The deeply silly, extremely serious rise of ‘Alpha Male’ Nick Adams

Nick Adams was speaking to the men in the room.

“Never apologize,” he said. “Never mask up. Never pick up the Fortnite controller. It starts with the Fortnite controller and boneless chicken wings, and ends in gender pronouns and communism. We don’t want that.”

“Damn right!” a young man in pleated khakis yelled. “Damn right, we don’t want that.”

The crowd chuckled. The affirmation was jokey, but serious - fitting for Adams, a happy culture warrior whose weapon of choice is not a video game controller but an X account, “Nick Adams (Alpha Male),” where he professes his love for Hooters, makes goofy claims such as how billionaire pop superstar Taylor Swift is dating NFL tight end Travis Kelce only because she wants a piece of his roughly $73,000 conference championship game share, and posts videos about boycotting Mars candy because M&M’s had committed “egregious sexism” for having all-female packaging. He calls his fans Nick Adams Disciples, or “Nads.”

On this occasion, the burgeoning Nads were young Republicans. They had gathered at the Capitol Hill Club to drink cheap beer, in a room decorated with porcelain elephant statues and photographs of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Sen. John McCain, and listen to a well-built man with a five o’clock shadow and an Australian accent tell them that “‘nasty women’ are coming for two things: your mind and your testicles!”

In some ways, Adams’s shtick is conventionally conservative: He’s Christian, he’s very concerned about there being only two genders, he rails against “woke.” In other ways, his version of MAGA manhood is so over-the-top, so uncanny that it almost seems like performance art. The parody theory seems especially strong when Adams’s posts on X veer into double-entendre territory — juicing engagement from snarky foes and howling fans with posts about his butcher (“I love watching Mario handle my meat”) or golf (“A foursome with the boys will be the most fun you will ever have in your entire life”).

He writes about how if your wife is “high-maintenance” then you’re a “loser” no matter how hot she is. And about his love of steak.

“Alpha males don’t care about time changes, we wake up at 4AM every single morning regardless of the circumstances,” he wrote on X last month, a few days after the clocks sprang forward for daylight saving time. “64oz tomahawk ribeyes aren’t going to eat themselves!”

Is Nick Adams serious?

In a Trumpified GOP, and a Trumpified Washington, the answer is yes. He is a presidential appointee to the board of Washington’s Woodrow Wilson Center, which, according to its website, “provides nonpartisan counsel and insights on global affairs to policymakers.” Donald Trump, who bestowed him with that honor during his last term, has recently made Adams an official campaign surrogate as the former president attempts to regain control of the White House.

One thing seems certain: As long as Trump continues to be a force in conservative politics, people in Washington and beyond may have to acknowledge a man like Nick Adams as a thought leader — no matter if they think he’s a joke.

“I think it’s a sincere bit,” Isaac Smith, who sits on the board of the D.C. Young Republicans, the group that hosted Adams’s appearance, said at the Capitol Hill Club. “He’s taking things that are real and playing them up to the nth degree.”

“I think he’s almost a genius,” said Veronica Hays, a digital training manager at the conservative Leadership Institute and one of a handful of women in attendance. “His use of satire, you don’t know if he’s being 100 percent real, but there’s definitely a grain of truth there.”

“You remember Andy Kaufman?” Adams’s hired security guard told me, referring to the late comedian who was famous for never breaking character.

Adams is serious, at least, about the steak. I found that out when I took him to dinner before his speech at D.C.’s Capitol Hill Club. He chose an upscale grill, and after we sat down he asked our male waiter if we could have a pretty female waitress instead. Then he ordered a 42-ounce tomahawk steak for two and proceeded to eat it in its entirety.

Heading into our first in-person encounter, I had been curious to try to get a sense of where Nick Adams ended and the “Alpha Male” began. In a private conversation I learned about while reporting, Adams himself described it as a character. At dinner, however, his answers were unequivocal.

“This is not a character,” Adams told me. “This is not a bit. It’s not trolling. Anyone who thinks this is not me, that I don’t eat steak, that I don’t drink ice-cold domestics, that I don’t repel woke beer, they’re wrong. They’re absolutely wrong.”

After dinner Adams texted his pal Tex Fischer, saying he couldn’t believe that I’d ordered salmon rather than steak. Fischer, who has known Adams for the better part of a decade, says his friend isn’t putting on a front. One time, he told me, Adams swapped his Jaguar for an Infiniti; when Fischer asked him why, Adams showed him an email that Jaguar had sent wishing him “Happy Holidays” (instead of “Merry Christmas”).

He told me about another time, years ago, when Fischer was working for the pro-Trump youth group Turning Point USA and Adams gave a talk to students at Ohio State University. “A good friend of mine, basically the guy hosting — you know, the chapter president — came out with us to Buffalo Wild Wings,” Fischer recalls. “Nick told the waitress that this guy was a big-deal porn star, calling him ‘Big Boned Deep Throat’ and all that stuff. He was doing it the entire time we were there, loudly, for everyone in Buffalo Wild Wings.”

Adams “really likes winding people up” and sometimes “says things explicitly to piss people off,” Fischer says, but when it comes to the Alpha Male stuff, he also happens to believe what he’s saying.

“It’s not that he’s playing a character,” he says. “It’s just that he is a character.”

Before Nick Adams was an Alpha King, he was a deputy mayor who wanted to kill a bunch of pigeons.

It was 2005, and Adams, then 21, was the youngest deputy mayor in Australian history. He represented Ashfield, a suburb of Sydney, and in a supposed effort to eliminate the growing threat of avian bird flu, Adams suggested eliminating the birds.

“Ashfield should be inhospitable to pigeons,” he said at the time. He pointed out that “avian influenza does not respect borders.”

His opponents pointed out that neither did pigeons. “The idea that you could get rid of them in one area and that no pigeons would ever fly over from another is ridiculous,” said Marc Rerceretnam, who served on the city council with Adams. “But he was serious about this thing. I mean, the guy is an idiot.”

He was clever enough, however, to douse a local shopping center with birdseed before staging a news conference there about the pigeon problem. The place was usually full of pigeons, Adams says, but on the day of his news conference there hadn’t been a bird in sight. So he dashed into a supermarket and baited the premises with seed, and by the time the news crews showed up, he says, the place was so inundated with pigeons that “you couldn’t see the sky.”

“He always had a brilliant mind to do certain things,” said Evan Angelopoulos, a friend of Adams’s since childhood, about the pigeon news conference.

Adams’s pigeon-killing proposal went nowhere. But the man behind it believed he was going places.

“He told me he wanted to be prime minister,” said Julie Passas, a former council member who says she helped Adams get elected to the council when he was 19 years old.

Born Nick Adamopoulos to a Greek father and German mother, he was a chronically sick baby who was eventually diagnosed with and treated for a neuroblastoma after an American doctor suggested his symptoms might align with that type of cancer — an intervention that he now uses as part of the origin story of his love affair with the United States. In Australia he was raised in a house with strict rules and high expectations; Adams says he never heard his dad say the words “I love you.” But he doesn’t hold this against the old man, who died in 2021. He calls him the ultimate “alpha” and a great father who pushed his son to achieve excellence.

“When I was 5 years old, he began to treat me like an adult,” Adams writes. “He didn’t dumb things down for me, didn’t cut me any slack, he didn’t accept if I mispronounced a word or made a grammatical error, he held me to account. In many ways, I credit my generational oratorical talent to this upbringing.”

If Adams is an “idiot,” he’s the smartest kind: quick on his feet, fluent in three languages. As a youngster he excelled academically at the Trinity Grammar School, an all-boys school where the students wore blazers and ties. Even back then he encouraged his friends to spend time hanging with the boys instead of letting girls control their social calendar, according to Angelopoulos.

“He’s always been this way,” his lifelong pal said. “It’s really who he is.”

As a burgeoning politician, he was a staunch nationalist who gave speeches about the importance of assimilating to Australian culture and warning against the dangers of multiculturalism. According to some of his co-council members, he spent a fair amount of time pitching ideas like having the city start DNA-testing dog poop on the street to catch the perpetrators who failed to clean up after their pets, or trying to make Halloween a public holiday. Also the pigeon-killing thing.

“If he didn’t have a stunt, he wouldn’t turn up to meetings,” said Mark Drury, a former member of the council.

Adams began missing a lot of council meetings to travel to America, where he would give motivational speeches. In 2009, the Liberal Party of Australia, the country’s right-of-center party, threatened to suspend him for six months after he swore at a local reporter who was filming a segment on his overseas travel, but he says he resigned from the party before the suspension took place.

“He had delusions of grandeur,” said Passas. Adams’s electoral success at such a young age “went to his head,” according to his political mentor, “and he couldn’t handle it.”

Adams resigned from Australian politics in 2012. If he wasn’t going to make it big in his home country, perhaps it was time to try somewhere else.

“I say to him, ‘Australia did you a favor,’” Angelopoulos said. “His boldness and his character was a bit much for Australia. But America sort of embraces it.”

The fake Time magazine cover hanging inside the front door of his enormous home in Palm Harbor, Fla. — the square footage is either 6,884 feet or “a little over 8,000,” depending on whether you go by public records or Adams’s estimation — announces him as the “Alpha Male of the Year.” A real oil portrait of Adams posing in a book-lined study hangs beneath the vaulted ceilings of the dining room, and a photograph of Adams and Trump giving a thumbs-up hangs beside the dining room table.

The walls are adorned with American flags, gifts Adams received after starting the Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness, an education nonprofit focused on civics and rejuvenating America’s “patriotic tradition” that in 2022 raised over a million dollars and paid Adams a salary of $248,251 (in 2021 he earned a salary of $310,000).

That the house is a reflection of Adams is not a surprise; in his latest book, “Alpha Kings” — which is full of advice for how to avoid a wife or girlfriend who ever makes you do anything you don’t want to do — he describes his house as a wall-to-wall “man cave” and declares that he would never compromise his decoration scheme to the tastes of any cohabitating woman, except perhaps for “a small area for her to do her scrapbooking or host her sewing machine.”

This is currently not an issue for Adams: Despite his voluminous, judgmental advice about marriage and child-rearing, Adams, 39, has never been married and has no kids. He is currently single and lives in the mansion by himself.

Elizabeth Hittos, chief of staff to Rep. Gus M. Bilirakis (R-Fla.) and a friend of Adams’s, says that Adams behaved like a complete gentleman when she set him up on a date with one of her friends — a doctor — and that, in reality, he would never tell a woman to get bent. When he’s not performing for an audience, she told me, Adams is actually “very, very humble.” (“I am the most humble man in the world,” Adams told me.)

Certainly, he is an ingratiating host — all smiles, winks and backslaps.

“I’m going to give you the special Nick Adams tour,” he told me when I arrived.

There’s a pool, a hot tub, an in-home movie theater, a makeshift studio from which Adams films his Cameo appearances and TV hits for Newsmax, and a billiards room filled with framed Trump tweets and handwritten notes from the former president.

Before Trump secured the 2016 nomination, Adams had been one of his early fans, going on Fox News that March and predicting that the businessman would “absolutely pulverize Hillary Clinton.” Trump shared that clip on social media, and after winning the White House he reciprocated the endorsement: In one printed tweet, which now hangs on the wall of Adams’s man cave, Trump called the Australia native’s book “Green Card Warrior: My Quest for Legal Immigration in an Illegals’ System” a “must read.”

Adams, who got his American citizenship in 2021, is part of a long tradition of immigrants who have won the ear of an American president. Though it’s harder to imagine Zbigniew Brzezinski or Henry Kissinger using their proximity to power to discuss matters such as which “Rocky” movie is best.

“I said ‘Rocky IV,’” Adams said, recounting such a conversation with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. “He said, ‘Sly’s body is immaculate, perfect in that movie. Amazing physique.’”

Is this not the American Dream? Or at least an American dream?

“I believe in kicking butt, not kissing it,” Adams told me. “And I think Donald Trump has that approach. Both of us come up with provocative ways to communicate something or highlight a subject area. But I think that’s more genius than anything else.”

“Like me, I know that Nick appreciates the power of humor, when it comes to making a point,” Trump writes in the foreword to “Alpha Kings.”

And, like Trump with his “sir” stories — tales of want and gratitude in which Trump inevitably plays the hero — Adams is prone to telling stories about himself that sound so comically heavy-handed that they strain credulity. Lately he’s been doing so in a way that seems tailored to the purpose of Trump’s reelection: After President Biden’s State of the Union address Adams told a story on X in which he is “so disgusted” by the speech that he shuts off the television and heads to the gym, where he meets “two attractive college educated Latina career women,” who say they, too, disliked Biden’s speech, and that they miss President Trump. Then the three discuss Trump’s “successful border policies,” the women ogle Adams’s muscles and the Alpha Male pushes out a personal record on the bench press. “It wasn’t long before a crowd had gathered to cheer me on,” Adams wrote, “the sound of my masculine grunts broken only by the two Latina’s counting my reps in unison.”

“You mean to tell me every part of that story was true?” I asked him at his house in Florida.

“It was nonfiction, Benny.”

Adams, who is fond of giving nicknames, has taken to calling me “Benny T” — teasing, to the Nads at the Capitol Hill Club, that he doesn’t know whether the “T” stands for “high T” or “low T,” and that my testosterone levels will reveal themselves when this article comes out. (Fischer said the only person Adams “respects too much” to call by a nickname is Trump.) Later, when I wrote him asking for contact info for the two attractive Latina career women, and other people who have appeared in his stories, he told me to “get bent,” explaining, “I’m not going to let these lovely ladies and individuals be dragged into the mud of the fake news just because of my fame and success.”

“My stories are true stories,” he told me in Florida. “I’m telling you.... Benny! I don’t know why you always doubt me, son.... I thrust forward with vigor, I thrust forward with vigor, my boy.”

At the Wilson Center, Adams is known as a quiet presence, attending board meetings regularly but speaking so little that some people didn’t even know he had an Australian accent. He is an active member, even traveling on a Wilson Center trip to Israel last year, where he participated in a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

There are members of the center’s staff, “especially young women,” who think his presence on the board is an “embarrassment” and “may be also be damaging our reputation,” according to a Wilson Center employee who would speak openly about a current board member only on the condition of anonymity.

“Some of our best directors and leaders here are women,” the employee told me, “and if you read the stuff he writes, it’s clear he thinks of women as less-than and inferior.”

Take, for example, the tale Adams told on X, and also in his new book, about going on vacation with a “sheila” (old-fashioned Australian slang for a woman) who didn’t want to carry his luggage at the airport. “Let me explain something to you, sweetheart. I am an alpha male,” he said he told her. “I lead, you follow. You are the supporting cast, I am the main character. I am a king, and I expect to be treated like it.”

Adams writes in “Alpha Kings” that real men protect women physically. But he does advocate for “correcting” women verbally. “When an alpha male interrupts a woman to correct her, it’s not ‘mansplaining,’” he writes. “It’s education.” In one memorable passage, he tells a story about a woman he was dating being “less than enthusiastic in her apology” after buying him the wrong kind of yogurt. “Later that day, she slammed my car door, not intentionally, but the delicate electronics housed within the car door didn’t care about the intent,” he writes. “I exploded on her, issuing a correction that rattled her to her core. After that her apology was, shall we say, more enthusiastic.”

After I started making inquiries about Adams with people who worked at the Wilson Center, the director, Mark Green, tried to allay any concerns among the staff about the Alpha Male in their midst.

A lot of politics can be performative, Green told other staffers during a regularly scheduled meeting, according to multiple people present. The center’s official response to my interest in Adams was prim: “Nick is a member of the board in good standing and regularly attends board meetings,” it said in a statement. “Beyond that, the Wilson Center’s policy is to not comment on board members and their activities.”

The Wilson Center may have good reason to want to remain in good standing with Adams. Because the center needs Congress and the president to approve federal funding to support operating costs, he may be its best ally if Trump’s GOP takes control of Washington next year.

“We know he styles himself as a friend of Trump’s,” said the Wilson Center employee, “but all this sudden talk about him has deepened the sense that people see Nick Adams as maybe important to the center’s future — as weird as that sounds.”

It’s tempting to attribute the rise of Nick Adams to Trump’s patronage, but that’s not the whole story.

“When Trump was president and said, ‘It’s a scary time to be a young man in America,’ a lot of people on the left rolled their eyes,” says Richard Reeves, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. “But it really resonated.”

There are genuine problems facing men and boys, including rising suicide and shrinking college enrollment rates. But by popularizing terms like “toxic masculinity,” Reeves says, the left has “pathologized” men in a way that turns them away from the Democratic Party. The Brookings scholar notes that Democrats have passed important legislation to help men — like the 2022 infrastructure bill, which benefited working-class men. But they don’t talk about it in those terms.

“Someone reasonably senior in Democrat circles said to me that they could afford to lose the votes of angry young men, as long as they pick up more votes from angry young women,” Reeves says. And while that may be true, it also means Republicans don’t have to do much more than acknowledge the plight of men to win many of them over.” In particular, the “reluctance” of Democrats and the American left to acknowledge the struggles of men “creates a huge market for guys like Nick Adams.”

Whether or not Adams is serious, he’s an answer to a serious question. And the fact that he’s doing so with shameless comedic bombast only gives him more credibility with certain audiences. “The combination of humor and irony and transgression,” Reeves says, “are like crack for a young boy.”

As a surrogate for the Trump campaign he plans to travel the country, speaking to young Republican groups on college campuses and wherever else they want him.

Fischer believes he has ambitions to someday run for office.

And he’s relentless about achieving his goals. Passas, the Ashfield council member who helped launch Adams’s political career in Australia, had plenty of salty things to say about her former mentee, but she also said he’s a hard worker who doesn’t give up.

“He was always a cocky little bastard,” she told me. “If he is working for Trump to try and get the youth vote, he will get it.”

It’s against Adams’s code to show vulnerability, but it became clear to me — through things he said both on and off the record — that he cares very much about what the readers of this article might think of him.

“What’s sad to me is that I’m always made out to be an idiot,” Adams told me. “I don’t know what you’re going to write. Maybe you’re going to write I’m an idiot. But if you’re being fair, I think you’ll work out I’m the farthest thing from.”

Trumpily, he suggested that The Washington Post would never allow me to report the real meaning of Nick Adams. He started telling another story. This time he was composing not as “Nick Adams (Alpha Male)” but as “Benny T,” yet another American man whom he had enlightened in his quest.

“Nick Adams represents horrible things and he’s connected with a horrible person like Donald Trump,” he said, in character as me. “I approached this article thinking I was going to hate Nick Adams, but after spending eight hours with you, I’ve got to tell you, I found that really, really hard to do. And I want to tell you, on the side of the left, my fellow comrades that are reading The Washington Post, if we have a brain, we would take this guy very seriously because he can do just about anything. He’s motivated. He’s super, super bright. He’s playing chess when we’re playing checkers. He is incredible.”

Adams did not smile. He was serious.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that Nick Adams alluded to Travis Kelce’s Super Bowl bonus check in an X post. That post alluded to Kelce’s compensation for the conference championship game. The article also said that Kelce’s compensation for that game was $70,000; it was $73,000. The article has been corrected.