The election of Maxwell Alejandro Frost—25, absurdly charismatic, Gen Z’s first berth in Congress—is a thrill for many. Young people, sure, but also progressives, Afro-Cubans, gig workers (Frost drove for Uber while on the campaign trail), and activists who came of age advocating for gun control.
For a legislature populated by Boomers, this is undeniably a big deal. But I’m here to talk about a different kind of first Frost will bring to Washington: Congress’ debut teenage Twitter stan. This may be the only public figure in history whose stature is actually enhanced by reading his adolescent internet history.
Frost’s charming Twitter feed—which dates back to 2009, when the congressman-elect was technically not even old enough to be on Twitter—is a survey of the various fandoms of which he’s a past (or present!) member. He’s tweeted about his love of the following: One Direction, Harry Styles, Ariana Grande, the Disney video game franchise Kingdom Hearts, the 1975, Taylor Swift (real fans know to only listen to “Taylor’s Version”), Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj.
Here he is at 15, celebrating a chance meeting with then–Nickelodeon star Grande:
Here he is defending Cardi B and Minaj’s rap honor against known internet villain Bhad Bhabie:
Here he is taunting Offset after the rapper asserted that Migos was the biggest group of all time:
As Frost’s contemporary—I’m exactly one month older than him—this is all so delightful. I love that he was almost certainly sharing his love for all of this on Tumblr, like I was when I was 16. I love that some of these posts are so inscrutable that they are impossible to parse. (Genuinely, if anyone can extrapolate some meaning out of his screenshot of a Bill Maher article about an anti-gay pastor, which he captioned with just “@onedirection,” please drop me a line.) I love it all.
While this digital footprint obviously can’t suggest anything in particular about Frost’s future approach to legislating, it does suggest something else: He was a kid with passions. And he’s clearly still this passionate in his mid-20s. Just take a look at his Halloween costume this year, a seriously niche nod to Greta Gerwig’s forthcoming opus Barbie, due out next summer.
While I doubt we’ll continue to see Frost share all his pop culture joys on the internet—and maybe we don’t need members of Congress to spend their valuable time shit-posting about boy bands—it’s some kind of comfort to know that we’ll have a representative who’s digitally literate enough to know which emojis to use and when:
