MAGA leaders sound alarm about discontented Trump base: ‘A huge risk'
The crowd at Turning Point USA's Student Action Summit was thrilled Trump was back in the White House. They weren't all thrilled, however, about everything Trump is doing there.
Some MAGA leaders at this weekend's gathering worried that dynamic could cost the Trump movement in next year's elections and beyond, as they sought to raise alarms 900 miles away in Washington.
The 'excitement I saw among younger voters could be defused,' said Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of Turning Point, in an interview with The Washington Post, likening it to 'air out of a balloon.'
'Do I think this is the end of MAGA? No. I've never said that,' Kirk continued. 'Do I think the extra 10 to 15 percent of [less inclined to vote] bros that are trading crypto and wake up at 2 p.m. every day … do I think they're going to be, like, 'Screw it?' Yeah. That's a huge risk.'
Across age demographics, some of Trump's most dedicated supporters are uneasy about the White House's decision to keep sending U.S. weapons to Ukraine and disappointed by the prospect that immigration raids might spare some sectors of the economy. At the Turning Point gathering dominated by his youngest voters, attendees were especially bothered by the administration's announcement last week that — despite promises to the contrary — there would be no additional files released on the deceased child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Crowds of devout young conservatives still lined up to make donations to receive '47' hats and cheered as photos flashed on-screen of Trump's mug shot, of him raising his fist after surviving an assassination attempt, of him waving from a McDonald's drive-through window. They did the Trump dance as 'YMCA' played, and they gave frequent standing ovations as speakers championed aspects of the president's agenda such as securing the border and opposing 'woke' ideology.
But other moments revealed that issues were 'bubbling under the surface' of their movement, as Fox News host Laura Ingraham explained it.
'How many of you are satisfied with the results of the Epstein investigation?' Ingraham asked to resounding boos.
'How many of you are happy that we are continuing to send weapons to Ukraine?' More boos rang out.
'How many of you are in favor of carveouts from the concept of mass deportation for agriculture or hospitality?' Ingraham asked. 'Are you for those?'
They were not.
White House officials — and Trump himself — have dismissed complaints about the Epstein case, trying to argue that a vocal but small minority of his supporters were upset over the decision to not reveal new information, though an outcry on social media and elsewhere has been difficult for his advisers to ignore.
But Kirk warned that Trump's newer young male supporters are especially rankled by what they see as a lack of transparency on Epstein.
'Their trust of government is zero,' Kirk said. 'The only reason they were able to succumb themselves to engaging was because of Trump.'
He jokingly described young Trump-voting men as becoming the 'Lost Boys of MAGA,' arguing that they're more likely to merely become politically disengaged due to 'mass cynicism' than they are to veer to the left and 'become card-carrying members of the Mamdani movement,' referring to Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic socialist New York City mayoral candidate.
Abigail Jackson, a spokesperson for the White House, said Trump 'is keeping his promises to his MAGA base on a daily basis' and that the GOP under Trump 'is more unified than ever.' Jackson pointed to the passage of Trump's 'One Big Beautiful Bill,' which enacted a number of his campaign promises, and said Trump 'will never stop listening to the voices of his closest allies and delivering for the American people.'
But the prospect that the White House might alienate key segments of the movement that put Trump in Washington was a constant theme in speeches from some of the biggest commentators in MAGA politics. One after another, speakers dropped hints — or made explicit warnings — about their worries. They often cloaked their concerns in criticism of people working around Trump and influencing him, rather than the president himself.
'This could actually cost Trump in the midterms,' conservative podcaster and former Fox News host Megyn Kelly said, as she spent more than half an hour railing against Attorney General Pam Bondi over her handling of the Epstein files. 'We need to make a smart choice right now. We can't lose any of the MAGA base.'
Former senior White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon, taping his daily podcast live from a small stage in the convention center Friday morning, was even more alarmed.
'It's deeper than Epstein!' Bannon shouted as a crowd gathered around him.
The administration's refusal to release more on the investigation and Epstein's potential ties to power, as it had once promised to do, is 'not about just a pedophile ring and all that,' he said. 'It's about who governs us, and that's why it's not going to go away.'
'For this to go away,' a fired-up Bannon continued, telling his producers they'd have to blow through the scheduled commercial break, 'you're going to lose 10 percent of the MAGA movement. If we lose 10 percent of the MAGA movement right now, we're going to lose 40 seats in '26, we're going to lose the presidency. They don't even have to steal it.'
A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the delicate situation, said Bondi is 'not going anywhere,' and Trump has 'extreme confidence' in her. The official dismissed the significance of the conservative influencers' complaints.
Still, Tucker Carlson, another former Fox News host and a leading voice in MAGA, said the official response to criticism over Epstein reminded him of the Biden administration.
'The fact that the U.S. government, the one that I voted for, refused to take my question seriously and instead said 'Case closed. Shut up, conspiracy theorist' was too much for me, and I don't think the rest of us should be satisfied with that,' Carlson said.
It wasn't all doom and gloom from the stage. Trump's administration was well-represented at the gathering, and his son, Donald Trump Jr., a longtime friend of Kirk, was among the speakers praising the work of Turning Point USA. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, also a former Fox News host, pitched the young audience on a career in the military, touting the administration's spikes in enlistment numbers since January.
Border czar Tom Homan was due to speak Saturday night, as was Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem. The president pushed back this week on concerns that some undocumented farm and hotel workers might not be deported, saying there would be 'no amnesty' but rather a 'work program.'
And most young supporters in the crowd said they were still happy overall with Trump. Mingling among tables selling MAGA-themed coffee ('Stay awake! Not woke!'), 'Based Nutrition' liver supplements and 'Birthright' prenatal vitamins, they said they had no plans to leave the movement.
'I think the last two weeks have been both a great surge with the Big Beautiful Bill, and then sort of a bit of a drop-off with all the other stuff,' said Alex Peña, a 24-year-old from Tampa who works in education, wearing a cowboy hat patterned like the American flag. A child of Cubans who immigrated legally, Peña, too, was opposed to Trump offering safety from deportations for some migrant workers. He was flummoxed over the Epstein announcement, and he described Trump's continuation of Ukraine military aid as 'the same stuff we were complaining about under Biden.'
'If the midterms were today, I think it'd be kind of rocky,' Peña said. 'But you know, a lot can change in a year, and a lot can change in 3½ years, when 2028 comes around.'
Vince Smith, an 18-year-old from Redwood City, California, who is preparing to begin studying construction management at Virginia Tech in the fall, said he was impressed by the Trump campaign's social media strategy last year and how it 'organically' fit with what teenagers were already seeing online.
'I'd say a larger subset of youth is worried about more 'America First'-style policy, so just ensuring that they stay on track with that, and that sort of happens in parallel to anything that might be more controversial — that's really important,' Smith said.
Trump's base has proved to be resilient — handing him the 2024 presidential nomination after a period of political uncertainty in the wake of his 2020 loss and the Jan. 6 riot, even though some formidable Republicans tried to stop him.
But now that Trump is back in the White House with a wider coalition — tech workers in Silicon Valley, more Latino voters and Black men, longtime liberals disenchanted by Democrats' handling of covid restrictions and vaccine requirements, and young men not previously engaged with Republican politics — it remains to be seen whether they'll all stay in the MAGA fold for good.
At the conference, Kirk and Carlson preached the importance of lowering housing costs to make it easier to start families, a sentiment that attendees brought up during interviews as a top concern.
'If we do not improve the material conditions of the younger voters, and do it quickly, the Mamdani effect will spread,' Kirk told The Post, calling on Trump's GOP to make a big statement by instituting a 'we're going to build 10 million homes, Marshall Plan-type thing' to address affordability.
From onstage, Kirk celebrated the gains that his and other organizations made in convincing young people to support Trump. Gen Z was 'making all the liberals confused' over their shift away from the Democratic Party, he said, describing it as 'the greatest generational realignment since Woodstock.'
'We turned that red MAGA hat from a symbol that everyone was afraid to wear back in 2016,' Kirk said, 'where now in 2024, we turned that into a symbol of hope, into a symbol of optimism, of patriotism and taking back our country.'
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