AND THEY’RE NOT WRONG: The Last Time America Got It Right, According to MAGA’s Next Generation.
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.
To illustrate the above article in graphic terms:
The shocking part of this is how most growth in the healthcare industry has come from bureaucracy, not actual healthcare https://t.co/5DbjX1creB
— Lauren Chen (@TheLaurenChen) July 13, 2026