The Young Republicans Who Think Trump Hasn’t Gone Far Enough
· The Atlantic
In the 2024 election, no group swung harder toward Donald Trump than young men. Today, no group feels more betrayed than the activists who helped make that shift happen.
As part of my work leading the Young Men Research Project, an organization that studies how young men engage with politics, I’ve spent the past several months calling conservative activists at colleges across the country. A clear message emerged: Young Republicans are souring on Trump.
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Most of the men I spoke with said that the president is abandoning his “America First” agenda, which is what attracted them to the Republican Party in the first place. Rather than defect to the Democratic Party, they want a more radical GOP—one led not by MAGA insiders such as J. D. Vance but by figures further to the right, who they believe can deliver on the promises that Trump has failed to keep on immigration and foreign policy. Some young activists, though, articulated a political vision that goes far beyond any Trump-campaign pledge. For them, the future of American conservatism should be rooted in a patriarchal version of Christianity and an unapologetic ethnonationalism.
Much of the anger I heard was focused on the Iran war. Riley Wilson, a member of the Turning Point USA chapter at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, told me that 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 a “stab in the back,” Wilson said. Vinson Ratcliffgardy, the Turning Point president at Angelo State University, in Texas, likewise opposed the conflict, dismissing it as “another sand war in the Middle East” and an example of the “very things Trump decried against in his campaign.”
[Faith Hill: The great Gen Z dividing line]
These views track with prewar polling from my organization. In an October survey, we found that 57 percent of 18-to-29-year-old Trump-supporting Republicans wanted the U.S. to scale back its international presence, compared with just 34 percent who wanted the country to remain engaged overseas. One month into the Iran war, the Pew Research Center found that young GOP voters were much more likely than older ones to object to the conflict: Only 49 percent of Republicans ages 18 to 29 approved of Trump’s handling of the war, compared with 84 percent of Republicans ages 65 and older.
A graduating senior from an Ohio university who had interned for a Republican senator said that he had been attracted to Trump’s “outsider status” in 2024. But now, largely because of Trump’s actions in Iran, the senior feels that the president has stopped “putting America first.” (Like others, he declined to speak on the record in part to protect his future political prospects.)
Not everyone was critical. Ryan Van Slingerland, the president of Turning Point at George Washington University, noted that he and his chapter remain generally satisfied with Trump’s second term. And the Ohio senior acknowledged that Trump has had some successes, such as reducing border crossings.
Still, I heard more complaints than anything else, including on immigration. During his 2024 campaign, Trump vowed to carry out the “largest deportation operation in the history of our country,” eventually setting a goal of 1 million annual deportations. The administration hasn’t released detailed data, but even by its own estimate it came up well short of Trump’s target last year. A Turning Point president from a southeastern university attributed the government’s supposed restraint to undue influence from Big Business. Ratcliffgardy said the “general consensus” among his peers is that the administration hasn’t done enough. The “hope for the future is to deport more.”
These hard-line views mirror my group’s survey results. Last fall, our polling found that 64 percent of the most civically engaged Trump voters—those who have attended rallies or volunteered for candidates, for example—supported ICE’s ability to “detain anyone they suspect of being eligible for deportation, regardless of citizenship status or criminal background.”
Some young activists linked their support for tighter immigration controls to their desire for a more aggressive, racialized nationalism. The Turning Point president from the southeastern university invoked the “Great Replacement” theory—the far-right view that nonwhite immigrants are systematically and deliberately displacing white Americans—to argue that immigration must be temporarily halted. This, he emphasized, is the “most important part of ‘America First.’”
Unlike mass deportations, blood-and-soil nationalism has never been a plank of Trump’s America First platform. But for years, the president has embraced and indulged ethnonationalists—with his equivocating response to the 2017 white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, his pardons of Proud Boys, a refugee policy that almost exclusively benefits white Afrikaners, and a White House social-media account that routinely invokes white-supremacist language. These forays into white-nationalist rhetoric and policy have aroused hopes among the far right for a more sweeping political transformation than Trump seems prepared to deliver. Now some young conservatives are searching for more extreme alternatives.
[Thomas Chatterton Williams: The white identitarians are having a moment]
For Kai Schwemmer, who is the national political director for the College Republicans of America as well as Utah County’s deputy elections clerk, embracing overtly racial nationalism isn’t just good in itself. It’s shrewd politics. “If we go back to this kind of civic nationalism”—the idea that America is united by shared ideals rather than common ethnicity or culture—“I think the Republican Party will end up losing,” Schwemmer told me. “Nationalism is not a dirty word,” he continued. “We can’t retreat from it, and we can’t retreat from having a more conservative Republican Party.” He said that the party’s future leaders must “appeal to the fears and worries of the majority of Americans, who are white.”
Speaking of potential leaders, Schwemmer 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 such as Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson who first drew many young conservatives into politics.
Fuentes, the 27-year-old white-nationalist streamer who rose to internet fame after attending the Charlottesville rally, came up more than anyone. When I asked Ratcliffgardy which figure his Turning Point members are listening to the most, he didn’t hesitate: “Fuentes, Fuentes, Fuentes!”
Fuentes is both a critic and beneficiary of Trumpism. He frequently attacks the administration for its unkept promises, stoking the grievances of those who are fed up with the president. (“Trump 2.0 has been a disappointment in literally every way,” he posted last year.) At the same time, Fuentes positions himself as the true standard-bearer of the America First movement that Trump built. And his national profile received a significant boost in 2022 when he attended a dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Trump, who has notably declined to condemn Fuentes’s extreme views.
None of the conservative activists I spoke with endorsed Fuentes unequivocally, and a couple condemned him, distancing themselves from the “groyper” label that his white-nationalist followers embrace. A member of the College Republicans at a private Ohio university estimated that only a minority of his group’s membership considered themselves fans of Fuentes, and most rejected the streamer’s blatant anti-Semitism. But he also conceded that about three-quarters of them “broadly sympathize” with Fuentes’s views. Skepticism of Israel, he told me, is the “dominant narrative” among his peers.
The Turning Point president from the southeastern university, however, has observed something much warmer, and more worrisome, than broad sympathy: the belief that Fuentes is a more genuine representative than Trump of the America First vision, not in spite of his anti-Semitism but because of it. “Almost all of Gen Z hates the Jews,” he told me. In his Turning Point chapter, he said, “Fuentes is the guy.”
Another name that I heard repeatedly was James Fishback, a 31-year-old GOP candidate for Florida governor. Fishback has amassed a large following on social media, where he regularly uses nationalist and racist rhetoric. One of his pinned Instagram videos is a clip from a conversation with Carlson in which he vows to divest Florida’s $385 million in Israeli bonds and redirect the money toward a down-payment-assistance program for young married couples. Some of the leaders I interviewed described Fishback’s campaign as the clearest test for whether their nationalist vision can attract other young voters. Ratcliffgardy, for his part, told me that Fishback is the only politician that he’s heard his peers praise.
For many young conservatives, Fishback’s appeal is primarily religious. In his conversation with Carlson, Fishback claimed that the “only systemic racism in America is against white Christian men.” He has also proposed a 50 percent “sin tax” on OnlyFans creators as well as a “simp tax” on the young men who pay their subscription fees. “I think these policies would be awesome,” Schwemmer said, adding that he wants Christian morality to exert a bigger influence on GOP policy.
[Yair Rosenberg: ‘The more I’m around young people, the more panicked I am’]
Other young conservatives cited Christian values as they discussed their wish for a total abortion ban, the revival of the nuclear family, and the return of traditional gender roles. The Turning Point president from the southeast told me that Turning Point’s national leadership is incompatible with this vision of Christianity. The CEO, Erika Kirk, represents the opposite of what “Christian values are about,” he said. “Big powerful woman putting on a suit—the least feminine thing I’ve seen in my life.”
Trump has long portrayed himself as a staunch defender of Christianity and boasted about the role he played in the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. But he’s distanced himself from the pro-life movement’s most ambitious proposals, such as a total abortion ban, which Fishback has made a central part of his campaign. Trump’s recent clashes with Pope Leo XIV over the Iran war have also unnerved some young conservatives. Ratcliffgardy emphasized that on “most issues,” he will “stand with the pope.” As for the conservative movement’s future, he said that his peers want “much more Christianity” in the government, “not just a facade.”
The Trump administration isn’t oblivious to the mounting discontent: Vance and other MAGA figures have been speaking at Turning Point events nationwide trying to shore up support among the young right. So far, at least, it doesn’t seem 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 told me. “Almost like what Trump was campaigning on—‘Drain the swamp.’ But it almost seems like he’s become the swamp.”