An analysis and opinion on the fracturing coalition behind Trump’s second term, and what the polling is really telling us about November.
For most of the past decade, defection from Donald Trump has come almost exclusively from what could loosely be called the establishment wing of the Republican Party. Their break was ideological and, in political terms, largely priced in. What’s happening now is different. The critics turning on Trump this year are not the establishment. In many cases, they are the exact people who built the modern MAGA coalition, and delivered him the 2024 popular vote.
Topsy Turvy
The podcasters who got Trump elected in 2024 are no longer supporting him.
Joe Rogan. Tucker Carlson. Theo Von. Andrew Schulz. Shawn Ryan. Megyn Kelly. Candace Owens. Alex Jones. Owen Shroyer.
Every one of them is who got Trump elected. And every one of them is now, in some form, publicly against him, or has flatly stopped supporting him. Some are urging their audiences to vote Democrat outright. Others are simply telling listeners the second term has become indefensible.
Remove them from the ledger and what is left of visible Trump support is a single demographic: Boomers. That’s it. The people who moved the youth vote are gone. The people who moved the podcast vote are gone. The people who moved the tech vote, the libertarian vote, the disaffected-independent vote. All gone. What remains is the base that has been with him since 2016, largely older, largely white, and shrinking with every election cycle by simple actuarial math.
The critical point is what these defections are not. They are not ideological drift. Not one of these figures has softened on immigration, on trade, on foreign wars in general, or on the core positions that defined 2024. They believe in 2026 what they believed in 2024. The accusation runs in the opposite direction: Trump is the one who moved.
If the losses had stopped at, say, Nick Fuentes and the Groyper corner of the internet (a faction that was already off the reservation before Election Day 2024), the story would be much smaller. This isn’t that story. This is a near-complete evacuation of the people, personalities, and platforms that made the 2024 popular vote possible.
The one place Trump has picked up new support is telling: the anti, anti-Trumpers of the establishment right. The neoconservatives, defense hawks, and legacy Republicans who spent 2015 through 2020 opposing him are now willing to defend him because he is delivering their policies: an Iran war, corporate ownership stakes, ballooning deficits, and unrestrained executive spending. These are the exact people he ran against to win in the first place. He is trading them for the coalition that actually put him over the top.
And we can’t forget Israel. A large share of the defectors, arguably the majority, cite it as the specific breaking point. That the Iran war was for Israel. That the foreign policy is being run for Israel. That the coalition Trump built on “America First” has been traded, in their view, for a foreign government’s interests. Whatever one makes of the accusation, the political reality is unavoidable: this is the through-line that ties Tucker, Rogan, Kelly, Von, Owens, and yes even Fuentes together. This isn’t the fringe talking. America First has turned Anti-MAGA.
America First is Not MAGA
MAGA may be willing to blindly support Trump. America First is not. One of the defining grievances the base carried into 2024 was the Biden pay-to-play scandal: the sense that access to the White House had a price tag and the family was cashing the checks. Trump ran against that. The second term has, by every measurable standard, made it worse.
Trump himself. 2025 income: $2.2 billion, a 200 percent jump over 2024. $1.4 billion from crypto alone, including more than $600 million from a meme coin his family controlled 80 percent of. House Oversight pegged realized profits from foreign payments and pay-to-play schemes at $2.25 billion.
The sons. Investment funds tied to Don Jr. and Eric hold positions in defense startups now sitting on $3.2 billion in Pentagon contracts, with $200 billion in guaranteed future work in the pipeline. In multiple documented cases, the family bought in weeks before the contract was awarded. Eric celebrated one live on Fox Business.
Kushner. Named Special Envoy for Peace, then turned around and solicited $5 billion from the same Middle Eastern governments he is negotiating with. His firm has already collected at least $80 million in fees from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, likely more, on top of $2 billion invested. His $30 billion Gaza reconstruction plan positions that same firm to profit.
Lutnick. The Commerce Secretary transferred his Cantor Fitzgerald stake to trusts benefiting his four children (including the two now running the firm), then presided over a $1.6 billion federal deal that ran through it. He is promoting AI data center expansion of direct benefit to Cantor while household utility bills in affected communities climb.
Iran. Trump ran on “no new wars,” naming Iran specifically. In February 2026, the strikes began. Gas prices rose. Grocery prices followed. This is the moment most of the defections cluster around.
The debt. The “Big Beautiful Bill” is projected by the CBO to add roughly $3.4 trillion to federal deficits over the next decade, or closer to $5 trillion if the temporary cuts are made permanent. Massie called it out as expanding spending beyond the Biden baseline. Trump’s response was to endorse a primary challenger. Massie lost his primary this summer.
None of this requires the coalition to have changed. It requires only that Trump did.
What the Numbers Say
The question is whether any of this reaches beyond the podcast ecosystem into the actual electorate. The polling suggests it does. And the strongest signal is coming from the pollster the base trusts most.
Rasmussen Reports, historically the friendliest of the major public pollsters to Republican presidents and the one MAGA cites when they distrust the others, has Trump underwater by 15 points as of July 15, 2026. Forty-five percent approve, 54 percent disapprove, with 44 percent strongly disapproving and only 29 percent strongly approving. The same Rasmussen tracking had Trump at 51 percent approval as recently as March. That’s a six-point slide in four months, in the pollster that has consistently shown him at his best. When Rasmussen breaks against a Republican president, the political meaning is unambiguous.
Among voters 18 to 29, Trump’s approval sits at just 25 percent, according to the Spring 2026 Harvard Youth Poll, which also shows young voters favoring Democratic control of Congress by a wide margin. A separate Third Way analysis found that among young men likely to vote in 2026, Democrats lead the generic ballot 61 to 31. The Yale Youth Poll found Democrats opening large leads among the youngest voters, reversing the narrow Republican advantages that helped Trump win 2024.
Roughly 8 percent of young men who voted Trump in 2024 now say they intend to vote Democrat in 2026. A significant additional share, particularly young Republican-leaning and independent men, say they are more likely to skip the midterms entirely and wait until 2028. Either way, Republicans lose.
The generational math compounds the problem. Gen Z and Millennial voters combined are projected to make up roughly half of the eligible electorate in 2026, and nearly 60 percent of that group now disapprove of Trump, a six-point drop from a year ago.
It should be noted that Democrats have their own confidence problem with these voters: the same polls consistently show unfavorable impressions of both parties. But when forced to choose, young voters are choosing Democrats by margins not seen since before 2020.
What the Podcasts Giveth, the Podcasts can Taketh away
The most striking part of the current Republican political posture is that it appears to assume the 2024 coalition is still available in 2026. It is not.
Every single one of the podcasters named above (Rogan, Carlson, Von, Schulz, Ryan, Kelly, Owens, Jones, Shroyer) represents a real slice of the American right and, more importantly, the independent voters who broke Trump’s way in 2024. Their combined weekly reach runs into the tens of millions. Rogan alone averages around 11 million listeners per episode. Carlson’s numbers on X routinely run into the millions. Kelly, Owens, Von, and Schulz each command audiences in the millions. That is not the fringe of the coalition. That is the meat of the right-leaning and independent media diet in this country. Every one of them was on the field for Trump in 2024. Not a single one of them is going to be pushing his midterm candidates in 2026.
The base Trump had in 2024 was, at its most expansive, the traditional Republican coalition plus young men, the podcast right, the tech world, and the libertarian wing. The base he appears to have going into 2026 is the traditional Republican coalition alone, slightly older each cycle, and without any of the groups that made 2024 possible. That base has not been enough to win since 2020.
A GOP strategist quoted by MS NOW in late July put it plainly: “We may be at the point now where for a lot of these Trump-adjacent folks, Trump fatigue syndrome has set in. They’re done with him.”
You Can Forget Charlie Kirk
Whatever anyone thinks of Charlie Kirk, the fact remains: he is not going to be there this time. He built the machine that delivered a real chunk of the 2024 youth vote, and under his widow Erika, that machine is a shell of what it was. The Charlie Kirk Show’s average YouTube views have collapsed from 658,000 per video two years ago to 13,000 in recent months, a 98 percent decline. A recent Turning Point campus stop at the University of Georgia put 1,200 people in an 8,000-seat arena. You can read all about the TPUSA Death Spiral.
What’s the Point
Here is what Boomer MAGA does not understand.
Not every conservative is a Republican. And it is not only defecting Republicans they need to fear at the ballot box. Independents are the true tippers of the scale, and specifically, the wave of independents who started calling themselves Republicans somewhere between 2016 and 2020 (the same voters who would go on to hand Trump the presidency in 2024).
Elon Musk is a prime example. He is not a lifelong Republican. He is a lifelong pragmatist who moved right when the left stopped making sense to him. Multiply him by a few million and you have the actual expansion that put Trump over the top in 2024.
These voters do not worship Trump the way the Boomer base does. They never did. They love the country. They are, in the truest sense of the phrase, America First. And it is precisely because they are America First that the second term is losing them. A $30 billion Gaza reconstruction plan routed through the president’s son-in-law. A joint war with Israel that Trump promised over and over would never happen. A defense contract pipeline flowing through the president’s sons. A Commerce Secretary steering federal deals through his own family’s firm. They see it. And they draw the obvious conclusion: this is unchecked power being used to self-enrich and, in their view, being sold to a foreign government for pennies on the dollar.
In the minds of a lot of these voters, the only lever available to stop it in the near term is voting Democrat. Not because they support the Democratic Party. Not because they have moved left. Because divided government is the only mechanism the American system offers to force a subpoena, freeze a spending bill, open an investigation, or slow a war. If pulling the Democratic lever is what makes the grift stop and gets the country out of Iran, that is what they will do.
Featured image: U.S. Army photo (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
