The Manosphere Turns on Trump How many times can a coalition crack before it shatters? By Elaine Godfrey

About half an hour into Episode 694 of the Flagrant podcast, and after a lively debate over manscaping methods, Andrew Schulz leaned back into the couch and brought the chin-wag to a screeching halt. “Are you guys, like—do you feel existential anxiety about the war?” he asked his co-hosts. Schulz seemed to be feeling some. “Americans can’t fucking afford health care,” he said later. “They don’t care about what’s happening in Iran!” War hawks have been angling for years for this war, he added. With President Trump, “they found a guy stupid enough to do it.” Schulz voted for Trump in 2024, after having him on the podcast—a move that angered a lot of liberals. But the 42-year-old comedian was never what one might call “full MAGA,” and he isn’t explicitly Republican. Instead, Schulz is representative of a not-insignificant slice of Trump’s voting base: nonideological guys who love free speech and are drawn to politicians who seem anti-establishment and, maybe more important, anti-woke. (The podcaster-comedians Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Tim Dillon, and Dave Smith all fit somewhere in this camp.) With their help, Trump pulled off his improbable comeback. But a lot has changed since November 2024. Schulz and many of his fellow manosphere commentators seem to feel—by varying degrees—duped by the president they helped elect. Some have been airing those grievances for months, starting with Trump's handling of the Epstein files and, later, the killing of American citizens at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis. To Schulz and others like him, a brand-new war in the Middle East is a betrayal so massive, you almost have to laugh. “The only shot you have at a good life right now is to hasten the rapture,” Dillon, another podcaster and comedian, said on a recent show. “The foreign and economic policy of our country currently is the rapture.” The evolving views of Schulz and others in this cohort are notable because they represent a reversal of support for the president. Their discontent had been mounting since even before Trump went to war. “The cracks have been forming for a while,” Charlie Sabgir, the director of the group Young Men Research Project, told me. For some, Iran “might be the last straw.” The MAGA faithful are overwhelmingly sticking with the president. Not so for everyone else. A number of new polls show that some of the voting blocs that helped power Trump’s 2024 win have lost faith in him: His support among young people has cratered; so has his approval among Latinos. According to one survey, more independent voters disapprove of the president now than they did at any point in his first term. The broad coalition that put Trump back in the White House no longer appears to exist. In the short term, this development bodes well for Democrats. Longer term, it might shed some light on the next iteration of Trumpism. I’ve watched almost every new episode of Flagrant since the 2024 election. The show, which stars Schulz and his comedian sidekick Akaash Singh, along with their co-hosts AlexxMedia and Mark Gagnon, is often hilarious, sometimes insightful, and frequently mind-numbingly dumb. The most interesting segments involve Schulz and the guys debating the news of the day, when they argue gamely about their loosely held opinions, most of which don’t scan as neatly liberal or conservative. They sound, in other words, a lot like the average American voter. Schulz voted for Trump in 2024 partly because he didn’t trust Democrats with the economy and partly because he considers the Democrats to be pious and annoying. He and the guys seemed particularly excited about the testosterone of the incoming administration. “The way that Tom Homan was talking about them cartels? This is fire!” Schulz said. Later, on the subject of the Houthis in Yemen, Singh gleefully predicted that “Trump be bringing the ruckus to these folks!” But Trump didn’t bring enough ruckus. Six months into his second administration, prices were still high, and he’d signed a bill that added significantly to the deficit. Then, in an about-face from his campaign promises, he blocked the release of the Epstein files. “Obviously the Trump administration is trying to cover it up,” Schulz said in a July rant, during an episode in which he and his co-hosts are literally wearing foil hats. This was not what he had voted for, he added. “I want him to stop the wars; he’s funding them! I want him to shrink spending, reduce the budget; he’s increasing it!” (Schulz, through a spokesperson, declined to comment.) Even Trump’s deportations were getting to be too much. By December, Schulz and the boys were debating whether and how they’d hide migrants from ICE in their homes. The killing of Alex Pretti in Minnesota by federal agents in January led to the second major milestone in Schulz’s Trump evolution. “ICE murdered an American citizen in cold blood,” he said. “I see the administration trying to spin it, and it’s fucking disgusting.” The operation had gotten out of hand, and Schulz and the others were starting to suspect that the cruelty and chaos were intentional. Alexx Media, Flagrant’s most consistently left-wing voice, couldn’t resist pointing out that Trump “said he was gonna do this.” When Trump embroiled the United States in a war with Iran, Schulz and the guys couldn’t understand the point. “Naturally, Americans are furious about it, right? Because we’re like, ‘How the fuck does it benefit me?’” Schulz said. “‘I can’t afford to pay for college, I can’t buy a home, I can’t pay for health insurance, and we’re gonna spend billions of dollars in a war in a country I can’t even point at on a map?’” (Later, he predicted that it will be much harder to install a U.S.-friendly leader in Iran, a country led by theocrats for nearly five decades, than it was in Venezuela. Iran will “take it to the end,” he said, because, unlike Latin Americans, Iranians don’t “have reggaeton” or know how to “enjoy life.”) Plenty of other bro-casters have followed the same trajectory as Schulz, as the initial thrill of Trump’s triumph over wokeness quickly gave way to confusion and disappointment. Last year, Joe Rogan was frustrated that Trump was withholding the Epstein files; earlier this month, Rogan complained that Trump’s moves in Iran are “so insane, based on what he ran on.” This week, Rogan asserted that MAGA is “a movement of a bunch of fucking dorks.” Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL and CIA contractor who’d also endorsed Trump, praised Joe Kent, who resigned over the Iran war earlier this month, and read back some of the anti-war campaign promises from Trump and others in the administration. “Every single one of these things is a complete fucking lie,” Ryan said. Perhaps predictably, some of this Iran-related criticism has veered into anti-Semitism. A number of Trump allies—including the conservative commentators Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, and the white-supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes—have suggested that the president was manipulated into the war. “That is unfortunately becoming the narrative” among some young men, Dan Cassino, a pollster and political scientist who studies masculinity, told me. “It’s Oh, the Jews tricked Trump into this.” Even before Iran, there was plenty of turbulence in Trump world. For months Owens and her internet goons have waged conspiratorial war against Turning Point USA and Erika Kirk over the murder of her husband, Charlie. Onetime pals Megyn Kelly and Ben Shapiro are at each other’s throats. As the GOP attempts to reel women back into its movement, conservative Christian hard-liners are publicly mulling revoking the Nineteenth Amendment. Tack on a new war, and you’ve got something worse for MAGA than turbulence. You’ve got disappointment and apathy in a midterms year. You’ve got, as the right-wing commentator Mike Cernovich put it on X last week, “a generational coalition, squandered.” Although the great majority of self-identified Republicans approve of how Trump is handling the war, according to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center, only about half of Republican-leaning independent voters say the same. There are age gaps too: Older Republicans generally approve of Trump’s conflict, while less than half of those 18 to 29 do. Cassino told me that he isn’t terribly interested in Trump’s overall approval numbers. “The key thing I’ve been looking at is the number of ‘don’t know’” responses in polls, which have “gone through the roof,” Cassino said. The trend shows that many voters are no longer sure if Trump is trustworthy or doing the right thing for the country. To them, Trump has simply become one more unreliable politician. Of course, most of the die-hard MAGA types will continue to vote for Republicans. (“I don’t care how mad you are at the Republican Party. You get death on the American streets if you vote Democrat,” Kelly said in a recent podcast.) But many of the disillusioned young men and independents who voted for Trump in 2024 have never identified heavily with either party and tend, generally, to tune politics out. These voters are probably not going to cast a vote for Democrats in November—but they also can’t be expected to get out and vote for the GOP. “Staying home,” Charlie Sabgir explained, “is the most likely result.” On the most recent episode of Shawn Ryan’s podcast, Kent told Ryan that Republicans are “going to need a lot of hard-core MAGA people to come out to knock on doors.” “Don’t come bangin’ on my fuckin’ door,” Ryan replied. “I don’t want to hear more of those fuckin’ lies.” All of this is happy news for Democrats. Low GOP turnout might help them achieve a blue wave in the midterms, much like the one that overwhelmed Trump’s party in 2018. Already, Democrats have flipped 30 state legislative seats across the country, and candidates have outperformed Kamala Harris’s 2024 showing by an average of nearly 13 points. But the unraveling of Trump’s coalition also provides an inkling of where the MAGA movement goes next—and who might rise to lead it. There’s an obvious opening now for someone to pick up Trumpism’s fallen mantle and carry it further than the president has been willing to himself. That person could be someone like Representative Thomas Massie, the consistently anti-war libertarian congressman famous mainly for being a thorn in Trump’s side. It could also, theoretically, be someone more like Fuentes, a man with darker intentions and a growing following. “If Trump did one of the things, we would’ve been happy!” Singh told Schulz in an episode from last July. “Stop the endless wars, stop the spending, release the Epstein files—we would have been like, ‘You know what? Okay, cool!’” Whoever follows through on those pledges might just win over the manosphere.