After the Proud Boys’ founder, Gavin McInnes, spoke at the club, vandalism and violence ensued, as people associated with the group squared off with protesters on the streets of the Upper East Side.
Now the brawl has moved inside the century-old club. The fight mirrors broader tensions within the Republican Party around the country, pitting far-right conservatives energized by President Donald Trump against a Republican establishment that was once a bastion of New York moderates like John Lindsay and Nelson Rockefeller.
The election for club president will be held Wednesday, and one of the two candidates, Ian Walsh Reilly, has won support from another right-wing provocateur, Milo Yiannopoulos, who posted a New Year’s Eve appeal on Facebook, urging his followers to join the club and vote for Reilly.
Yiannopoulos warned of “an anti-MAGA coup d'état” at the club and said, “We need to keep this bastion of real conservatism alive and well in the belly of the beast.”
Reilly, who is in his 30s, did not respond to numerous requests for an interview. But on social media, he has seemed eager to capitalize on the notoriety of the Proud Boys visit, calling on supporters to join the club by Jan. 1, the cutoff point for new members to be eligible to vote in the election.
“I am writing you today because I need your help,” Reilly wrote Dec. 28 on a Facebook page called Ian Reilly for Met Club President, featuring a red banner with a cartoonish drawing of Trump’s profile and the slogan, “Keeping the Met Club Great.”
“After being driven from power in 2016, the anti-Trump forces of the Republican Establishment are reasserting themselves and plotting a takeover of the Metropolitan Republican Club.”
Club members said they cannot remember another time in decades when there was a contested election for the club presidency. In the past, a nominating committee typically chose a candidate who was then elected unopposed.
Yet Trump, much as he has in the rest of the country, has become a polarizing force. He remains unpopular in his home state and especially in New York City, where Democrats outnumber Republicans 6-to-1.
His unpopularity even extends to Manhattan Republicans: In the 2016 Republican primary, Trump won every county in New York state except Manhattan, where John Kasich defeated him, 45 percent to 42 percent.
Reilly and his opponent, Robert Morgan, 66, both support the president, but it is the injection of a far-right brand of Trumpism that has divided the organization.
“It’s a larger example of what’s happening to the party nationally,” said William F.B. O’Reilly, a political consultant who is a former club president. “If it can infect the Metropolitan Republican Club, it is now complete in its infection.”
The Metropolitan Club, he added, “would be the last place that type of angry populism” would take hold.
Reilly’s campaign tactics led to a counter membership drive to support Morgan, a Manhattan lawyer who is a previous club president.
Andrea Catsimatidis, chairwoman of the Manhattan Republican Party, sent out an urgent email Dec. 31 in support of Morgan’s bid for the club presidency, calling him “a community-oriented leader who will avoid needless controversies.”
Referring to him only as “Bob’s opponent,” Catsimatidis accused Reilly of “sending out blast emails to many thousands of individuals, many of whom have no prior connection to the club or our Republican community, spreading rumors absurdly claiming that Bob is part of an ‘anti-Trump takeover’ of the Met Club.”
She added, “We just can’t let the ballot box in effect be stuffed by false claims,” and went on to urge the recipients of her email to join the club before midnight so that they could provide an electoral counterweight to the new members recruited by Reilly.
The dueling membership drives more than doubled the club’s size. In early December, there were slightly more than 300 members, according to Morgan’s son, Robert Morgan Jr., who is on the club’s executive committee and supports his father. He said nearly 500 people joined that month.
Members can vote by attending a meeting Wednesday or by proxy.
Interviews with club officials left it unclear how McInnes was invited to speak at the club in October and what Reilly’s role was.
In the Dec. 28 Facebook post, Reilly boasted that as executive committee chairman, he had transformed the club “into New York City’s conservative stronghold,” and he cited other speakers who have appeared there during his tenure, including Newt Gingrich and Ann Coulter.
Morgan, the candidate, said in an interview that he voted for Trump and supports him. At the same time, he sees the club as belonging to a long tradition of New York Republicanism, associated with moderate figures like former state Sen. Roy M. Goodman. He said Rudy Giuliani, too, drew club support in his mayoral campaigns, at a time when Giuliani was far more liberal than he is today.
“Our club has a long tradition of electing conservative-to-moderate Republicans who fit in with the community,” Morgan said. “It’s an important pillar of the Republican community, and I think my election will mean that it will continue to represent the mainstream Republicans on the East Side and in Manhattan.”
Yet he resisted characterizing the bitterness dividing the club today as a sign of broader pressures within the Republican Party.
“I agree that there are stresses, but what I don’t want is to say this is just anti-Trump vs. pro-Trump,” Morgan said. “Most people support President Trump, but there are degrees of emphasis within our membership.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.