Grifters Gonna Grift

‘He’s lied about everything’: Iran war puts Trump on shaky ground with young MAGA men
Their frustrations and anger with the conflict were on full display at CPAC this week.

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— Jon Cooper (@joncooper-us.bsky.social) March 28, 2026 at 6:07 PM

… While Trump’s decision to join Israel in attacking Iran has rallied war hawks and his older supporters, it has alienated many of the young men who swung toward the GOP in 2024. That split is resonating among not only the rank and file, but also conservative media influencers and some corners of the White House.

The generational divide was on stark display at CPAC, the annual conservative base-rallying gathering, where some young MAGA loyalists expressed deep frustration and even anger at the Trump administration’s choice to reignite conflict in the Middle East. One month into the war, Trump’s shaky ground with young men threatens to fracture an already-fragile GOP coalition ahead of a hostile midterm in November.

At the conference in north Texas, some attendees carried around Iranian flags, pledging loyalty to the U.S. mission overseas, while others donned America First hats and preached about the need for anti-interventionism.

“Trump and Republicans in general are going to have major issues in the midterms, in 2028, if we can’t wrap this up in a relatively quick amount of time,” said 21-year-old Andrew Belcher, president of the Ohio College Republicans. He added that Trump is doing “relatively poorly” with hyper online young men who are influenced heavily by media figures like Tucker Carlson and other isolationists in the GOP.

A POLITICO poll this month found that Trump voters largely continue to back him. But men who self-identified as “MAGA Republicans” and voted for Trump in 2024 are deeply split by generation over their trust in the president and their view of the war, especially if the number of U.S. casualties rises.

The contrast was striking, even with the larger margins of error that come from the smaller sample sizes: More than 70 percent of those over 35 believe Trump has a plan, compared with 49 percent of those under 35. A 66 percent majority of older MAGA men are willing to sacrifice American lives in order for the U.S. to achieve its goals in Iran, compared with less than half of younger MAGA men who say the same. And the younger men are significantly less likely to say the war is aligned with MAGA principles and in the interests of American people…

Part of CPAC’s intent, a hallmark grassroots gathering that has been held for more than 50 years, is to hype up conservatives, a particularly important mission for party leaders in critical election years. If Republicans want to prevent Democrats from flipping the House this midterm cycle, they need to ensure they don’t lose any gains they made with key parts of their coalition in 2024, namely young men…

“Trump is winning,” FCC Chair Brendan Carr said at CPAC “Look at the results. PBS-defunded.NPR- defunded. Joy Reid-gone from MSNBC.Sleepy-eyed Chuck Todd-gone.Jim Acosta-gone.John Dickerson-gone. Colbert is leaving.CBS is under new ownership,&soon enough,CNN is gonna have new ownership as well.”

— [email protected] (@currentideas.bsky.social) March 28, 2026 at 12:55 PM

This is the FCC Chairman, who is ostensibly a non-partisan industry regulator, openly bragging about conducting a political purge of the media.

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— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec.bsky.social) March 28, 2026 at 9:51 AM

I don't think most people comprehend how bad this is, from a governance point of view.

— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec.bsky.social) March 28, 2026 at 9:52 AM

Given his role, he shouldn't even be speaking at CPAC, much less saying things like this.

— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec.bsky.social) March 28, 2026 at 9:54 AM

Once the center of conservative gravity, CPAC can’t get a single Trump family member to show up.

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— Mother Jones (@motherjones.com) March 29, 2026 at 10:53 AM

The older generation of grifters loses its fastball; a new, possibly more dangerous generation arises:

… During the Trump decade, CPAC had been a showcase for the MAGA faithful, and Trump and his family were its biggest stars. Trump himself first appeared at the event in 2011 when he was toying with a presidential run. He hasn’t missed the event in a decade. “Nobody can deny that [CPAC] is the center of political gravity,” CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp told me in 2022.

But the center of gravity has clearly tilted if the modest crowd in the convention hall at the Gaylord Texan resort in Grapevine is any indication. “It’s shitty,” Warner Kimo Sutton told me of the turnout. “Last time this place was packed.” A GOP stalwart who who ran Trump’s 2016 campaign in Hawaii, he was here two years ago, the last time CPAC came to Dallas. He was still hoping more stars would show up. “I’ve heard the widow is coming,” he whispered, saying he had it on good authority that Erika Kirk, the widow of the murdered Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, might be making a surprise appearance…

… And the primacy of CPAC as a testing ground for future presidential candidates seems threatened. As of Thursday, not a single 2028 aspirant was scheduled to speak in Grapevine. No Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, no Vice President JD Vance. And Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio was way too busy plotting to overthrow Cuba. The closest he has come to the event was appearing on the big screen in the exhibit hall Thursday morning during a broadcast of the president’s predictably fawning cabinet meeting…

Perhaps Americans, even the MAGA faithful, are too pinched by gas prices to shell out for a trip to the resort in Grapevine, where, as Sutton complained, parking costs $29 a day. Maybe a lame duck Trump, whose approval rating has never been lower, has hurt attendance. Or maybe even Republicans have grown weary of an event that has strayed far from its roots as a conservative policy confab and increasingly served as a platform for some of the GOP’s most morally compromised representatives. As conservative radio host Erick Erickson lamented in an X post Wednesday, “’C’ in CPAC is now best represented by the word ‘clown’ than as any semblance of a conservative institution.”

It’s also possible, however, that the main problem with CPAC is CPAC itself. The conference has suffered in recent years from competition, most notably from Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk’s conservative youth group. (T-shirts featuring Kirk as martyr are a hot item in the CPAC exhibit hall.) Turning Point’s national convention in December drew a whopping 30,000 people, which seems about 10 times larger than the occupancy of the Gaylord convention hall…

In fairness, not everyone seems disappointed with the event. I found Enrique Tarrio, the former chairman of the Proud Boys, hanging out and watching Matt Gaetz record his OAN show in the CPAC exhibit hall. Tarrio seemed glad to be here and not in prison. In January last year, Trump pardoned him, saving him from a 22-year sentence for seditious conspiracy related to his involvement in the January 6 riot. He told me he comes to every CPAC and that this one was the same as in 2018, another non-presidential election season…

‘I Think That MAGA Is Dying’: Inside the Youth Movement at CPAC www.nytimes.com/2026/03/30/s…

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— Shawn Connery (@shawnconnery.bsky.social) March 30, 2026 at 10:14 PM

The NYTimes interviews the GOP’s feral children (gift link):

As the first day of the Conservative Political Action Conference wound to a close, the audience inside the airplane-hangar-size ballroom had dwindled as Nick Shirley, the headline speaker, mumbled his remarks. Mr. Shirley, a 23-year-old content creator and recently minted right-wing celebrity, had been tapped by the conference’s organizers to bring a youthful jolt of energy to the proceedings.

But youths themselves, and their conservative energy, were nowhere to be seen among the rows of empty chairs, as Mr. Shirley made halting reference to Theodore Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” speech.

Just outside the hall, 20-somethings in rumpled suits were gathered in clusters, debating the merits of a ground invasion in Iran, the conservative backlash against those who were “J-pilled” (far-right slang for skepticism of Israeli influence), the backbreaking costs of American life, and what they saw as the slow demise of the Trump era.

“The majority of us, we don’t necessarily come to these types of events for the speakers because generally they dish out the same slop over and over,” said Jack Moore, 19, a board member of the Georgia Teen Republicans…

One of them was Joseph Bolick, an Army veteran wearing a bright blue “America First” hat, a loud symbol in conservative spaces that one is a supporter of Nick Fuentes, the 27-year-old white nationalist known for making racist and antisemitic remarks.

“It’s very cultish here,” said Mr. Bolick, 30, who was attending CPAC for the first time. “It seems like boomers are just on this Trump train,” he added.

After talking with other young attendees at the conference, Mr. Hoffses said most appeared to be aligned with Mr. Fuentes, who has become a pariah within the conservative movement for, among other reasons, his recent declaration that young conservatives should express their displeasure with Mr. Trump’s military strikes on Iran by voting for Democrats.

“I’d say at least 60 percent of the young people here are fans of Nick,” Mr. Hoffses said…

“Those conversations are just not happening here,” said Samantha Cassell, a 27-year-old Republican strategist. She was wearing a “Fishback for Florida” hat in support of the rage-baiting Florida candidate for governor who has energized a coalition of young voters in that state. “There’s no serious discussion going on. It’s just flat. I’ve gone to a lot of these events, the R.N.C., the D.N.C., and this is probably the worst one I’ve ever been to.”

Some on the far right saw in this generational division an opportunity to claim a young cohort looking for an outlet. Joel Webbon, an online influencer who promotes a brand of nationalism infused with Christianity, wrote that his attendance at CPAC last week revealed one major finding: “The youth are ours,” he wrote in a post on X.

Elijah Schaffer, a far-right commentator, who could be seen roaming the halls at CPAC on Friday in an all-black suit, wrote on X that “CPAC 2026 has given me hope for the American youth. Every young man & woman here are all radicalized / based.”…