Donald Trump’s favorability among young men has cratered by 10 percentage points since spring 2024, with a new poll revealing that the demographic he courted so aggressively is now turning on him—hard.
According to polling from the Speaking With American Men (SAM) project, shared with Puck, Trump’s favorability among young males now sits at just 46 percent, down from 56 percent before the election. Among all young people aged 16-29, it’s an even grimmer 36 percent.
WHAT’S GOING ON: The survey of 4,211 young people conducted in late 2025 paints a brutal picture for the 79-year-old billionaire.
Only 27 percent of young men believe Trump is “delivering for people” like them. Meanwhile, 40 percent say: “He talked big, but let people like me down.”
Even worse for Trump’s ego: just 22 percent think he’s “fighting for people” like them, while nearly half—47 percent—say he “creates chaos and makes things worse.”
THE DETAILS: Pollster John Della Volpe told Puck that Trump’s failure to bring down costs, combined with his chaotic tariff policies, has shattered young people’s faith in him.
“The big picture is that Trump was getting the benefit of the doubt in the first 100 days of his term,” Della Volpe said. “Now, they are reflecting on those policies several months later and seeing no significant improvement. And they’re saying that their situation is no better. In many cases, it’s worse.”
The poll also found that avoiding “unnecessary wars and conflicts” is a massive priority for young men—78 percent said it “matters” to them, and 68 percent said they’d be more likely to support a candidate who stays out of them.
By a five-point margin, young men now believe Democrats would be more likely to avoid foreign wars than Republicans.
OF COURSE: The timing couldn’t be worse for the administration. The poll was conducted before 2026’s chaotic start, which included the U.S. military attack on Venezuela and the dramatic abduction of former leader Nicolás Maduro.
Trump has since threatened similar action against Cuba and Colombia, while refusing to rule out invading Greenland—a NATO ally’s territory.
As Puck’s Peter Hamby noted, the White House has desperately tried to frame Venezuela as a “law enforcement operation,” not a war. “But when your administration forcibly extracts a foreign leader from a heavily fortified compound, killing dozens of people in the process, that might seem like a semantic difference,” Hamby wrote.
BUT BUT BUT: White House spokesperson Davis Ingle offered the predictable spin: “President Trump was overwhelmingly elected by nearly 80 million Americans to deliver on his popular and commonsense agenda. The President has already made historic progress not only in America but around the world.”
WHY IT MATTERS: Trump’s 2024 victory was built in part on unprecedented gains among young men, particularly through his appearances on bro-podcasts and appeals to crypto bros and gym culture. That coalition is now fracturing ahead of the 2026 midterms.
Young people are watching their costs stay high, their job prospects remain bleak, and their president threaten wars across multiple continents—and they’re drawing conclusions. The billionaire who promised to fight for the working class is being exposed as exactly what he always was: a chaos agent who serves himself.