Donald Trump is the undisputed king of the Republican Party. Earlier this month, Trump exacted revenge on Indiana state senators who had opposed his call to redistrict the Hoosier State; his endorsees won a majority of races against incumbents. Last weekend, Trump successfully nuked Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) from political life, relegating the incumbent to a shocking third place in his statewide primary. And this past Tuesday, Trump-endorsed candidates across the nation won every primary race — 37 victories and zero defeats. Overall, Trump's approval rating among members of his own party sits around 81 percent — down from last year but higher than comparable second-term approval metrics for either Barack Obama or George W. Bush.
On the one hand, then, things could not possibly be going better for Trump within the GOP fold. It is only when one considers the generational divide among Republican voters, especially on matters of foreign policy, that things begin to look a bit bleaker.
The latest New York Times/Siena College poll reveals some startling age-based demographic splits within the MAGA coalition. Sixty percent of Republicans 18 to 44 want an overall new direction for their party beginning in 2028; only 33 percent want to follow Trump's course. Seventy percent of young Republicans want the post-2028 GOP to chart a new course when it comes to U.S.-Israel relations; only 20 percent want the party to continue Trump's close embrace of the Jewish state. Fifty-six percent of young Republicans want a new direction on Iran; just 35 percent want to follow Trump's antagonistic stance.
Young voters shifted notably to the right in the 2024 election. Trump's political challenge, in this midterm election year, is to keep these new MAGA voters firmly in the coalition while not alienating the loyal older MAGA voters who have served as his core base since 2016 — and who overwhelmingly approve of his second-term job performance. Given the consistently greater reliability of older voters in turning out to vote, simply pandering to the younger generation's various desires would be foolish at the most rudimentary political level.
So, what to do? The answer is to lead with vision, conviction and confidence, as great men of history do.
Consider foreign policy, which is the most divisive cross-generational issue within the GOP. There is an undeniable foreign policy chasm between Republican boomers, who often get their news from cable TV, and Republican millennials and zoomers, at least some of whom get their news from "Podcastistan" subversives. The explanation for this divide is that many older Republican voters have been around long enough to see actual American military success in the world. Many younger Republican voters, by contrast, spent their formative years in a milieu wherein the failures of 21st-century American foreign policy were all but universally acknowledged. In short, older voters have seen foreign policy success, but all younger voters know is failure on the world stage.
The solution is to alter the entire paradigm and flip the script on its head by demonstrating unambiguous success on the world stage.
All younger voters have seen is endless boondoggle after endless boondoggle. There are numerous reasons for this, including the mission creep inherent in the failed neoconservative/liberal humanitarian project of "democracy promotion," overly restrictive and self-defeating rules of engagement, and transnational institutions (such as the United Nations) that take a tendentious view of "human rights." Regardless of the causes, there have been no decisive military victories to speak of. And that is the reason our "forever wars" go on, well, forever.
So how about showing younger voters what a real, decisive victory looks like?
Trump came closest to doing that with the astonishing extraction of Venezuelan strongman (and illegitimate leader) Nicolas Maduro in January. Iran has been a bit of a different story. What began as an extraordinary shock-and-awe campaign has become a quagmire. Voters are understandably concerned about rising gasoline prices, but the solution is not to repeat the cardinal sin of decades of American foreign policy blunders: starting a war and then failing to finish it. The debate over whether the Iran war is wise may have been a worthy discussion before it started. But at this point, it's irrelevant.
The easiest way for Trump to stabilize oil markets while saving political face is to keep on pushing — with force — to achieve the four key goals of the Iran operation: an open Strait of Hormuz, the cessation of Iranian regime funding to its regional terror proxies, the end of the regime's ballistic missile and drone programs, and the successful ferreting out of the regime's enriched uranium stockpile. Unless and until those four things happen, the Iran operation will have achieved only partial success.
Even better, younger Republican voters will finally get a taste of real victory over a hardened adversary. Gas prices will come down. The MAGA coalition would yet again coalesce. Trump would yet again be king of all of MAGA. And for the GOP, the midterms could be saved.
But it depends on Trump leading with conviction and confidence by ripping off the proverbial Band-Aid and finishing the Iran job once and for all.
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