing the “main event.”

And then, Ja Rule stepped into the octagon.

“Where are my party people at?” he crooned, before launching into a nearly 45-minute set that included two hits: “Can I Get A…,” a 1998 Jay Z collaboration that launched his career, and his 1999 debut, "Holla Holla."

“Imma bring y’all back for a minute. Come on back to ‘98, ‘99,” he said, at one point bouncing around the octagon with a mic in one hand and a bottle in the other. “Some of you might have been in grade school in ‘98, ‘99. But that’s cool.”

Whether many in the crowd were old enough to remember the songs — or, pointedly, alive when they topped the charts — was beside the point. To Washington’s new Republican elite, the 1990s, and its nostalgia, swagger and anti-establishment edge, have become the house style.

At one level, the 90s-ification of Washington is indicative of generational change after years of boomer ascendancy. Malik is candid that he’s curated a list of headliners for the club — Busta Rhymes, Akon, Timbaland, Nelly — who were topping the charts in his college years. Marco Rubio drops Cypress Hill in the White House briefing room. Kash Patel made an FBI recruitment video that recreated, nearly shot for shot, a 1994 Beastie Boys music video. JD Vance credits Boyz n the Hood with shaping his entire political worldview.

These are Gen Xers and millennials. Of course they are referencing the culture they grew up on.

But the nostalgia is more than generational reflex. It carries a political argument — that the 90s, in their telling, was the last time America got it right. The Cold War was over. The Soviet Union had collapsed. By decade’s end, the U.S. was running a budget surplus for the first time in a generation. China had not yet joined the World Trade Organization, the move many blame for hollowing out American manufacturing. It was, in many ways, the last moment of American supremacy — before 9/11, before the 2008 financial crisis, before Covid, before the long cascade of failures this generation inherited.

“The conservative party in the 90s was pining for the 50s,” Malik told POLITICO Magazine. “Now, we're pining for the 90s.”

This next generation, more often than not, is reaching not for the decade’s feel-good touchstones like Friends, Titanic or Mariah, but for the decade's darker and more anti-establishment canon: hip-hop, grunge, alt-rock and Tarantino.

“Being anti-establishment, it’s always in vogue,” said one senior White House official, granted anonymity to speak on an unapproved topic.

The next day’s White House UFC fight made the point bluntly. Sweaty, shirtless men clad in red, white and blue pummeled each other on the South Lawn as Trump cheered ringside, the crowd thundered “U-S-A” and fighter jets screamed overhead. Three decades earlier, that kind of spectacle would have induced moral panic in the likes of John McCain, who in the sport’s early, unsanctioned days described UFC as “human cockfighting.”

This is the paradox of the 90s revival in Trump’s Washington — a longing for lost order is being voiced in the language of breaking it. And as the party begins to look beyond its avowed 1980s president to 2028, that paradox is likely to define the next era of GOP politics.

“MAGA is a reaction to the establishment in the same way that alt-rock was a reaction to the establishment in music,” said Jack Posobiec, an influential MAGA podcaster. “This idea that you can break the rules and still be successful, that is almost the quintessential difference between us and the old right.”

“In the New Right, we are very willing to break the rules,” he added. “If the system got us to a bad place, then we need to break the system to get us back to a good place.”

The morning after accepting the nomination to be Trump’s vice president, Vance needed to make a good impression.

Heading into the Republican convention in Milwaukee, Trump had been struggling to paper over a rift with evangelical voters on abortion. Top Christian leaders were thrilled Trump had appointed the justices who overturned Roe v. Wade — but they were less so about the fact that he was treating it as settled law and now deferring to states to decide when and whether to allow abortion.

The evangelicals awaiting Vance at a Faith and Freedom Coalition breakfast in a downtown Milwaukee ballroom were skeptical this senator from working-class Ohio — and onetime atheist — would be the one to allay their concerns.

Five minutes into his remarks, as attendees in their Sunday best picked at the remains of a white-tablecloth breakfast, the man who would become vice president reached for a metaphor to explain his faith.

He landed on Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 profanity-laced, blood-drenched neo-noir film Pulp Fiction.

“I want to leave you with one more final thought, and it comes from one of my favorite theologians, the character Jules, from the movie Pulp Fiction,” he began, interrupted by a low rumble of laughter.

He recounted a scene in which Jules, played by Samuel L. Jackson, survives a point-blank shooting and argues with his fellow hitman about whether God had stopped the “mother-effing bullets,” in Vance’s church-appropriate retelling.

“What matters is that I felt — I felt the touch of God,” Vance said, quoting Jules. “And I think that if we look out there, and we look in this country, we look at our past, and we hopefully envision a future, you remember that there’s a lot of little touches of God in our past, in our present and in our future.”

The reference was not an obvious fit for a hotel ballroom packed with evangelicals old enough to remember when both parties treated violent and sexual media as a moral threat. During his 1996 presidential campaign, Bob Dole accused the entertainment industry of “mainstreaming of deviancy.” Tipper Gore successfully pushed for parental warning labels on albums with explicit content. V-chips to block violent television programming were written into federal law.

Back then, the idea that a Republican politician would invoke Pulp Fiction as a theological text — in front of evangelical voters, no less — would have been unimaginable.

“The baby boomer notion that ‘conservative’ meant you didn’t swear, you had good manners — the sort of Tipper Gore, Bob Dole, all that kind of stuff — has completely broken into a million little pieces,” said Bob Thompson, a pop culture professor at Syracuse University. “These leaders are embracing the culture that their comparable cohorts of generations ago would have considered the enemy.”

Now, the U.S. has a president whose social media posts — “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell,” he threatened Iran on Truth Social in April — could be straight out of a Tarantino movie.

The grittiness of the cultural references these Gen X and elder millennial Republicans are reaching for reflects the seedier underbelly of 90s triumphalism. AIDS was a full-blown crisis. The crack epidemic was surging, as was violent crime, which peaked in 1991. Deadly federal sieges at Waco and Ruby Ridge seeded a generation’s distrust of government. Despite times that in retrospect seemed prosperous, disaffection was everywhere — and the art being made reflected it.

“In the early 90s, the media discovers that young people are not boomers anymore, they're Gen Xers. Everybody is wearing black. There's this cynicism and kind of darkness at the core of alternative rock, like Nirvana, and it's all very dark,” said Jean Twenge, author of the 2023 book Generations: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers and Silents — and What They Mean for America’s Future.

Institutional trust had declined steadily since the 1970s, Twenge found in her research, accelerating in the 1980s and 1990s alongside rising cultural individualism.

Unlike boomers, who came of age during a postwar boom that made faith in institutions feel earned and reform seem possible, Gen X and millennials never had the illusion to begin with.

“‘We’re all in this together, we’re all going to work together’ — that’s not just what Gen Xers or millennials were brought up to believe,” Twenge added.

The soundtrack of that era reflected that sensibility. Many of the artists who broke through weren’t selling optimism, but rather channeling alienation, cynicism and rebellion. For some in the MAGA movement who came of age during this period, the music was the message.

“At the end of the 80s, especially in rock music, it’s super complicated. It’s intricate guitar solos. It’s chord changes and progressions … and then along comes Kurt Cobain with three power chords and no solos. It’s just raw emotional energy, and it’s in your face,” said Posobiec, the MAGA podcaster. “Trump and MAGA came in and disrupted politics the same way that alt-rock disrupted the establishment of pop music back then.”

Posobiec framed the appeal of 1990s acts like Kid Rock, who performed at Turning Point USA’s “All American Half Time Show,” as well as the Republican National Convention in 2024, as rooted in “working-class industrial populist sound.”

Now, the two Republicans most visibly auditioning to inherit Trump's movement are mining the same decade. Rubio has, for instance, in the White House briefing room deployed 1990s hip hop as a kind of political vernacular, quoting Cypress Hill’s “Insane in the Brain” and Ice Cube’s “Check Yo Self” to speak directly to top officials in Iran.

“Rubio has been using rap references his entire political career. He’s just now in a position where people are noticing,” said Alex Conant, a GOP strategist who worked on Rubio’s 2016 campaign. “I think the same can be true of JD Vance and [other politicians] who are finally getting a chance at the limelight.”

Vance, meanwhile, has at points treated 1990s culture as formative political text. He has taken to using Creed’s 1999 single “Higher” at his events, coinciding with the post-grunge band’s memeification across the internet. And beyond Pulp Fiction, which Vance again referenced in his recent memoir about his faith, Communion, he has repeatedly credited John Singleton’s 1991 film Boyz n the Hood with shaping his understanding of family breakdown.

In a 2024 interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, Vance said the film helped crystallize his thinking on fatherhood and family breakdown. He highlighted scenes in which Furious Styles, played by Laurence Fishburne, lectures young men in South Central Los Angeles about education and power.

“I watched that movie a ton when I was like 8, 9 years old, and I didn't realize how much that movie has had an influence on me until I watched it last night,” Vance told Rogan.

It was an idiosyncratic reading of a film rooted in Black urban life — a film that itself challenges stereotypes that GOP officials often reach for about absent Black fathers — but a nevertheless revealing one. Vance was not simply remembering the 1990s but rather using one of the decade’s bleakest cultural artifacts to explain some of what he believes went wrong with America.

For allies of both men, the point is not merely that they quote the culture of their youth. It’s that in doing so they are embodying the posture of that culture, speaking in an at times plain and raw manner that makes the rehearsed conviction of their forebears look weak by comparison. (Vance and Rubio did not respond to requests for comment.)

“They’re not theater kids,” said Andrew Beck, a partner at Beck and Stone, a conservative branding firm. “Everyone is so tired of the theater kid.”

Not everyone sees the GOP’s 90s fixation as benign, though.

To some cultural critics, the GOP’s embrace of 1990s culture looks less like homage than extraction, a way of stripping art of its original politics and redeploying it in service of the very power structures it once challenged. Boyz n the Hood, for instance, was not merely a movie about fatherhood but a film about racism, policing, gentrification and the abandonment of Black communities. West Coast rap was not simply swagger and rebellion but music born from surveillance, poverty and police violence, communities trying to narrate their own lives before someone else did it for them.

“It was not only about speaking truth to power. It was about escapism. It was about boasting and who had the most clever rhymes, who can dig themselves up the most. You’re talking about a society that is not used to having the larger society sing their praises. They had to learn how to sing their own praises, and to make something out of nothing,” said Raquel Cepeda, a documentary filmmaker and writer known for her work on hip-hop in this era.

“When it comes to hip-hop, it's being recontextualized in a way that's kind of neutering it,” she said. People like Rubio are “looking at it as if they’re being subversive, they’re being cool, they’re being anti-establishment, they’re being anti-RINO, and they’re being anti-swamp-ish, when they are, by very definition, the swamp.”

It’s a tension conservatives are not blind to: What happens when the anti-establishment becomes the establishment?

The GOP is “becoming, almost institutionally, the most anti-establishment party,” said Curt Mills, executive director of the American Conservative magazine, while conceding that “Republicans purloining cultural motifs and memories is always, I think, kind of precarious ground.”

The passage of time has made that kind of purloining — or what some might call appropriation — easier. The culture that once terrified politicians has become familiar, commercial and, in some cases, almost institutionally safe. Ice-T, once cast as a public menace after “Cop Killer,” is now a national spokesperson for CarShield auto protection plans and played a cop on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Snoop Dogg, an active Long Beach Crip in his youth who helped define West Coast gangsta rap, performed at Washington’s first “Crypto Ball” before Trump’s inauguration.

To Greg Kot, who was the longtime music critic at the Chicago Tribune, the danger is that politicians are borrowing the language of artists who were “punching up” while using it from a position of power. The transgressive music of the 90s, he argues, was representing people who felt voiceless; today, it is being quoted by people who run the institutions those artists were often critiquing.

“You obviously didn’t get the message in that music,” Kot said. “You’re co-opting something that meant totally the opposite thing when it was originally written … Now you’re quoting lyrics from it 30 years later, and you’re one of the people that probably a song like this would be written about today.”

Others reject the idea that culture can be permanently assigned to the politics of its creators. They argue artists from Tupac to Rage Against the Machine and films like Boyz n the Hood were critiquing a broken system, and that the embrace of that critique is available to anyone who sees themselves in the same vein, including conservatives who grew up absorbing the same songs and films as their liberal peers.

A second Trump administration official granted anonymity to discuss cultural matters said that what rap groups like NWA or films Boyz n the Hood share with MAGA Republicans is an attitude that something in society has gone awry.

“The LA riots were happening because they were fucking pissed at what was happening. Yeah, that was totally screwed up,” the official said. “And in the same way, you have people with this internalized anger that they’re just trying to do their own thing, and they feel like the powers that be are attacking them.”

Still, the tension between MAGA and the decade’s cultural icons is not merely theoretical: A raft of 1990s artists — including rapper Young MC, funk legend Morris Day and country singer Martina McBride — recently backed out of performing at Freedom 250 concerts in Washington this summer after learning of the organization’s ties to the Trump administration, leaving Trump himself to headline a June 24 event on the National Mall.

Raheem Kassam, a populist-right media figure and co-owner of Butterworth's, the Capitol Hill restaurant that's become a New Right hangout, pushed the point further, arguing that art that stays chained to its origins isn't really art.

“If art retains a partisan political grounding, then it’s not art,” he said. “It's politics.”

The fight over who gets to claim the 1990s has not made the decade less useful to Trump’s Washington, but rather more so. The decade can stand for the transgressive culture Republicans once condemned — but also for a softer memory of American life, before smartphones, 9/11 and the feeling of being perpetually perceived online.

That softer version has its own vocabulary, particularly on social media. It shows up in clips of the teen sitcom “Saved by the Bell,” old mall footage, Pizza Hut nostalgia, grainy concert videos and the “Mom, what were you like in the 90s?” trend — a kind of “anemoia,” or longing for a time one never lived through. One popular meme features a young girl standing in a park with the Twin Towers in the backdrop, overlain with the text: “The world you were raised to survive in no longer exists.”

Elsewhere, darker artifacts from the decade have found their own afterlives, from the manosphere’s embrace of Fight Club to younger conservatives’ fascination with the punks, goths and countercultural figures of an era they largely know secondhand.

In other words, the 90s has moved beyond generational memory to a kind of memeable shorthand.

“When we make memes out in the meme fields, we try to use 90s as much as we can,” Posobiec said. “We do tend to use 90s as, like, nostalgia bait.”

But there is an irony embedded in that nostalgia. Many of the conservatives now pining for the 1990s believe their own party spent the decade fighting the very culture they now claim as their own — railing against rap lyrics and violent movies, but also casting itself as the guardian of private morality. The party of the 1990s was the party of “family values:” Dan Quayle attacking the fictional CBS sitcom character Murphy Brown for having a child outside marriage; Pat Buchanan declaring “religious war” over abortion and gay rights; and Republicans making the Monica Lewinsky scandal a referendum on national character.

“The reason why the Republicans lost the culture in the 90s — and I would have never voted for them — is because they were the people who were championing that idea of moral superiority, coupled with moral panic,” said Malik, who used to be a registered Democrat.

Three decades later, many on the right see the roles as reversed: Democrats have become the scolds and Republicans the ones willing to transgress.

“I do think the Republican Party is more of the anti-establishment party — at least the populist wing of it — versus Democrats who were more anti-establishment at that point,” Malik continued. “There's this weird merging where a lot of us who were more anti-establishment in the 90s are now assuming power. Trump's Republican Party is very different than the one in the 90s.”

Mills argued that the 1990s references favored by Vance, Rubio and others are “not this cutesy, Zoomer-fied TikTok, Seinfeld shit,” but something more “masculinist” and more pointed — an implicit critique not just of late 20th century liberalism, but of the Reagan-era conservatism that preceded it.

“The question of where did America go wrong, if it ever went wrong, is an interesting one. But the thing that people seem to be moving towards is a consensus that something cracked up in the 90s,” Mills said. “To think the 90s were kind of bad, or at least were the genesis of the nation’s rot, I think you have to at some level think that Reagan was bad.”

The irony is that the politician who made this nostalgia politically useful is not really a creature of the 1990s at all, even as he has elevated people like Vance and Rubio who are. Trump’s own mythology was forged in the 1980s — the New York tabloids, gilded high-rises and art-of-the-deal excess. By the 1990s, his image had curdled into bankruptcy, divorce and public humiliation.

“If you look at it, the 90s was probably Trump’s least favorite decade,” Mills quipped.

Whatever the 90s mean as culture, its political meaning is arriving just as the country is on the verge of a generational handoff it has put off for decades.

Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Trump were all born in 1946. Biden was older, a member of what’s known as the Silent Generation. Obama, born in 1961, was technically a late boomer, though he carries Gen X impulses.

The country has never elected a younger-than-a-boomer president. That may be about to change.

“The next five years — the House, maybe the presidency — it’s definitely a big turning point generationally. It brings a lot more individualism, a lot more distrust in institutions, a lot more cynicism,” Twenge said.

Rubio, born in 1971, is Gen X, while Vance, born in 1984, is an elder millennial. The Democratic bench, too, is increasingly post-boomer: Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, Wes Moore, Andy Beshear, Pete Buttigieg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez all belong to Gen X or younger cohorts.

Institutions are moving more slowly, but in the same direction. The 119th Congress is somewhat younger than the one before it, with fewer boomers and more Gen Xers, according to Pew Research. In this current Congress, the median age of voting House members is 57.5, down from 57.9 in the previous Congress, while the Senate’s median age dropped to 64.7 after several years of climbing.

“We’re a generation that has inherited a lot of problems caused by previous generations, whether it’s climate, debt, broken institutions. These are not problems that Gen X caused but ones that they’re having to confront,” Conant said. “There’s a little bit of — resentment’s not the right word — but a little bit of frustration that we’re having to pay for the problems our parents created.”

Those impulses are roiling Democratic politics, too, from generational fights in Congress to insurgent primaries testing the party’s old guard. But it’s the Republican Party that has been more willing to translate that anti-institutional mood into a governing style.

Cepeda, the documentary filmmaker, said that part of the appeal of the 1990s is that it was an era before every adolescent mistake, awkward question or half-formed thought became permanent public evidence. Democrats, she argued, hold people to an impossible standard while Republicans “are meeting people where they’re at.”

Looking back, had the experimentation of the 90s played out online, she added, “a lot of us would have been canceled.”