After Trump’s surprise attack on iranI spoke with a young man who voted for president in 2024. He was generally satisfied with Trump’s second-term agenda and had warmed to the president on social issues and his promise to reduce unnecessary spending. But he, like his classmates in his university’s Turning Point USA chapter, was struggling to make sense of the current moment. Trump campaigned as an outsider who would shake up the system, a negotiator who would keep the United States out of useless wars. Like many of the young people who bought this playing field, he is beginning to have doubts.
On the one hand, Trump’s opacity about Epstein’s files has been, in his words, “troubling”; although he believes that “both parties” are guilty of hiding information. Now, the prospect of another endless war in the Middle East is perhaps their biggest worry. “I don’t think anyone wants another Afghanistan or Iraq,” he told me.
I am the Director of the Young Men’s Research Project (YMRP), a research organization that studies political trends among young men through surveys and analysis. At 24 years old, I am also in this demographic. Let me tell you: this is not an outlier. For many young people – as well as their most popular influencers, many of whom supported the president – foreign intervention and the Epstein dossiers are important in their own right. But they also serve as a litmus test: Is Trump just another out-of-touch politician, protecting the powerful and distracting through chaos?
Young people swung decisively toward Trump in the 2024 election. According to Catalist, a progressive data company, Democratic support among men ages 18 to 29 sank 46 percent in the last election, up from 55 percent in 2020. Some opted for the Republican candidate because of persistent inflation or skyrocketing housing costs; others, frankly, because of the “vibrations”. But the main line was a fiction that Trump skillfully manufactured and sold: that he was the antidote to the much-maligned establishment, the same establishment he now embodies.
Generation Z Men are perhaps the least ideological and most politically disengaged segment of the American electorate, and at the root of this is a deep distrust of the ruling class. In a national representative survey In a survey of men ages 18 to 29 conducted last summer by YMRP/YouGov, when asked which party is more “corrupt,” the most common answer was both. When asked which party is more honest, a plurality (35 percent) said no. This generation’s complaints about the political establishment are not unique: interest groups lining the pockets of those in power, the slow pace of change (mainly in economic matters, although not exclusively), and foreign adventurism seen less as a shoring up of national security and more as a useless conflict in the exclusive service of the military-industrial complex.
Many are beginning to believe they have been sold a false bill: a president not only stuck in the proverbial quagmire, but launching interventionist wars with no clear end in sight. Nowhere is the backlash more visible than in the corners of the Internet that helped mobilize Trump’s coalition of young men.
In foreign policy, cracks were already appearing. After the attack on Iranian nuclear facilities last summer, Charlie Kirk reassured his base that Trump and MAGA “He has never advocated nor will he support regime change.” appearing in This past weekend with Theo Von After the capture of Nicolás Maduro, libertarian comedian and podcaster Dave Smith, a former Trump supporter who is popular with young men, damned the operation as an “intolerable humiliation” of the president’s core supporters, a sentiment with which Von sympathized. Now, with Iran, the anger has boiled over. Adin Ross, the 25-year-old far-right streamer who also endorsed Trump, struck strikes are “really fucking stupid”, while Fresh and fit Host and manosphere mainstay Myron Gaines joined the chorus. lamenting Trump’s actions.
For many, Iran and Epstein are inextricably linked. Ryan Garcia, the 27-year-old boxer who had proudly supported Trump, publicly resigned his past support due to Trump’s appearance in the files, and Joe Rogan has called The administration’s ICE raids in Minnesota are a “distraction” from the Epstein drama. Among popular far-right male influencers like Dan Bilzerian, this same accusation — that the president is causing chaos to divert attention from the files — is now being challenged. level against Iran, indicating greater suspicion among its base and the general public.
These influencers run huge platforms. But they are also useful substitutes for the ideologically malleable and politically independent young people who helped Trump win the White House. They distrust traditional politicians and are fans of outside candidates (Joe Rogan gave Bernie Sanders an endorsement in 2020, and Ro Khanna is almost a fixture on these shows); despise cancel culture (two in three young men agree that guys can “have their reputations destroyed just for speaking their minds these days,” according to YMRP vote); they are more curious about conspiracies than the average voter; and, like the young people they speak to, they are largely anti-interventionist.
The fall of YMRP survey found that young men favor a less active American role in the world by 17 points; Fifty-three percent agree that the United States “needs to be less actively involved in world affairs because we need to focus more on issues and problems here at home,” compared to 36 percent who say the United States should remain actively involved. Among independents, net support for a reduced global role widens to 24 points, while a majority of Trump voters also favor a less active stance.
This opposition manifests itself in real time. A Fox News national survey published on March 3 found that Americans under 30 are the most opposed to Trump’s actions of any age group: Only 15 percent say the president’s handling of Iran has made the country safer, compared to 65 percent who say it is less safe. From “America First” hardliners like Nick Fuentes, who says will vote Democratic in 2026, not out of apostasy, but to punish a Republican Party he constantly mocks as insufficiently radical: For those who changed their minds for less ideological reasons, the president is winning over no one and actively alienating many who checked his box 14 months ago.
The young man I spoke to has no interest in voting Democratic anytime soon. But a prolonged conflict, he told me, could be enough to keep him out in 2026 and 2028. Eight months before the midterm elections, young people like him could once again prove decisive. Some who broke with Trump may cross the aisle; most will not. For many, they find fewer and fewer reasons to show up.
Charlie Sabgir is the director of the Young Men Research Project. You can find more of his writings at his Substack.
