The Young Republicans Who Think Trump Hasn’t Gone Far Enough

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.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