How this dark-horse hard seltzer brand helped reelect Donald Trump
A Fingers special report on the Happy Dad-UFC-MAGA nexus
Around 2:45am last Wednesday, once it became clear that Donald Trump had the 2024 presidential election in the bag, Dana White took the stage at Mar-a-Lago to get the party started. The Ultimate Fighting Championship’s head honcho delivered half a minute of praise for Trump’s resilience, work ethic and other character traits that he very obviously doesn’t possess. Then White moved on to some shoutouts to “manosphere” entertainers in his inner circle that he considered integral to the former president’s reelection.
That list ended with “the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan,” because of course it did. But the very first people White thanked from the Mar-a-Lago stage last week, with newly minted president-elect looking approvingly over his shoulder and the cameras beaming him around the world, were the Nelk Boys. The YouTube edgelords-turned-GOP darlings had made it to the inner sanctum. And they brought their shockingly successful hard seltzer brand, Happy Dad, with them.
I’ve been tracking the Nelk Boys’ ascent descent to MAGA royalty since March 2022, when Trump appeared on their podcast, Full Send. The episode would quickly become notorious when YouTube pulled it down for violating its guidelines about misinformation about the 2020 election, but what caught my eye was the 12-pack of Happy Dad hard seltzer placed conspicuously in frame. It’s not uncommon for influencers to try to leverage their online popularity by launching beverage-alcohol brands, but it’s a rare influencer that’s able to place their own flavored malt beverage on the elbow of the former president of the United States. I began looking into the relationship, filing an initial report that spring, and additional items ever since.
Now, two years removed from that first podcast episode, and one week removed from the 2024 election, I think it’s important to put it all together. At the nexus of the Nelk Boys, White, and Trump are millions of Zyn-popping frat bros, heavily armed Punisher-misunderstanders, and other too-online jamokes slamming Happy Dad and getting angry about “the border.” They’re mostly anonymous chuds, but some of them are very famous and powerful chuds, like conservative reactionary Caitlyn Jenner, former Fox News demagogue Tucker Carlson, and Nazi-humping welfare queen Elon Musk. Here’s how together, they helped reelect Trump.
For those lucky enough to still be unfamiliar: the Nelk Boys are a collective of dudes who do pranks and objectify women for tens of millions of views each month on their main channel, which boasts 8.25 million subscribers. In 2021, the Nelk Boys launched Happy Dad, a hard seltzer in a standard 12-ounce beer can meant to differentiate it from the “skinny can bullshit” of segment leaders White Claw and Truly.
That’s a very thin reed upon which to hang an upstart brand in a crowded segment that was then beginning to plateau, but with Nelk’s media machine behind it, and legions of opted-in young drinkers clamoring for Nelk, Happy Dad has done very, very well. It’s a top-five hard seltzer brand nationwide, and has recently begun showing up in Circana scan-data snapshots of the top 25 brands across all beer in some channels. Sophisticated, experienced firms like Boston Beer Company don’t know whether to shit or go blind in the now-struggling hard-seltzer market, but Happy Dad and its interloping founders are thriving.
It’s impossible to say how much of that success is due to Nelk Boys’ Trump-ward lurch (which began in 2020 with a ride on the recently ousted president’s plane), but I think it’s helped. In 2022, I argued that embracing the former president’s conspiracy-addled worldview gave Happy Dad a lane to a customer that mainstream brands simply couldn’t reach:
This is a longstanding tradition on the American right wing, and hard seltzer, as an ahistorical, premium-priced beverage that’s relatively inexpensive to make and carries no cultural baggage, is an ideal product for aspiring 20-something hucksters like the Nelk Boys to hawk to an impressionable young audience already thirsty for line-stepping, anti-PC troll theater. In other words, if Happy Dad succeeds long-term, it won’t be in spite of the group’s decision to cozy up with Donald Trump and tweet endorsements from Alex Jones—it’ll be, at least in part, because of it.
Two years later, the opposite has also proven true. Whether the UFC’s White, a conservative star in his own right who would go on to sign a $100-million deal to be Anheuser-Busch InBev’s anti-woke henchman in 2023, then introduce Trump at the Republican National Convention in 2024, orchestrated the 2022 interview to help the fuckboys, the felon, or both isn’t clear. But whatever prominence with MAGA drinkers the Nelk Boys gained for Happy Dad by simping for a lifelong teetotaler in Trump, they would also repay in spades once the 2024 presidential campaign began in earnest.
They rose together, in a sense: the brand, up the hard-seltzer sales charts; the election-denier, in popularity with the the young male mouth-breathers he’d need to return to the White House. In March 2023, Happy Dad muscled its way into the top 10 bestselling hard seltzers in the country. The following month, a freshly indicted Trump ran into the Nelk Boys at—what else—a UFC fight in Miami, where the group posted videos of the former president receiving a standing ovation interspersed with clips of a Happy Dad-sponsored fighter doing a shoe-y with the hard seltzer. “The chance [2023] meeting led to a second appearance” on Full Send, reported TIME last week. “His closest confidantes didn’t realize it at the time, but interviews on male-focused podcasts would become a throughline of his extraordinary political resurrection.”
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
By early 2024, Trump was once again consolidating power on the campaign trail, and the Nelk Boys were very much along for the ride, helping to repackage the shambling candidate’s cognitive decline and vile racism as epic own-the-libs machismo to hordes of credulous Happy Dad customers.
In Nevada this past February, the then-presumptive GOP candidate shouted out the conservative #creators from the campaign stump, marveling at the reach of their 2022 interview before YouTube spiked it. At a golf tournament later that year, Nelk members kitted out in Happy Dad swag glad-handed with Trump wearing Happy Dad apparel. Trump’s conviction in May in New York presented an opportunity for the Nelk Boys to deploy their damn-the-torpedoes schtick in service of their beloved bully-in-chief. They did just that, posting “Free Trump” to their 4.2 million Instagram followers.
In August, when Trump’s oafish running mate, Ohio senator JD Vance, joined TikTok, his first post was a video of him accepting a 12-pack of Happy Dad from Nelk ringleader Kyle Forgeard after recording a podcast episode with the group. At a Las Vegas rally in late August, the group appeared with Trump on-stage while Happy Dad promo girls handed out hard seltzers to the crowd outside; a month later in the same city, Forgeard endorsed Trump to a stadium crowd, then did some fan-service about taxes on Zyn, the preferred nicotine source of the American right’s angry young flat-brims. Of course White shouted them out at Trump’s election victory party last week—they were basically running his Gen Z surrogacy operation, and delivering millions and millions of free media impressions in the process.
Don’t think they don’t know it. Two weeks before the Nelk Boys moment of MAGA glory at Mar-a-Lago, Forgeard appeared on Fox News for an interview with host Jesse Watters to talk about Trump’s late-game pivot to “manosphere” entertainers like Rogan, Theo Vonn, and the Nelk Boys themselves.
“So you’re taking full credit for him blowing up in the podcast world?” Watters asked.
“Oh, we’re taking full credit,” Forgeard responded. On his head perched a Happy Dad hat.