There’s been a grassroots Constitutional conservative movement percolating in Brooklyn, as those of you who have followed my coverage of the Donald J. Trump Kings County Republican Club already know. The club recently celebrated its first year with a gala in Dyker Heights, filling a large banquet room with a crowd that nicely illustrated the coalition building the movement.
The event wasn’t just notable as a demonstration of the club’s rapid transformation from a dozen outraged citizens into a center of gravity for liberty-minded political players. It pointed the way forward for a nascent opposition movement—I’ll call them New York’s New Republicans—determined to take on the Marxist collectivists who have been steadily gaining ground in both the government and the streets—most notably in the recent election of socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani.
At the January 31 gala, DJT Club founder Jimmy Wagner touched on the group’s major goals for 2026 and distributed a year-in-review journal that delved into the details of its political philosophy in a series of articles. Those articles are now available on the DJT Club’s website and provide a good overview of what the club is all about.
The main thing it’s about is fighting for an American Constitutionalist vision of New York City, the United States, and even the world, that is diametrically opposed to the core tenets of New York’s Marxist vanguard:
The Marxists describe rights and individual dignity as emanating from the government through guarantees of material benefits. As Mamdani put it in his Forest Hills Stadium campaign speech, “It is government’s job to deliver that dignity.”
On the first day of the 250th anniversary year of the Declaration of Independence, Mayor Mamdani didn’t cite that document in his inaugural speech. Instead, he pointed to the South African Freedom Charter as his guiding light. The mid-20th-century tract lays out an extensive list of rights that its authors thought should be granted by the state, from a minimum wage to public nursing homes to recreation and even “comfort.”
The New Republicans, on the other hand, take the foundational American view that a limited number of natural rights inhere in each human individual, and governments are just hired to uphold them. They see individuals, as our Declaration of Independence says, as “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” And they view private property ownership as a means of securing those rights instead of a mechanism of oppression that keeps the government from delivering rights to the people.
The New Republicans also describe the structure of society as springing from culture, with American society having emerged specifically from the culture of a Western civilization rooted in Christianity. The Marxists take the opposite view, understanding culture as a product of economic systems—“a response to the conditions we live in,” as socialist Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently put it in Berlin.
The policy preferences of the two political adversaries flow from these fundamentally different worldviews.
New York’s David v. Goliath Battle for Middle Class Votes
It would be difficult to overstate just how overmatched the New Republicans are in New York City right now. As founding DJT Club member Rachel Maniscalco said at the gala, “We are living in a present-day David and Goliath.” The Goliath to the club’s David is the Democratic establishment and the Marxist insurgency that is reshaping its politics.
The movement that carried Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani to the mayoralty has been built over decades and only seems to be growing. It encompasses numerous very well funded organizations spanning the Marxist spectrum from the cheerful incrementalists of Mamdani’s own DSA and socialist-adjacent progressives to the burn-it-down revolutionaries of PSL.
It’s well established in NYC’s City Council, unions, schools and bureaucracies. It can bring armies of adherents into the streets on a day’s notice to protest or get out the vote. This week, a few hundred of them gathered on a frigid Monday afternoon just to give Trump the finger.
This is an election year, and already assessments of Republicans’ chances in New York races are grim. There just isn’t much reason to think Republicans not only in New York City but in the state as a whole will be able to do anything more than retain the seats they have—even that may be a stretch.
Pushing Forward, Playing Catch-Up
The New Republicans are nonetheless full of ambition. In its year-in-review journal, the DJT Club laid out its plans for 2026: support aligned candidates, petition to amend the New York City Charter, build its voter and volunteer bases, and form alliances.
The club seems to be trying to rouse a silent majority (or at least a reasonably large voting bloc). They’re betting there are enough New Yorkers to win elections out there who share their foundational American values but have just been too busy working and taking care of their families to do anything political about it. With organization and concrete goals to work toward, the thinking goes, they will start taking back political power.
New Yorkers who threw their support behind Curtis Sliwa in the 2025 mayoral campaign were making a similar bet, and they lost it decisively when Sliwa got only 7% of the vote. The DJT Club backed his candidacy and gave him their People’s Mayor award at the gala.
But many Sliwa supporters argue that his loss was in large part due to the lack of support from his own party and its funders. The Republican establishment, such as it is in New York City, didn’t give him the tools he needed to win, and hasn’t even built the kind of foundation any viable candidate requires. The New Republicans appear to be taking on this practical task.
The club has launched a get-out-the-vote app, Voter Outreach & Tracking for Election Registration (V.O.T.E.R.), aimed at identifying and canvassing unregistered voters, supporting petitioning, and registering voters.
Progressives and socialists in New York have been using and refining that kind of technology very successfully since the Reach app was created for AOC’s first campaign in 2018. It played a significant role in her electoral victory and has since developed into a rich grassroots organizing tool that has been used by left-wing campaigns nationwide, including Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral run.
Similar apps have been developed for conservative campaigns, but New York candidates don’t seem to make much use of them. V.O.T.E.R. represents a step toward bringing NYC Republicans and conservatives into the current technological era.
New York’s Eclectic New Republicans
Still, there’s no app that can replace boots on the ground. A political movement is made up of people, and the DJT Club is trying to bring enough of them together to move the needle. Perhaps its most important task as a new organization is defining who belongs in it and making sure they get an invitation to join.
The people who got an invitation to the gala painted the picture: There were labor leaders, medical freedom advocates, small business owners, and a lot of working class New Yorkers and municipal workers. Many of them were casualties of the City’s 2021-2022 vaccine mandate firings, which became the crucible in which the club was formed. Club founder Jimmy Wagner, an attorney, represented some of the club’s founding members in lawsuits against the City after they lost their jobs. The club is clear about prioritizing working and middle class interests; these are not old-school big business Republicans.
The large number of political players in the room spoke to the club’s ability to put itself on the map in a short period of time. They tended to have strong bona fides as down-to-earth advocates for working class New Yorkers—people like City Council Member Joann Ariola; State Senator Steve Chan, a former cop; and of course Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa.
Kings County Republican Party Chair Richie Barsamian, who has worked closely with the club since its inception, was joined by Queens County Republican Party Chair Tony Nunziato and New York Republican State Committee Chairman Ed Cox, who gave the final address of the night. Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman couldn’t make it but sent a video message, and Congressional and state AG candidates Greg Hach and Khurram Dara spoke.
Notable guests formed an eclectic group ranging from religious conservative show host Eric Metaxas to rapper Lord Jamar to feminist author Naomi Wolf, who threw her support behind the club’s first sponsored City Council candidate, Athena Clarke, in 2025.
What this diverse collection of people who got dressed up to go to Dyker Heights on a freezing Saturday night share in common is strong support for civil liberties, middle class economic interests, and traditional American civic values.
Many of them also share a history as registered Democrats. DJT Club founder Jimmy Wagner and a large number of the club’s current members defected from a Democratic Party they see as having thrown middle class New Yorkers under the bus, especially during COVID.
There’s a long history of working and middle class Americans defections from the Democratic Party that have created groundswells of support for Republicans and reshaped that party’s politics too. One key ingredient in those shifts has been a charismatic leader. Ronald Reagan was a decisive factor for the Reagan Democrats, Donald Trump for “Obama-Trump” voters in 2016, and RFK Jr. for formerly Democratic MAHA voters who backed Trump in 2024.
The DJT Club backed a group of energetic candidates in the 2025 election, but there is no single political leader who has emerged thus far as that kind of catalyst. In the battle for New York’s working and middle class votes, no New Republican leader currently stands out as being a match for charismatic socialist politicians like Zohran Mamdani and AOC, who also claim to be representing working class interests.
But again, the New Republicans of the DJT Club say they’re just getting started. At their Dyker Heights gala, they celebrated their first year with recognition for the hard work of people building their movement. You can listen to what they had to say in the full event video at the top.
Eleven honorees spoke and accepted awards at the gala:
Curtis Sliwa (People’s Mayor Award)
Rachel Maniscalco (MAHA Workhorse Award)
Michael Kane (Voice for Medical Freedom & Informed Consent Award)
Janine Acquafredda (Tulsi Gabbard Strength and Service Award)
Athena Clarke (Naomi Wolf American Truth Award)
Elijah Diaz (Rising Star Republican Populist Award)
William Egdorf (MAGA Workhorse Award)
Tramell Thompson (Dorothy Day Workers’ Rights Award)
John Gilmore (Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Liberty & Courage Award)
New York State Senator Steve Chan (The Sky’s the Limit Award)
New York City Council Member Joann Ariola (Donald J. Trump Patriot Leadership Award)
Retired NYPD Lieutenant and Finest Unfiltered founder John Macari was awarded the Andrew Breitbart Digital Courage Award. He was unable to attend the gala, but he commented afterward:
I’m humbled to have received the DJT-Andrew Breitbart Digital Courage Award, though I don’t believe I’ve done anything extraordinary to deserve it. Sharing honest opinions and engaging in honest dialogue shouldn’t be a revolutionary act. It should be commonplace online, at work, and in social gatherings.
Every generation, including our own, has an obligation to defend our GOD given and constitutionally protected freedoms and hand them off intact to the next. We can’t do that if we’re unwilling to exercise our most basic right: FREE SPEECH. Use it, or lose it.
