Young Republicans Angrily Turn on Trump

Politics admin July 1, 2026 0 Comments

The young men who powered Trump’s 2024 election victory are turning on him, according to the head of an organization built on speaking to younger voters.

Charlie Sabgir, director of the Young Men Research Project, a nonprofit tracking political and social trends among young men, spent time speaking to young Trump supporters across the country and found a consistent theme. His respondents complain that the president is abandoning the “America First” agenda that drew them to him in the first place.

Sabgir wrote up his findings for The Atlantic, asserting that the Iran war is the sharpest grievance among the important voter bloc. Riley Wilson, a member of the Turning Point USA chapter at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, told Sabgir he cast his first presidential vote for Trump in part because the president had promised “no new wars.”

Trump’s decision to attack Iran was, Wilson said, “a stab in the back.” Vinson Ratcliffgardy, the Turning Point president at Angelo State University in Texas, dismissed the conflict as “another sand war in the Middle East” and an example of the “very things Trump decried against in his campaign.”

The polling backs up what Sabgir heard on the ground. In an October survey by his organization, 57 percent of 18-to-29-year-old Trump-supporting Republicans wanted the U.S. to scale back its international presence, versus just 34 percent who wanted continued overseas engagement. A Pew Research Center survey taken one month into the Iran war found only 49 percent of Republicans ages 18 to 29 approved of Trump’s handling of it, compared to 84 percent of Republicans aged 65 and older.

Immigration has also become a flashpoint. Trump won over young men in 2024 by promising the “largest deportation operation in the history of our country,” eventually targeting 1 million annual deportations.

Even by the administration’s own estimate, it fell well short last year. Ratcliffgardy said the “general consensus” among his peers is that the administration hasn’t done enough, and that the “hope for the future is to deport more.”

Some young activists framed their frustration in explicitly racialized terms. One Turning Point president from a southeastern university invoked the “Great Replacement” theory—the far-right claim that nonwhite immigrants are deliberately displacing white Americans—arguing that immigration must be temporarily halted as “the most important part of ‘America First.’”

The bloc’s eyes are already drifting toward more radical figures. Kai Schwemmer, national political director for the College Republicans of America, identified a “big three” for young conservatives: Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens. This “dissident” wing, Schwemmer said, has displaced the “old guard”—figures like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson.

Trump’s clashes with Pope Leo XIV over the Iran war have unsettled some young Catholics in the movement. Ratcliffgardy said that on “most issues,” he will “stand with the pope,” and that his peers want “much more Christianity” in government, “not just a facade.”

The White House is not unaware of the problem. Vice President JD Vance and other MAGA figures have been making the rounds at Turning Point events to shore up support. It doesn’t appear to be working.

“Everyone considers the whole establishment to be a pile of rubbish and would rather see it all burned to the ground, and then built up by a new administration,” Ratcliffgardy said. “Almost like what Trump was campaigning on—‘Drain the swamp.’ But it almost seems like he’s become the swamp.”

The White House did not immediately respond to request for comment.