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Welcome to Trump’s America, The i Paper’s World Insight series presenting the sharpest, deepest thinking on an era-defining shift in history and politics, investigating how Donald Trump and his administration have changed the US and the world – and where we go from here.
• America can’t afford to retire
• The US is becoming impossible to live in
•
The White House I worked for would have condemned this image. Trump refuses
• Maga leaders want ‘traditional American families’ – but can’t stop having affairs
• Sin City has lost its shine. It shows how far America has fallen• The Florida street that exposes America’s growing homophobia
• Inside America’s most loyal Trump town – where people still think he’s ‘a good man’
Gen Z has a reputation for being anxious, underemployed and terminally online. But their progressive politics was never in doubt until the 2024 US elections. That year, young voters cast their ballots for Donald Trump in the strongest youth turnout for a Republican candidate since 2008.
The shift rightward was best captured by a New York magazine cover story that profiled the new generation of young Maga voices – welcome, it said, to the “cruel kids’ table”.
There are rumbling suggestions that not all is what it seems with Gen Z Americans. A fault-line appears to be emerging inside this demographic – with the younger ones being more pro-Trump than their elders.
In a 2025 poll, just over half of those aged 21 and under viewed Trump favourably, compared to 46 per cent of older Gen Zers – the oldest of whom are now 30. It’s a demographic split that Gen Z conservative Raquel Debono has noticed in her own circles through the “Make America Hot Again” parties she organises (think of them as social mixers for young Maga singletons).
“A lot of younger Gen Zs are going the ‘America First’ route,” she told The i Paper. “They’re sick and tired. They realise they can never afford a home. The American dream is no longer conceivable to them, and they blame a lot of that on immigrants or whoever the scapegoat of the day is.”
David Schultz, a political scientist and co-author of Generational Politics in the United States, said that part of the explanation lies in the different life experiences that shaped their political consciousness. “For older members of Gen Z, events such as the Parkland school shooting, concerns about climate change, and, to some extent, the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis became defining experiences.”
That sense of civic activism – accompanied by the belief that participating in a democratic system still pays off – is not shared by their younger anti-establishment peers. In fact, Gen Z analyst Rachel Jafanza describes these two cohorts as Gen Z 1.0 and Gen Z 2.0.
“The older half of Gen Z was part of the cohort on the forefront of social movements pushing for climate justice, the Black Lives Matter movement and the March for Our Lives,” she said. “Gen Z 2.0 look at the activism of Gen Z 1.0 and say, ‘Okay, that didn’t really get us anywhere.’ They’re more sceptical overall.”
If the politics of older zoomers are exemplified by the left-wing climate activism of Greta Thunberg, now 23, then their younger generation mates are best represented by Barron Trump, 20, who stage-managed his father’s campaign appearances on manosphere podcasts.
Gen Z 2.0 draws their politics from vastly different formative events.
“Donald Trump, the Covid pandemic, and the social isolation associated with it have been major influences,” Schultz said.
That was the experience of Clarkson Lawson, a Gen Z content creator with 920,000 followers on TikTok, who was still in school when the pandemic hit. “I didn’t really start posting about politics until after Covid,” he told The i Paper. “Seeing how the people we were supposed to trust were running around like chickens with their heads cut off led to a lot of distrust as a young person.
“Trump’s messaging of ‘institutions are bad, they all need to be burned down’ really resonated with me,” he added.
Trump has positioned himself as the ultimate outsider who would “drain the swamp”, in the words of the Maga faithful. But as his second term limps into its second year, it’s harder to draw on the same political capital. It is hard to claim to be a daring insurgent when you’re on your second term – particularly when you’ve reneged on campaign promises and started a costly foreign war.
“The 2024 election suggested that younger voters temporarily shifted toward Donald Trump rather than Kamala Harris, largely because of economic and political frustration,” said Schultz. “By 2026, however, it is far less clear that this represented a lasting political realignment.”
Meanwhile, the Gen Z anti-establishment appeal is now being cultivated by a very different politician: Zohran Mamdani.
“He’s massively popular,” said Jafanza, who holds focus groups with young people across the country. “Outsider candidates are having a moment because they’re appealing to the fact that so many young people feel like everything around them is broken – they want something new.”
The policies, in other words, might not matter as much as vibe. What plays particularly well among younger Gen Zers is politicians who market themselves as crusaders against the worst excesses of the elite – whether that’s fat cat billionaires or “deep state” bureaucrats.
Whether or not younger Maga supporters break away from the fold may ultimately depend on the same variables that influence every generation’s political behaviour: race, gender, class, college education and region.
Notably, there are still holdouts of support among Gen Z, even as Trump’s approval rating has plummeted due to the Iran war and its impact on the cost of living. In one poll, support for Democrats actually decreased among men aged 18 to 22, even as it increased by 14 points among older Gen Z men. But even then, that’s not to say that young men will remain dyed-in-the-wool Maga supporters.
Take Lawson, for instance. After years of posting pro-Trump content, he now describes his politics as centre-left. “As a young person, you’re still curious,” he explained. “As I got older, I started entertaining other ideas and I realised that a lot of [my old views] didn’t hold up to debate.”
Youthful curiosity, in other words, may just hold the key to changing Gen Z’s political views.
