Welcome to Trump’s America, The i Paper’s World Insight series presenting the sharpest, deepest thinking on an era-defining shift in history and politics, investigating how Donald Trump and his administration have changed the US and the world – and where we go from here.
• We’ve reached “peak America” – just don’t tell Donald Trump
• Brash America is facing its worst nightmare: loneliness
• Maga’s worst nightmare: a child-free, unmarried female president
Kameron Zeka is annoyed with himself for voting for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. The 22-year-old, from a small town near Storm Lake in Iowa, is one of many Gen Z voters who backed the President but have now turned against him.
The fracturing of Trump’s coalition threatens to doom the Republican Party in the midterm elections next month, when Democrats are expected to take back the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate as well.
Zeka, who works as a fertiliser drafter, knew that Trump was a wrecking ball when he voted for him but he thought was exactly what the country needed. “Our political system is so broken,” he tells The i Paper. At the time, he felt “we need somebody to come in and break it to the point where it actually is going to get repaired”.
“I thought Trump might get us to the point where Americans wake up and say, we have to take back our political system from these corporations,” he adds.
“It seemed everything was fairly normal when Trump was President the first time … it wasn’t too crazy.”
He brushed off concerns from many of his friends, who are Mexican, that Trump would deport them and ignored his mother, who said that Trump was a fascist. And he agreed with some of the things that Trump was saying, including that Nato countries should pay more and there should be no new wars.
Looking back, he thinks: “It’s stupid to believe what I did.”
Zeka’s regrets began within months. He was deeply upset with the President’s handling of the Epstein files. He was angry that the famous men who knew Jeffrey Epstein got away without being put on trial, especially as Trump was named in the documents. But when the war on Iran began on 28 February, Zeka finally lost faith in Trump.
“It just seemed so dumb,” Zeka said. “Middle Eastern wars are a touchy subject for Americans. Trump says this one was for nuclear weapons, but a bunch of countries have nukes. North Korea has them and we haven’t been killed by them”.
Zeka is not alone. According to a recent poll by The New York Times, Trump’s approval rating among voters under 30 stands at a miserable 18 per cent. That is down 20 points from the 39 per cent of Gen Z who backed the President in the 2024 election. Trump came into office promising to end foreign wars and bring down grocery prices on day one. Instead he invaded Iran and gasoline is at its highest level in decades. For younger voters who cast their ballot in their first presidential election in 2024, the past few years have proved a brutal lesson in the realities of national politics.
“When I was at school I read the [Erik Larson] book In The Garden of the Beasts, about a US diplomat and his family who lived in Weimar Germany,” Zeka says. “It does seem every day like we’re getting closer and closer to something similar to that. I’m worried.”
The company where Zeka works is now “really struggling” due to the high cost of fertiliser. Some staff have had their hours cut from 45 to 40 a week and he fears his may be cut, too. He says he is paying hundreds of dollars more on groceries and fuel, with the cost rising with every week that passes. “I’m just disappointed with Trump,” Zeka says. “I think he’s a horrible person and I’m not happy with him.”
If Kamala Harris had taken over from Joe Biden, he believes, it “wouldn’t have been this bad”.
Addy Leugers, 21, was drawn to Trump because of his economic message, too. “The promise of an easier adulthood for people like me just starting out was very appealing,” she tells the The i Paper.
Leugers, who grew up in a devout conservative Baptist household in Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City, where Fox News was constantly on the TV, also liked the President’s bluntness. “I had a lot of friends who said, he calls it like it is,” she says. “Some people like how harsh and brash he was. He was ‘meme-able’, they think he’s funny. Some of my friends ate up the YMCA dance he does.”
Memories of the 2008 global financial crisis were still in Leugers’ mind in 2020 when, having just turned 18, she cast her vote for Trump amid the downturn caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. “He campaigned on lowering prices and people my age were getting out of high school, still working low-income jobs just trying to get by,” she says. “A lot of it was on affordability at a time we were trying to make a life for ourselves.”
At the time, Leugers was extremely pro-Maga, having watched countless hours of right-wing influencers on social media. Leugers’ views on Trump began to change during Covid when he made bizarre claims that people should inject themselves with bleach. Leugers was an essential worker with a job in a grocery store.
After the 2024 election, she was dismayed by Trump’s response to the Epstein files, which she saw as a distraction from his failings on Iran, China, ICE raids and Venezuela. As she continued to re-evaluate her beliefs, Leugers moved to Hawaii three months ago, where she now works as a behaviour technician in a clinic for autistic children.
“Trump said to us: ‘We’ll set you up for a successful future,'” she says. “We spent four years waiting and everything got harder and harder. Now diesel is over $7 a gallon. What are we doing?”
Steve Vilchez performed a similarly sharp U-turn on the President. The 22-year-old son of Mexican immigrants grew up on the North Side of Chicago. Vilchez admits that he was drawn to Trump’s brashness. He was 12 when Trump was first elected and said he was initially nervous about the 2016 presidency, but became “captivated” by conservative influencers like the late Charlie Kirk. By 2017, Vilchez was what he calls a “pretty hardcore Donald Trump supporter”.
“I like how he was very confident in himself,” he says. “Even when the experts were telling him he could do something wrong, the way he was defiant, believing he was right, that level of self assurance I really enjoyed.”
Vilchez, who is now a student biology teacher, began to have doubts about Trump due to his response to Covid and the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January, 2021. Vilchez’s view has further soured since the President took office for a second time and now he considers him a “very dangerous person”.
“It seems like a lot of Trump voters are having a lot of buyer’s remorse,” he says. “The economy is shambles, grocery prices are insane, they’re getting the message Donald Trump lied to them.
“But will they vote Democrat? I haven’t seen a lot of people saying they will do that. People are upset with the Republicans, people are dissatisfied with the Democratic Party, there’s no good option. Everyone’s just scrambling.”
Others feel that the damage caused by Trump could turn an entire generation off voting Republican.
Tina Tang, director of polling and analytics at polling company Navigator, said that their research into Gen Z showed a significant number of young voters wished they could take back their vote in 2024.
During their last survey of younger voters, Navigator asked what grade they would give the President and most people gave him Ds and Cs, but some gave Trump an F.
“Remember what it’s like being in school and getting a grade like that,” Tang said. “It’s hard to bring it back to an A”.