In the wake of Trump’s surprise attack on Iran, I spoke with a young man who cast his ballot for the president in 2024. He was generally pleased with Trump’s second term agenda, and had been drawn to the president over social issues and his promise to cut wasteful spending. But he, like his fellow members of his university’s Turning Point USA chapter, was struggling to make sense of the current moment. Trump campaigned as an outsider who’d rattle the system, a dealmaker who would keep America out of futile wars. Like many of the young men who bought this pitch, he’s starting to have doubts.
For one, Trump’s opacity on the Epstein files has been, in his words, “worrying” — though, he believes “both sides” are guilty of withholding information. Now, the prospect of another endless war in the Middle East is perhaps his greatest concern. “I don’t think anybody wants another Afghanistan or Iraq,” he told me.
I’m the Director of Young Men Research Project (YMRP), a research organization that studies the political trends among young men through polling and analysis. At 24, I’m squarely in this demographic myself. Let me tell you: he’s hardly an outlier. For many young men — as well as their most popular influencers, many of whom endorsed the president — foreign intervention and the Epstein files matter in their own right. But they also function as a litmus test: Is Trump just another out-of-touch politician, protecting the powerful and distracting through chaos?
I’m a big fan of Twain as well, which work of his were you thinking of?
I’m fond of his writing on travel, particularly this passage: “The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become, until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and call him brother. I shall always delight to meet an ass after my own heart when I shall have finished my travels.”
It strikes me that I’ve met Trump followers who have traveled, and yet they stayed in their own little American bubble wherever they went. They stayed on their cruise ship, in their hotel, in their manicured tour group.
I wish to visit Europe some day, but I’m afraid being an American has already marked me a “Consummate Ass.”