October 14, 2025, 10:13 AM View Comments ()

Conventional wisdom suggests that young people are usually progressive but become more conservative as they age. But numerous polls show that in the United States, at least, the youngest voters are trending more conservative than before: Forty-three percent of Americans under 30 voted for Donald Trump in 2024, a 7 percentage-point jump from his previous two runs for the presidency.

Are young Americans shifting rightward? And if so, why? Does the shift fit into traditional definitions of conservatism, or is it connected to culture war issues? And what does it all mean for Trump and the future of his MAGA movement? On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with conservative commentator Emily Jashinsky, who hosts the podcast After Party with Emily Jashinsky and is the D.C. correspondent for the website UnHerd. The full conversation is available on the video box atop this page, or on the FP Live podcast. What follows here is a lightly edited and condensed transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: So, you describe yourself as a conservative who is also a journalist. There’s a trend today for journalists to identify their political affiliations, which in my mind runs counter to traditions that prioritize objectivity. What’s behind the trend?

Emily Jashinsky: We’ve seen this happen over the course of decades, especially on the right. The conservative movement once sought to train young journalists who could go populate the newsrooms of legacy institutions, be secretly conservative and balance the media that way. But that changed as technology democratized the media space, especially when blogs erupted during the aughts. And it really shifted toward putting people who have open conservative voices into the media. That has advantages and disadvantages, of course. But it’s almost inevitably where the media is going because of how news-delivery systems are changing. Part of it has also been exasperation that it was almost impossible for conservatives to find themselves in these newsrooms anyway.

RA: The right is not a monolith. There’s a diverse coalition of conservatives in America right now. So, what is the new right?

EJ: This is the big question, of course. My litmus test for what’s “new right” versus “old right” today is if you are fundamentally sympathetic to the MAGA cause, if not Trump himself. It’s very hard to categorize people because right now there are a lot of insincere MAGA folks who are saying they love tariffs, for example, but they don’t actually love tariffs. They just love Donald Trump. But they’re old-right figures who don’t like the tariff regime; they don’t like industrial policy; they don’t like the anti-imperialist, anti-adventurist changes to foreign policy that [Vice President] J.D. Vance would advocate for. So that line is still there, but it’s covered up by the Trump of it all. Those lines within the conservative movement will be much more exposed after Trump.

RA: OK, and given that backdrop, is it true that young Americans are trending conservative right now? And if so, why?

EJ: It’s a great question. It’s true that young Americans are trending conservative. These trends tend to be more acute with young men. Sometimes these numbers are dragged in the conservative direction by the movement of young men even while young women are being nudged in the opposite direction. Because the shift among young men has been so dramatic.

Now, it’s extremely complicated. There are all kinds of complications with using votes for Donald Trump as a proxy for being dragged right, but if you do that, young women moved too away from Dems. That’s a really interesting trend. I don’t know if it’s just because of [former Vice President] Kamala Harris or just because of Donald Trump.

But there are shifts on big cultural questions. Immigration is a good example. A poll in September found 45 percent of young men support Trump’s immigration enforcement policies, and about 21 percent of young women. Neither is over the 50 percent line. But it is unusual for conservatives to find themselves with any level of support among younger Americans that approaches the 50 percent level.

RA: One of the murky aspects of, say, immigration, is the big gap between Trump’s rhetoric and execution. And so, for example, for all the talk of mass deportations, we’re nowhere near the millions of people they wanted to deport. Instead, it seems to me that the point of the rhetoric is to put up a giant “Do not come here” sign, especially on the southern border. So it’s unclear to me whether younger Americans adhere to the rhetoric or to the policies.

EJ: I think that’s true of the public more broadly. It’s just really hard to know, especially with Trump, because so much of his policy is intentionally about the performance. In the case of immigration, a lot of this is intended as a disincentive. And a lot of it is also trying to nudge the Overton window so Republican rhetoric on immigration is completely intolerant of Gang of Eight-style, old-right politics, where [then-Sen.] Marco Rubio infamously joined up with Democratic senators to pass what the Tea Party base at the time said was an absolutely intolerable comprehensive immigration reform bill. So it’s a little bit of both.

We’ve seen recently Zach Bryan, a country singer popular especially with younger men, sing about [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] ICE busting down doors, that ICE is acting like authoritarian thugs. And Joe Rogan has expressed discomfort with Trump’s immigration enforcement policies. These are interesting cultural signifiers for future attitudes.

RA: I didn’t expect to bring this up, but Taylor Swift has a new album out. Do you detect a move toward the right there as well?

EJ: This is actually a great example. It looks like a move toward the right, but it’s not necessarily right-coded. She embraces marriage and the white-picket-fence American dream vision. She talks about wanting a block full of kids who look like her and a basketball hoop in her driveway. She really criticizes the decadence of Hollywood people who have dogs instead of children. This is only a year after she endorsed Kamala Harris by holding up her cat in an Instagram post as a nod to the Vance “childless cat ladies” line. And so it does seem like Taylor Swift has been swept up in the vibe shift among younger Americans.

At the same time, though, it would be a mistake for the right to claim Taylor Swift as a conservative victory because I don’t think there’s any evidence that her politics have shifted to the right. Maybe she’s had a cultural lifestyle change over the last year, but there’s definitely a distinction.

RA: I’m going to take us back to 30,000 feet. Why are younger people becoming attracted to the right? Is it just a broader sense that the system itself wasn’t working? Is it a backlash?

EJ: It’s totally a backlash. And this is difficult for conservatives who interpret some of this as pro-right when it’s mostly anti-left.

Charlie Kirk’s a good example. We were both in the conservative youth movement at the same time. And he believed that these cultural issues were dragging the right down. By the time he was killed, Charlie was almost exclusively talking about cultural issues, not about tax rates and the proper scope of government intervention in health care. He was almost explicitly talking about marriage, children, religion, abortion, immigration. Turning Point USA at one point had a culture war tour.

A lot of that started around COVID. In my experience talking to young men, some of their earliest political memories are the MeToo movement and cancel culture, and all of this exploded when COVID hit. That was a paradigm-shifting experience, completely formative for all young people across the board. We never quite reckoned with that, and it surprised a lot of people when it showed up in support for Trump in 2024. But I don’t know if that is durable support for the Republican Party.

RA: You’re essentially saying that the ascendancy of the new right is about being anti-left. The Democrats have also struggled in recent years with articulating a strategy that is anything “not Trump.” So the two sides are essentially just saying “not the other.” But what does the right stand for?

EJ: This is the challenge for the right in the Trump era. Look at how Trump approached the question of TikTok before he became president again, when he had donors like Jeffrey Yass coming to him and saying, “You should save TikTok.” This is just one example of many where what Trump stands for is charitably called pragmatism. That means that people on the right scramble to either get themselves from point A to point B because their politics are now becoming pragmatic like Donald Trump’s, or to go back to basics and figure out what they actually believe is: Is Trump right or wrong on this?

Because so much signaling comes down from Donald Trump to people on the right, I genuinely don’t know where some people will go when Trump is no longer there. It’s amazing how those shifts are just papered over because people will say “I just support Trump, I trust Trump,” and then nobody has to kind of duke it out because Trump had the final say-so.

RA: You said a lot of the growth of conservative media was to balance a perceived kind of imbalance in the media ecosystem. How does the right grapple with elements of their leadership that they might disagree with?

EJ: I love this question, and it’s actually one of the reasons that I’m in journalism. When you spend time in activist circles, and you’re more interested in the real story than wins and losses, it’s really hard to just work in the nonprofit world.

A lot of people who find themselves in influencer spaces—we see it on the left, too—don’t really get that balance right. That’s to their detriment, actually, because their audiences want to trust them and want to believe what they’re saying is not paid propaganda.

Even if you’re an influencer who has some media platform but isn’t technically a journalist, you’re still in trouble because nobody is more sensitive than Donald Trump himself about these loyalty litmus tests. I’ve literally been part of conversations where people wonder how on Earth conservatives are supposed to offer constructive criticism in the Trump era when there are so many tests to see if you’re with us or if you’re against us. That crystallized after the 2020 election, when these litmus tests became even more important for Donald Trump and the people around him. I do think that’s been a problem. Downstream of that we’ve seen less criticism, for example, on genuine free speech problems in the Trump administration from people on the right who staked their careers on free speech battles against the Obama and Biden administrations.

That’s why it’s great to be in journalism, because you don’t have to worry about playing on a team. But a lot of people who step into these new media spaces still feel like they’re part of a team, and that makes it really hard for them to have honest conversations.

RA: At times, it’s hard to distinguish between the “new left” and the “new right.” Both draw on populism. Both draw on a narrative that the system isn’t working, that many of the forces of the last four decades—globalization, urbanization, technological shifts—have gone too far, and that you need radical, dramatic change. So: “If that was a backlash, then we need a new backlash to the backlash.” I hear that both from the Bernie Sanders left and from the MAGA right. In your reporting, have you seen a cognizance on the right that a lot of what they say can often make them sound like the left?

EJ: Yes. Some people who are united under the banner of Trumpism are really uncomfortable with some of the young Trumpism that has come into the mix. Israel is the best example of this. We’re sadly seeing this play out in public right now, but privately there is so much discomfort and really ugly tension on the right because young people on the right are so, so polarized from older people on the right about their beliefs about Israel. If we’re talking about a really hardened conservative ideologue versus a very hardened young liberal ideologue, there are obviously important differences. But when it comes to what U.S. involvement should be in that conflict, there are so many similarities. That makes people on the right extremely uncomfortable in private. Some of it is playing out publicly. But that battle has been really, really bitter internally for a couple of years now.

RA: Let’s talk about foreign policy more broadly now. You’re absolutely right on Israel. There’s been a real shift in the American mood as well as in the Republican Party mood, especially among younger voters. It’s very telling that Marjorie Taylor Greene was the first Republican in Congress to call what’s happening in Gaza a genocide. She was an outlier initially, but people are rallying around her. What is the through line of what a Republican foreign policy is today?

EJ: It’s the two simple words: America First. Everyone will agree with that in theory.

RA: But what does that mean?

EJ: Right. So does that mean colonizing Greenland, taking Canada, and then doing a sort of targeted regime-change operation in Venezuela, as seems to be on the table right now with the Trump administration? Nobody knows.

Nobody has the answer because so many people take their cues as to what America First means from Donald Trump himself. I just saw this debate playing out on X with Dinesh D’Souza, who was saying Donald Trump defines what America First is, just how Donald Trump defined what MAGA is. Your interpretation of what is America First toward Israel or toward Venezuela is completely secondary to whatever Donald Trump thinks it is. What happens after Donald Trump leaves office? I genuinely don’t know.

RA: But even before we get to when he leaves office, how do you as a conservative commentator feel about America First being the vague articulation of what one man thinks? Self-interest has always been the driver of foreign policy, so the idea that a country would place its self-interest first is not new at all. It’s a branding tool at some level.

EJ: I know it’s absolutely a branding tool, and to that extent, it’s better than what came before. It is definitely an improvement, both politically and in substance, from everyone running against Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican primary. My perspective is that he has shifted the Overton window on foreign policy in a way that is much healthier, both for the right and for the country.

On the other hand, Trump’s ideology is more pragmatic than it is political. He will define America First as the terms of any negotiation he is entering into. Greenland is a really good example of this. Is America First a sort of Monroe Doctrine, as some people have tried to cast it? Or is it smart adventurism? These questions are genuinely difficult to resolve because Donald Trump defines them bit by bit. At the same time, though, that pragmatism is an improvement over this template that gets applied to Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, different places in Africa in the global war on terrorism moment.

RA: I have a lot of sympathy for the argument that what happened before was not ideal, and I think that is a great debate to play out. On Trump himself, however, especially for viewers of this show, if you threaten to take over another country, those are red lines—it breaks international law. There are real, global consequences to pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, for example.

You mentioned Dinesh D’Souza earlier, this articulation of what Trump thinks is the manifestation of American foreign policy today. How does that play into another big-ticket issue: growing fears of authoritarianism? Consolidation of power in the executive, federal troops in American cities, detentions of op-ed writers for criticizing Israel, investigating and firing political opponents. How does the right accommodate these things that, on the face, seem very problematic?

EJ: I came of age during the Obama era, when the right was constantly criticizing the executive for abusing the concentration of executive power for political goals—DACA, for example. I actually think some of that is completely fair and helpful, but this is where it’s difficult with the Trump administration, because the president himself is a real raw-power politician. That manifests in ways that go beyond the conservative vision for the separation of powers. There are serious questions about civil liberties and free speech that are being raised right now by the way the Trump administration is prosecuting Trump’s domestic policy vision. And there’s very little pushback to it because people are afraid of failing that litmus test of loyalty.

This might sound odd, but there are people who genuinely trust Trump’s instincts, because he’s proved them wrong in different ways. There are people who said conservatives had to moderate on immigration to ever win an election again—then Trump came in on a “build the wall” platform and trounced the Republican primary. So some of it is people genuinely deferring to Donald Trump, and a lot of it is people being afraid to fail the litmus test and push back on what would be seen otherwise as excesses of government power.

RA: Connecting the dots globally, how does the rise of the American right fit into our dovetail with the rise of the right across the world? Think of strongmen in places like Turkey, Hungary, and India. How do you think about the connections between them? Is there a feedback loop?

EJ: One of the reasons this is also interesting is the backlash in terms of whether this is an anti-left movement or a pro-right movement, and I do think that’s one of the through lines we see in Western populism, whether it’s AfD, Popular Front, Reform, or MAGA. It’s difficult to talk about all of this, partly because the coalition is so diverse in a way the old American conservative fusionist coalition under the anti-communist banner wasn’t. They were able to find common ground for so long that tied together neoconservatism, fiscal conservatism, and social conservatism, to the point where big conservative gatherings were held for decades.

Now, part of what makes it difficult to even talk about this is that the right’s coalition is instinctive and reactionary, which is rooted in nationalism. If you look at Reform or France and Germany, it’s very similar to that. As you were pointing out, one of the important through lines here is having a huge chunk of your coalition being more anti-left than pro-right. The Trump coalition, for example, is not this massive Tea Party limited-government movement. That’s just not what the MAGA coalition is part of. That’s really similar, when you’re bringing in so many anti-left people to the coalition. What does that look like in Hungary, when [Prime Minister Viktor] Orban has to hang on to power? It’s a great question, and one that he is obviously confronting right now.