Stephen Miller is not much of a man, at least by the increasingly herculean standards of the right. Gawky, bald and pasty, Miller nevertheless rose through the ranks during Donald Trump’s second administration, most recently moving from an advisory role to the lame-duck leader’s chief of staff.
In this role, Axios reports, Miller has one priority: winning back young American men to the MAGA cause.
The right sees young men as one of its most important demographic groups, as they have been less responsive to the general shift of young people to the left over the past 20 years. But after making massive gains with the group in the 2024 cycle, Trump’s MAGA Man project has stumbled, its support drying up faster than the front lawn of a Texas fraternity house. In the 2026 midterm elections, young men switched 38 points in favor of Democrats compared to how they voted in 2024. Why this happened is a complex puzzle, but the most important piece is clear: Americans are tired of war. In Iran, they faced the existential threat that America would revert to the warrior nation that dragged their older brothers and parents’ generation into 20 years of needless bloodshed in the Middle East.
Miller seems to have identified it very early. The New York Times reported last week that Miller’s speech to Trump as he sought the chief of staff post involved direct advice to end the war in Iran, which Miller said — rightly — had alienated supporters he could not afford to lose.
But Iran is only part of the picture. I’ve been reporting on masculinity in America for years, and the anxieties facing young voters are more holistic than just the fear of being sent to die in a foreign country. That’s part of it, of course — while Gen Z was mostly too young to fight at the height of the global war on terror, many of them remember their older siblings or parents who spent years in Iraq or Afghanistan. But what they remember even more are the economic effects of 20 years of American war. For many of the young men I’ve spoken to in recent years, their childhood political memories aren’t of Clinton getting a blowjob or the overall trauma of 9/11. The older ones remember that their parents lost their jobs during the 2008 crash; those who are younger have left high school or university and entered directly into the Covid pandemic.
Now, with missiles flying over the Persian Gulf, young men are seeing it happen again: the price of gasoline and the price of food are rising, and the promise of owning a home and someday retiring is falling further into disrepair, even if they aren’t drafted to fight for a cause they don’t support.
In 2016, and even more so in 2024, Donald Trump effectively exploited young men’s anxiety about their place in the world. In both campaigns, he met men where they were: in 2016 on social media and in 2024 in a new media world populated by podcasters and influencers. These two places gave a generation of young men adrift a culture in which they felt at home – and with Trump, they had a leader with them.
It had a profound effect. Some young conservatives, at least, still see their futures as directly tied to Trump, likely because the MAGA movement was the first time they felt a sense of political agency or control. But for those less ideologically tied to Trump, the relationship is more transactional. Sure, young men might appreciate Trump walking around on TV and talking trash. But what his successful campaigns did was promise these men something concrete: their prices going down, their fortunes going up, a leader who will fight for their place in the world. A few years ago, at a UFC fight just after Trump was elected for the second time, two twenty-somethings told me they liked that Trump “presented himself as a fighter,” which they said “resonates with a lot of people who are hurting.” “When they see a strong number like that, it gives them a sense of hope,” one said.
The difference now is that Trump no longer represents that hope. And that means Miller has a very, very high hill to climb. He cannot, as he did in 2024, simply tell men to “show you’re not an idiot” and vote for Trump. Axios reports that Miller should focus more on this friend of the culture war, cracking down on “woke” politics in schools and offices.
But all this is just smoke and mirrors. In the midterms, young men turned to the Democrats in record numbers because the party offered them something: an end to foreign wars, a better chance to look forward to the future. Even if Miller succeeds and gets Trump to roll back the war in Iran, young men aren’t stupid: you barely get credit for “ending” a war you started in the first place.
Axios reports that Miller also plans to promote other economic reforms mentioned by the Trump administration but not implemented in the past, such as prescription drug pricing, but that they will also continue to focus on fraud and eliminating federal bureaucracy. These latter points seem like a rethinking of DOGE, an idea that might have sounded good on paper initially, but which has yielded unclear, if not disastrous, real-world results. Still, it’s a sign that Miller has identified some of the fundamental problems that he says caused Trump to lose votes among all demographic groups, not just young men. Democrats, however, have their own ideas about what Americans voted on this month, and they can use strong majorities in both houses of Congress to advance them.
The next two years will therefore determine which party will be able to persuade young men that it is fighting for them. Miller took on this task, which Democrats should see as an opportunity. After all, he doesn’t seem that hard to beat.
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