On the afternoon before Inauguration Day, Cassandra Fairbanks was in her living room, in Silver Spring, Maryland, putting the final touches on her outfit: a Stars-and-Stripes manicure, a strapless red ball gown, a rifle-casing pendant, and a poncho—“in case the protesters decide to throw paint on me,” she said. Fairbanks was one of the organizers of the DeploraBall, a party for the ultra-nationalists and Twitter trolls who, as they put it, “memed Donald Trump into the White House.” Protesters had threatened to disrupt the event, at the National Press Club, and had listed Fairbanks, a pro-Trump journalist and social-media demi-celebrity, as one of several “high-value targets.”

Fairbanks took a sip from a canned Starbucks latte, her hand trembling. “I’m either overcaffeinated or just nervous,” she said. Her two-month-old puppy—Wiki, short for WikiLeaks—padded around, occasionally peeing on a towel.

An Uber arrived, and Fairbanks stepped in carefully, holding up her dress.

“What’re we up to today?” the driver asked.

“Going to a ball,” Fairbanks said.

Fairbanks, who is thirty-one, sees herself as a civil libertarian. “I care more about free speech, including for Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, than almost any other issue,” she said. When she began freelancing, she wrote for leftist clickbait sites like U.S. Uncut and Addicting Info. “Talk about fake news,” she said. “That was the fakest shit I’ve ever seen. They would put headlines on my pieces that they knew were bullshit, and tell me, ‘Don’t worry, we’re just giving your story some juice.’ ”

For the first half of 2016, she supported Bernie Sanders; when he dropped out, she was conflicted. “I couldn’t possibly support Hillary, I knew that,” she said. She considered Jill Stein, but concluded that Stein didn’t have enough charisma to win. (“No one wants to elect their weird yoga teacher who smells like cat urine.”) So she turned to Trump. “I was still working for these sites that were saying terrible things about him, but when I listened for myself I thought, His message makes sense.” She appreciated Trump’s opposition to political correctness, and his willingness, after the Orlando shootings, to focus on terrorism instead of on gun control. “I started saying a few pro-Trump things on Twitter, and people absolutely lost their shit,” she said. “I got called a literal Nazi so many times, I eventually went, Fuck it, I’ll just go all in.” She now writes for Sputnik, a news site funded by the Russian government.

Fairbanks was dropped off at a luxury condo building on K Street. On a roof deck, she met up with Gavin McInnes, another of the DeploraBall’s V.I.P. guests. McInnes, a forty-six-year-old with a waxed mustache, co-founded Vice Media in the nineteen-nineties, then left the company as his politics shifted right. He recently formed the Proud Boys, a “pro-Western fraternal organization” for men who “refuse to apologize for creating the modern world.” On the roof, McInnes drank Budweiser with about a dozen Proud Boys, most of them a decade or two his junior. “I find it strange,” a Proud Boy from North Carolina said. “It’s O.K. to be a nationalist, and it’s O.K. to have pride in yourself. But you put either of those concepts together with being white, and suddenly you’re an insane Nazi bigot.”

McInnes put on reading glasses and picked up a copy of “The Death of the West,” the 2001 book by Pat Buchanan. The Proud Boys gathered around him. “The West did not invent slavery, but it alone abolished slavery,” he read. “The time for apologies is past.”

The group left the building and walked quickly toward the Press Club. McInnes, at the front of the pack, rubbed his palms together. “Get in formation!” he said. “Ladies on the inside, for protection!” Fairbanks, wearing heels, hurried to stay in the middle of the scrum.

In front of the Press Club were several dozen police officers and several hundred protesters. One of the protesters, wearing a black mask, crossed McInnes’s path; McInnes grabbed him by the shoulder, turned him around, and punched him in the face. “What the fuck?” the protester shouted. “Fuck you, fascist!” A few police officers rushed to arrest the protester, while other officers escorted the Proud Boys inside.

“We made it!” Fairbanks said. “Thank you for protecting me.”

“Don’t mention it, m’lady,” McInnes said.

She checked her poncho, affixed two pins to her dress (Comet Ping Pong and Pepe the Frog), and made her way upstairs to the bar. McInnes stopped to talk to several reporters, each time heightening the story of his scuffle with the protester. “I think that when I punched him my fist went into his mouth, and his teeth scraped me on the way out,” he said. “Now I might get loser AIDS.” ♦