On Saturday night, Stephen K. Bannon grabbed the microphone on the upper level of Tom’s Watch Bar, a sports bar in National Harbor, Md., to close out the final after-party of the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference.
“The management is upset,” Mr. Bannon, the former Trump adviser turned podcaster, said to a crowd of a few hundred college Republicans, young political operatives and middle-aged MAGA-sphere celebrities. “You all aren’t drinking enough. I told them I was throwing a party, but you all are a bunch of pencil-necks. Are we drinking or not?”
The room roared back. They were definitely drinking. A college Republican sporting a turtleneck and a Gen-Z fade teetered past the dance floor. A mohawked security guard wearing a Gadsden flag pin manned the stairs to the V.I.P. section, where Nigel Farage, the former Brexit Party leader, pressed the flesh with Newsmax hosts and other guests like James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas.
Nearby, Mark and Patricia McCloskey signed leaflets featuring the infamous photo of them pointing guns at Black Lives Matter protesters from their front lawn in St. Louis in 2020. Televisions around the bar played a loop of promo images for Mr. Bannon’s podcast, “War Room.” A D.J. bumped 2010s club hits.
The bar was open — domestic beers and tequila sodas flew across it, and servers in T-shirts circulated trays of old-fashioneds. After four days of speeches and a convention floor offering little more than a Jan. 6-themed pinball machine and some late-night infomercial products, the attendees appeared desperate for a good party.
