There are a number of far-right activists who are furious at President Donald Trump because he hasn’t gone far enough in his promises to adhere to their vision of the MAGA U.S.
The Atlantic reported on Wednesday the young men who fought to elect Trump in 2024 don’t feel like they got what they voted for.
Charlie Sabgir said that he spent the past several months calling some of these activists who now feel “betrayed.”
As part of his work on the Young Men Research Project, Sabgir said that these men feel as if Trump has “abandoned” them and the so-called “America First” agenda that he has run on for the past decade.
Trump has spent the majority of his second term focused on international issues like trade and wars abroad rather than major issues at home. The Iran war is taking the brunt of most of the anger.
Turning Points USA member Riley Wilson said that he cast his first presidential vote for Trump because he promised “no new wars.” He called it a “stab in the back.”
Chapter president Vinson Ratcliffgardy, at Angelo State University, in Texas, called it “another sand war in the Middle East.” He said it was the “very things Trump decried against in his campaign.”
In an October survey, the Young Men Research Project found 57 percent of young (18-29) Trump-supporting Republicans believed the U.S. should scale back to a more isolationist nation. Just 34 percent supported remaining engaged overseas. Just a month after the Iran war began, Sabgir cited the Pew Research Center, which found that young GOP voters (49 percent) were more opposed to the conflict than their older counterparts (84 percent).
“I heard more complaints than anything else, including on immigration,” wrote Sabgir. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security produced a video championing the deportation of 100 million immigrants from the U.S. Upon entering office, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, reportedly set a goal of 3,000 arrests daily of immigrants. DHS has never been able to meet the requirement.
Ratcliffgardy said the “general consensus” among his friends is that folks “hope for the future is to deport more.”
While the media is focused on the takeover of the local Democratic Party in Manhattan by the Democratic Socialists of America, Kai Schwemmer, the College Republicans of America political director, said he’s concerned about those embracing overly racial nationalism.
“If we go back to this kind of civic nationalism,” he said, speaking of the U.S. sharing an ethnicity, “I think the Republican Party will end up losing,” Schwemmer told Sabgir.
“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 wants to see future leaders “appeal to the fears and worries of the majority of Americans, who are white.”