In the wake of Trump’s surprise attack on Iran, I spoke with a young man who cast his ballot for the president in 2024. He was generally pleased with Trump’s second term agenda, and had been drawn to the president over social issues and his promise to cut wasteful spending. But he, like his fellow members of his university’s Turning Point USA chapter, was struggling to make sense of the current moment. Trump campaigned as an outsider who’d rattle the system, a dealmaker who would keep America out of futile wars. Like many of the young men who bought this pitch, he’s starting to have doubts.
For one, Trump’s opacity on the Epstein files has been, in his words, “worrying” — though, he believes “both sides” are guilty of withholding information. Now, the prospect of another endless war in the Middle East is perhaps his greatest concern. “I don’t think anybody wants another Afghanistan or Iraq,” he told me.
I’m the Director of Young Men Research Project (YMRP), a research organisation that studies the political trends among young men through polling and analysis. At 24, I’m squarely in this demographic myself. Let me tell you: he’s hardly an outlier. For many young men — as well as their most popular influencers, many of whom endorsed the president — foreign intervention and the Epstein files matter in their own right. But they also function as a litmus test: Is Trump just another out-of-touch politician, protecting the powerful and distracting through chaos?
Young men swung decisively toward Trump in the 2024 election. According to Catalist, a progressive data firm, Democratic support among men aged 18 to 29 sank to 46 percent in the last election, down from 55 percent in 2020. Some opted for the Republican candidate because of lingering inflation or soaring housing costs; others, frankly, for the “vibes.” But the through-line was a fiction Trump manufactured and skillfully sold: that he was the antidote to the much-maligned establishment, the very establishment he now embodies.
Gen Z men are perhaps the least ideological, most politically untethered segment of the American electorate, and at the root of this is a deep mistrust of the ruling class. In a nationally representative survey of men aged 18 to 29 conducted this past 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 neither. This generation’s jeremiads about the political establishment are hardly unique: interest groups lining the pockets of those in power, the sluggish pace of change (primarily on economic issues, though not exclusively), and foreign adventurism viewed less as shoring up national security, more like pointless conflict exclusively serving the military-industrial complex.
Many are starting to believe they’ve been sold a false bill of goods — a president not only enmeshed in the proverbial swamp, but one who is launching interventionist wars without a clear end in sight. Nowhere is the backlash more visible than in the corners of the internet that helped mobilise Trump’s young male coalition.
On foreign policy, the cracks were already showing. After the attack on Iranian nuclear facilities last summer, Charlie Kirk reassured his base that Trump and MAGA “has never and will never stand for regime change.” Appearing on This Past Weekend w/Theo Von after the capture of Nicolas Maduro, the libertarian comedian and podcaster Dave Smith — a past Trump endorser who’s popular with young men — blasted the operation as an “intolerable humiliation” of the president’s core supporters, a sentiment Von sympathised with. Now, with Iran, the anger has boiled over. Adin Ross, the 25-year-old far-right streamer who also backed Trump, bashed the strikes as “really fucking stupid,” while Fresh & Fit host and manosphere mainstay Myron Gaines joined the chorus lamenting Trump’s actions.
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For many, Iran and Epstein are inextricably linked. Ryan Garcia — the 27-year-old boxer who’d proudly backed Trump — publicly renounced his past support due to Trump’s appearance in the files, and Joe Rogan has called the administration’s ICE raids in Minnesota a “distraction” from the Epstein drama. Among popular far-right male influencers like Dan Bilzerian, this same charge — that the president is manufacturing chaos to divert attention away from the files — is now being levelled at Iran, indicative of a larger suspicion among his base and the general public.
These influencers wield enormous platforms. But they’re also useful proxies for the ideologically malleable, politically independent young men who helped win Trump the White House. They distrust traditional politicians and are suckers for outsider candidates (Joe Rogan delivered Bernie Sanders a 2020 endorsement, and Ro Khanna is a near-fixture on these shows); they despise cancel culture (two in three young men agree that guys can “have their reputations destroyed just for speaking their minds these days,” per YMRP polling); they’re more conspiracy-curious than your average voter; and, like the young men they speak to, they are largely anti-interventionist.
YMRP’s fall poll found that young men favour a less active American role in the world by 17 points; 53 percent agree that the U.S. “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 U.S. needs to stay actively involved. Among independents, net support for a reduced global role widens to 24 points, while a majority of Trump voters also favour a less active posture.
This opposition is manifesting in real time. A Fox News national survey released March 3 found Americans under 30 are the most opposed to Trump’s actions of any age group: just 15 percent say the president’s handling of Iran has made the country safer, versus 65 percent who say less safe. From “America First” hardliners like Nick Fuentes — who says he’ll vote Democrat in 2026 not out of apostasy, but to punish a GOP he consistently derides as insufficiently radical — to those who swung 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 with has no interest in voting Democrat anytime soon. But a prolonged conflict, he told me, might be enough to sit out 2026 and 2028. Eight months out from the midterm elections, young men like him could once again prove decisive. Some who broke for Trump may cross the aisle; most will not. For many, they’re finding fewer and fewer reasons to show up.
Charlie Sabgir is the director of the Young Men Research Project. You can find more of his writing on his Substack.
From Rolling Stone US
