Trump's Empty Appeal to Young Men

He wants to exploit their disaffection. But what exactly is he offering them?

Photo by Gage Skidmore

It isn’t hard to understand why Donald Trump enjoys appearing on Dudebro podcasts. What he finds there is two or three young white guys who will fawn over him, tell him that he’s cool, think being informed beyond a superficial level is for nerds, and love the things Trump loves, including violence, ogling women, and bitching about how the world doesn’t give them their due. Where could he possibly feel more at home?

So Trump has been doing a lot of these podcasts, not just because he enjoys it but as a central pillar of his campaign’s strategy in the final weeks. If they can persuade a sufficient number of young men to support him, his campaign believes — and, crucially, if they can get them to vote — then it could produce just the margin they need. Polls have found that while Kamala Harris has a huge lead among young women, Trump trails her by far less among young men. To take the latest example, progressive group Data for Progress released a poll of voters under 30 on Tuesday showing Harris ahead 67-30 among women, but the race tied 48-48 among men.

So Trump sees an opening in widespread discontent among young men, as pollster John Della Volpe recently summarized:

Today’s young men are lonelier than ever and have inherited a world rife with skepticism toward the institutions designed to promote and defend American ideals. Men under 30 are nearly twice as likely to be single as women their same age; Gen Z men are less likely to enroll in college or the work force than previous generations. They have higher rates of suicide and are less likely than their female peers to receive treatment for mental health maladies. Most young men in my polling say they fear for our country’s future, and nearly half doubt their cohort’s ability to meet our nation’s coming challenges.

But what precisely is Trump offering these disaffected young men? There are two answers. The first is emotional, and what he offers in that area is real but ultimately empty — and only appeals to a subset of young men. The second is practical, and what he offers in that area is precisely nothing. 

In this, there is a direct parallel to another group I’ve spent the last couple of years writing about: Rural voters. Just as he is now trying to do with young men, Trump tapped into deep emotional needs rural people had, but left those he claimed to speak for with nothing to show for the support they gave him.

Focus on the feelings

There have been hundreds of articles and more than a few books written in the last few years about the “crisis of manhood” in America, a complex phenomenon that combines real developments with a lot of right-wing bloviation whose purpose is to make men feel anxious and resentful. Most of the commentators on the right, and some on the left, agree that young men have lost their sense of what it means to be a man. Gender roles and expectations are in a period of rapid change, and that leaves some young men feeling uncertain and unmoored. When the path before them and their place in the social hierarchy was simpler and clearer, they didn’t have to spend a lot of time wondering if they were doing manhood right, because the lines between doing it right and doing it wrong were so straightforward. 

But now, society is telling them both that there are lots of different ways they can be men, and that some parts of traditional manhood are deeply problematic. Some of them feel simultaneously confused and judged. But the Dudebros, and Trump, offer a solution. 

First, they tell young men that yes, you are oppressed. Progress on gender equality and the greater visibility and openness of LGBTQ people — both in your day-to-day life and in pop culture — makes you feel uncomfortable, and that discomfort is proof that you are a true victim, your identity demeaned and your feelings denigrated. 

Second, they offer an affirming and empowering message: Rather than succumb to a society that wants you to suppress your manly instincts, you should not only embrace them, you should do so in the most belligerent way possible. 

Because isn’t that what Trump does? He is a creature of pure id, unconstrained by society’s judgments. He lives the life of a 14-year-old boy’s fantasies: garish displays of wealth, cheating on his succession of model wives, scamming people out of their money and offending whoever he wants. He is sexist, racist, crude and lewd, and nobody can tell him not to be. He grabs ‘em by the pussy, because when you’re a star they let you do it. 

And if you aren’t allowed to do that in your own life, at the very least you can give everyone scolding you and constraining you a great big middle finger, because that’s what support for Trump is. Doesn’t it feel good? 

Where’s the beef?

But if you asked a hundred or a thousand young men what Trump wants to do that would benefit them, or how the country he wants to create would plausibly be better for them than the one they live in now, I suspect almost none of them would be able to come up with an answer. They might be able to cite some general things they’re hoping for — like a good economy — but that’s not particular to them as young men.

Most constituencies have in mind at least something a candidate might deliver specifically for them, or at least the things they care about, if they get elected. If you ask the young women whom Harris is winning so overwhelmingly, I’m sure many of them would say that they expect her to defend (or restore) abortion rights, for instance. An older person might demand that their candidate protect Social Security and Medicare. People who care about climate change want policies that will lower emissions. And so on.

But Trump isn’t going to be able to fix what ails young men, because their problems are rooted in social changes that have played out over decades. Trump isn’t going to ban women from demanding that their partners treat them as equals or getting college degrees. He may be a sex assaulter, but he won’t make it okay for other people to assault whomever they please. He isn’t going to make young men feel that they know exactly what is expected of them as men. Could you name a single practical thing Trump would do as president that would be good for young men in particular?

And while his running mate JD Vance has some ideas about families, they’re mostly about women and their obligations, and he sells what sounds a lot like a future of early and child-heavy marriages without much joy in them. As Amanda Marcotte writes, Vance “tells the real story of MAGA government's plans for young men: trapping them in hasty marriages alongside the women who are being forced to bear all those children.”

The analogy with Trump’s approach to rural voters is imprecise but useful. Those voters had legitimate complaints about what their communities had undergone, and Trump saw in their anger a fruitful source of votes. So he promised to solve all their problems and restore their lives to what they had been in an older, better time. Even though it was an obvious lie, they ate it up because it felt good. And when those promises were unfulfilled after four years? They voted for him in even greater numbers (according to data from the Pew Research Center, Trump got 62 percent of the rural white vote in 2016 and 71 percent in 2020).

Which tells you that the genuine material complaints rural voters had were not really the point of supporting Trump. They loved him for some of the same reasons many young men do: In a world they feel is not serving them well, he hates who they hate, and says he’ll be an instrument of their revenge. As he said last year, “for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” 

But retribution won’t improve young men’s prospects in the world any more than it will restore struggling rural communities. It just means making someone else suffer in revenge for the way you think you’ve suffered. 

Trump has other constituencies to whom he is offering something real. If you’re rich, he’ll give you a tax cut. If you want to outlaw abortion, he’s being pretty vague right now but you can be assured he’s with you (and he already delivered a Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade, as he promised he would). If you hate immigrants, he’s offering mass deportation. 

But if you’re one of those young men excited when he goes on your favorite podcast, so much so that you’re considering voting for the first time? I’ve got some bad news. You’re just another in a long line of marks who fell for Donald Trump’s scams.