Trump Betrayed the Youth. Now MAGA Is Burning.
Why young voters are abandoning the 47th President in record numbers.
When Donald Trump won the presidential election last year, the vibe among his supporters was euphoric. He had just survived an assassination attempt. Biden was gone. Kamala was defeated. It felt like a new dawn in America.
For the Gen Z and Millennial voters who swung his way, the promise was straightforward: no more foreign wars, a return to sanity, and a real chance to own a stake in the country they live in.
One year later, that mandate is in ashes.
Since his inauguration, Trump’s approval rating has fallen consistently, month after month. The decline is neither marginal nor confined to any single pollster or methodology. It appears across the polling landscape, a pattern captured clearly in the RealClearPolitics average of the top 19 national polls:
Republicans are now projected to get crushed in the 2026 midterms:
Meanwhile… Trump’s approval just reached a record high… in Israel.
The administration’s opening act was a grim indicator of things to come: the deportation of students for the crime of writing op-eds.
The National Review now reports: Government investigators found no evidence that Rumeysa Öztürk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University, had “engaged in antisemitic activity” or made “any public statements indicating support for a terrorist organization or antisemitism generally,” before the Trump administration tried to deport her, according to newly unsealed court documents.
Since then, Trump has increasingly deferred to and elevated Lindsey Graham on foreign policy. Graham—who played golf with Trump last week—has an approval rating of just 29% in his home state of South Carolina. Only 14% of his constituents say he should be reelected, while 73% say it’s time for someone new.
Graham visited Israel last week, where he bragged that “I come to Israel every two weeks, if I need to or not” and explained: “The wars of the future are being planned here in Israel“
Meanwhile, the most iconic photograph of Trump’s term so far is him obsequiously pulling out a chair for Netanyahu.
My point isn’t to aimlessly bash Israel or Netanyahu, my point is they are both historically unpopular with voters. Netanyahu’s approval rating among U.S. adults sits at a paltry 29%, while Israel consistently polls as the most disliked country in the world: according to Pew Research, the only remaining countries that have a net positive view of Israel are Nigeria, Kenya, and India.
Netanyahu and Israel are especially unpopular with young Americans, with a majority of adults under 35 now favoring reducing—or ending—U.S. aid to Israel.
Is it any surprise, then, that Trump’s approval decline is being driven by young voters more than any other demographic? He has lost the youth vote outright.
Roughly half of America’s younger voters moved away from Trump in the span of a single year. Among voters aged 18–29, his net approval collapsed from +9 in February 2025 (52–43%) to –42 in February 2026 (25–67%), according to YouGov.
That’s a 51 point swing in one year.
You might dismiss YouGov as an unreliable pollster. But the collapse is not an outlier. Even Quantus Insights, a Trump-aligned firm with a clear pro-GOP house bias, reports a comparable freefall. Among voters aged 18–44, Trump’s net approval fell from –2 in August 2025 to –45 by February 2026.
Trump has already bombed Iran once on Israel’s behalf, and he is now on the verge of doing so again. Public support for another attack on Iran stands at just 21%.
Intervention in Venezuela was deeply unpopular as well. Roughly 56% of respondents said they either oppose or strongly oppose U.S. military action there.
Young people feel betrayed particularly because Trump campaigned on an isolationist message of no new wars and no foreign interventions.
Trump also ran on a platform of ending the Russia-Ukraine war within 24 hours. Here are 53 times Trump said he’d end the Ukraine war within 24 hours or before taking office. Yes, people know Trump is a bullshitter who speaks in hyperbole, and they bake that into their expectations, but you promised it would take a day, and it’s been a year with zero progress, people are justifiably upset.
Who actually benefits from these foreign wars?
Not young Americans.
They benefit a narrow set of interests: major donors, defense contractors, and foreign governments with direct influence over U.S. policy. Trump’s administration is structured to align U.S. power with those Zionist billionaires.
Young Americans notice that, and they care.
This deference to Israel ultimately culminated in Trump’s mishandling of the Epstein files. On July 16, 2025, Trump posted on Truth Social, calling the push for more Epstein files a Democratic “hoax” and “bullshit.” He referred to his supporters demanding transparency as “weaklings” doing “the Democrats’ work” and stated he no longer wanted their vote.
Trump said he doesn’t want the votes of people who care about Epstein.
Voters have taken him at his word.
In terms of public opinion and polling, this is yet another lopsided issue where Trump finds himself on the wrong side of the electorate, and it is plainly dragging his approval rating down.
Perhaps the most egregious Epstein lie came from Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, who brazenly misrepresented his association. Younger voters, raised in an era of receipts and screenshots, know exactly what it looks like to be lied to.
The fact that Howard Lutnick is still a member of the Trump administration would be shocking, if not for the fact that if he fell on his sword, it would mean a dozen other Trump officials would have to fall on their swords as well.
MAGA is flailing. With no rebuttal to the Epstein argument, they are now reduced to changing the subject or lashing out with unrelated personal attacks.
Case in point, Pam Bondi spent her entire hearing last week lashing out with personal attacks & changing the subject.
Beyond Israel and all the baggage that comes with it, another major force dragging down youth support is housing. Housing is not an abstract issue for this generation. It determines whether they can marry, have children, or stay in the country at all. When a political movement offers them endless war abroad and lifelong rent at home, they do not see stability.
Trump ran on making housing more affordable, another bait and switch:
But in reality all he has produced so far is a fig leaf proposal like 50-year mortgages, sold as “innovation” but functionally indistinguishable from debt serfdom. Stretching mortgages across half a century doesn’t make homes more affordable; it simply lowers the monthly payment while locking buyers into lifelong leverage. The price of housing doesn’t fall — it rises. To young people, the message is unmistakable: You will not own. You will rent. And if you do manage to buy, it will be through permanent debt slavery.
Trump has zero interest in making homeownership easier for young families. His policies have been cosmetic at best and hostile at worst. There is no appetite for deflating a housing bubble because that bubble is the retirement plan of his boomer base.
Last month, speaking at the World Economic Forum, Trump was unusually candid about housing. He acknowledged that he has the power to bring prices down—but made clear he has no intention of doing so:
“Every time you make it more and more affordable for someone to buy a house cheaply [that’s a bad thing]. I don’t want to do anything that will hurt the value of homes … if I really wanted to crush the housing market I could do that so fast, and people could buy houses.”
Two days later, he reiterated the point even more bluntly, saying he did not want to drive housing prices down simply so that youth “who didn’t work very hard” could afford to buy a home.
For younger Americans locked out of homeownership by prices they did nothing to inflate, the message was unmistakable: preserving asset values for existing owners matters more than giving the next generation a chance to build a life.
And that’s before we even get into the broader economy, or broader corruption.
As a result of Trump’s indifference to young people, U.S. fertility has been falling to historic lows and according to a new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report, that decline is expected to worsen in the coming decades. In fact, the CBO now predicts deaths will exceed births in America 10 years sooner than their 2024 projection.
Yes, this fertility crisis predates Trump, but he has shown no interest in addressing it.
While American fertility collapses, Israel’s Jewish population recorded a fertility rate of 3.1 births per woman in 2024, nearly double that of the United States. Washington has money, attention, and political urgency—just not for its own country.
A government that subsidizes foreign demographic growth while presiding over domestic collapse is not confused. It has made its priorities clear.
"Sure, things are getting better but everything that took decades to destroy has not been fixed in one year so we're gonna let the communists win to open the borders, fill the country with street shitters, take away all of our rights and let the Somalians steal billions more from us!"
Lmfao! That's a great strategy. Good luck. Let me know how it goes. My money is on the street shitters burning you retards to death.
>Meanwhile… Trump’s approval just reached a record high… in Israel.
Doesn't that indicate the GOP will win midterms?