Trump’s Gen Z Disaster
MAGA is losing Gen Z. How has Trump tried to win them back? Posting cringey memes online and deregulating flavored vapes. The result is a generational political catastrophe for Republicans.
Donald Trump is not popular.
Poll after poll has shown his approval cratering into the mid-low 30s overall, the lowest of either of his terms. On the issues that matter most to Americans, like the cost of living, it’s even worse. By almost every measure, he has become the least popular president on record.
Nowhere has this been more pronounced than with young voters. In 2024, young voters swung towards Trump more than almost any other group. Young men in particular became enamored with his “macho” style (even though he can’t go more than two weeks without a fresh spray tan and has an affinity for gaudy stage lights) and his promise to kill the “woke” boogeyman. Upon taking office for a second time, his approval rating among 18-29 year olds was +11, its highest ever.
Today, it has cratered to -43, a 64-point drop in a year, one of the largest of any group. Trump, sensing the electoral armageddon awaiting him and his party in the midterms, has launched a vain, superficial strategy to win back young voters. He’s sought to deregulate flavored vapes, release UFO files, and will even go so far as to host a UFC match (ring and all!) on the South Lawn of the White House this summer. Online, he’s posted ragebait AI slop, rants, and has generally embraced shitposting as a political strategy. Because everyone always loved the loudest kid in the classroom, right?
Trump will do everything to win back young voters other than the one thing that actually matters: making their lives affordable.
While he thinks his key to winning Gen Z was his online strategy and awareness of trends, many voters backed him out of a feeling of necessity. Democrats bore the blame for Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic and subsequent inflation, and many young voters believed that Trump might be able to do something differently.
Since coming to office, Trump has imposed heavy tariffs (and then rescinded them, and then reimposed them, and, oh yeah, rescinded and reimposed them again, and again, and I think we’ve seen this film before!). He has recklessly wielded American military might, disregarding allies and beginning wars of choice that have caused energy, housing, grocery, and other everyday costs to skyrocket. He’s dismantled the Department of Education and made it harder for young people to access federal assistance and repay their student loans.
In other words, he’s screwed young Americans every opportunity he’s had, and we know it.
We know that his rhetoric is destroying the social fabric our futures rest on. We know his erratic and idiotic foreign policy is wiping out any savings we had and pushing us further into debt. We know that his tax cuts for the rich are robbing us of the American Dream.
No distractions by Trump can change that reality. Nothing else matters if we can’t afford to put food on the table or buy a house.
Not only has Trump failed to address our concerns, but he’s incapable of doing so, because to address the affordability crisis requires admitting one exists in the first place. Trump’s fragile ego cannot admit that he’s failed. If you can’t admit something is wrong, you can’t present a plan to fix it.
Oh, and as an aside, you also have to stay awake long enough to be able to create a plan. Judging by Trump’s frequent public naps in the Oval Office, he doesn’t seem capable of that either. Despite promising that we’d never see him asleep on camera, Trump has increasingly preferred to get his beauty rest from behind the Resolute Desk. It seems Trump’s fondness for deriding Joe Biden as “Sleepy Joe” was really to hide Drowsy Don. The call is coming from inside the house, Mr. President.
For young people in an age where Trump’s government refuses to stop AI from stealing our jobs, where inflation is wiping out our savings, where we face a mountain of deferred debt from Trump’s two huge tax cuts for the wealthy, and where the economy has become almost entirely inaccessible, Donald Trump isn’t it, as if he ever was.
We’re angry, tired, and over it. This November, you better believe we’ll be voting.