Aabout half an hour in Section 694 of Announcer podcast, and after a lively discussion on manscaping techniques, Andrew Schulz leaned back on the couch and rested his chin. “Do you guys, like—feel worried enough about the war?” He asked his fellow villagers. Schulz seemed to feel a little. “Americans can’t afford health care,” he later said. “They don’t care about what’s happening in Iran!” War hawks have been agitating for years for this war, he added. With President Trump, “they found someone stupid enough to do it.”
Schulz voted for Trump in 2024, after having him on a podcast—a move that angered many liberals. But the 42-year-old comedian was never what one might call a “full-on MAGA,” and he’s not an outspoken Republican. Instead, Schulz is representative of a subset of Trump’s voting base: moderates who like free speech and are attracted to politicians who seem anti-establishment and, perhaps most importantly, anti-woke. (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 much has changed since November 2024. Schulz and many of his fellow commentators on world affairs seem to feel—to varying degrees—being lied to by the president they helped elect. Some have been airing those complaints for months, starting with Trump’s handling of the Epstein files and, later, the killing of an American citizen at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis. For Schulz and others like him, a brand new war in the Middle East is a betrayal so big, you almost have to laugh. “The only shot you have at a good life right now is to rush the rapture,” Tim Dillon, another podcast host and comedian, said on a recent episode. “Our country’s foreign and economic policy is currently a rapture.”
The progressive views of Schulz and others in this group are notable because they represent a reversal of support for the president. Their discontent has been growing since even before Trump went to war. “Cracks have been showing for a while,” Charlie Sabgir, director of the Young Men Research Project group, told me. For some, Iran “may be the last straw.”
MAGA believers are in abundance to accompany the president. Not so for everyone else. Several new polls show that some of the voting blocs that helped propel Trump to victory in 2024 have lost faith in him: His support young people has cratered; so he has his approval among Latinos. According to one study, more liberal voters not agree of the president now than they did at any time during his first term. The broad coalition that returned Trump to the White House does not seem to exist anymore. In the short term, this development bodes well for Democrats. In the long run, it may shed light on the second iteration of Trumpism.
Ii have watched almost every new episode of Announcer since the 2024 election. The show, which stars Schulz and his comedian Akaash Singh, along with co-hosts AlexxMedia and Mark Gagnon, is often funny, sometimes insightful, and often mind-boggling. The most interesting parts involve Schulz and the boys discussing the news of the day, as they argue heatedly about their arbitrarily held views, many of which don’t parse as liberal or conservative. They sound, in other words, like the average American voter.
Schulz voted for Trump in 2024 because he didn’t trust the Democrats and the economy and because he considered the Democrats pious and offensive. He and the boys seemed very happy about the testosterone of the incoming administration. “The way Tom Homan was talking about those groups? This is hot!” Schulz said. Later, on the topic of Houthis in Yemen, Singh gleefully predicted that “Trump is going to wreak havoc on these people!”
But Trump didn’t make enough of a fuss. Six months into his second term, prices were still high, and he had signed a bill that significantly increased the deficit. Then, in talks about his campaign promises, he blocked the release of the Epstein files. “It’s clear that the Trump administration is trying to cover it up,” Schulz said in a speech in July, during an episode in which he and his co-hosts wore tinfoil hats. This is not what he voted for, he added. “I want him to stop the war; he’s funding! I want him to reduce spending, reduce the budget; he’s increasing!” (Schulz, through a spokesman, declined to comment.)
Even Trump’s exile was becoming more and more. By December, Schulz and the boys were discussing whether and how they would hide immigrants from ICE in their homes. The killing of Alex Pretti in Minnesota by federal agents in January led to the second major step in Schulz’s transition to Trump. “ICE killed an American citizen in cold blood,” he said. “I see the administration trying to get around it, and it’s really disgusting.” The operation had gotten out of hand, and Schulz and others were beginning to suspect that the brutality and chaos were deliberate. Alexx Media, Announcera frequent left-wing voice, couldn’t resist saying that Trump “said he was going to do this.”
When Trump dragged the United States into a war with Iran, Schulz and the youth could not understand it. “Usually, Americans are angry about it, right? Because we’re like, ‘How does hooking work for me?’ Schulz said. “‘I can’t pay for college, I can’t buy a house, I can’t pay for health insurance, and we’re going to spend billions of dollars on a war in a country that I can’t even show on a map?'” (Later, he predicted that it would be more difficult to keep a friendly American leader in Iran, a country led by theocracies close to Venezuela. In the end, he said, because, unlike South Americans, Iranians “don’t have reggaeton” or don’t know how to “enjoy life.”)
Many other actors have followed Schulz’s path, as the initial excitement of Trump’s victory over the wake gave way to confusion and disillusionment. Last year, Joe Rogan was confused that Trump was withholding the Epstein files; earlier this month, Rogan complained that Trump’s actions in Iran are “pretty crazy, based on what he’s done.” This week, Rogan claimed that MAGA is “a movement of a bunch of dorks.” Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL and CIA contractor who 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 lie,” Ryan said.
Perhaps predictably, some of this Iran-related criticism has turned anti-Semitic. Several Trump allies—including conservative commentators Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, and hard-line lobbyist Nick Fuentes—have suggested that the president was misled into the war. “That unfortunately becomes the narrative” among other young men, Dan Cassino, a pollster and political scientist who studies masculinity, told me. “It is Oh, the Jews tricked Trump into this.”
Ebefore Iran, there was a lot of turmoil in Trump’s world. For months, Owens and his internet friends have been waging a conspiracy against Turning Point USA and Erika Kirk over the murder of her husband, Charlie. Once friends Megyn Kelly and Ben Shapiro are at each other’s throats. As the GOP tries to push women back into its fold, conservative Christians are publicly considering repealing the Nineteenth Amendment.
Prepare for new battles, and you have something worse for MAGA than turmoil. You are discouraged and careless in the middle year. You have, like right-wing commentator Mike Cernovich set it to X last week, “the union of the generations, wasted.”
While a majority of self-identified Republicans approve of Trump’s handling of the war, according to a recent survey from Pew Research Centeronly half lean Republican independent voters say the same. There are age gaps, too: Older Republicans generally approve of Trump’s defiance, while less than half of those 18 to 29 do. Cassino told me he’s not too impressed with Trump’s overall approval numbers. “The main thing I’ve been looking at is the number of ‘don’t know'” responses in the polls, which “have gone through the roof,” Cassino said. The trend shows that many voters are no longer sure whether Trump is trustworthy or doing the right thing for the country. For them, Trump has become one unreliable politician.
Of course, many MAGA types will continue to vote Republican. (“I don’t care how crazy you are in the Republican Party. You get death on the streets of America if you vote Democrat,” Kelly said in recent podcastBut many of the disillusioned young independents who voted for Trump in 2024 have never been deeply involved in any party and tend, in general, to keep politics out. These voters probably won’t vote for Democrats in November—but they also can’t be expected to turn out and vote for the GOP. “Staying at home,” Charlie Sabgir explained, “is the most likely outcome.” On top of recent period of Shawn Ryan’s podcast, Kent told Ryan that Republicans “will need a lot of MAGA zealots to come knocking.” “Don’t come knocking on my door,” Ryan replied. “I don’t want to hear any more of that fuckin lie.”
All of this is good news for Democrats. The GOP’s low turnout may help them ride a blue wave in the midterms, like the one that swept Trump’s party in 2018. Already, Democrats have flipped 30 state congressional seats across the country, and candidates who did better Kamala Harris shows 2024 with an average of almost 13 points.
But the revelation of Trump’s coalition also offers a glimpse of where the MAGA movement is going next—and who might lead it. There is a clear opening now for someone to pick up the fallen mantle of Trumpism and carry it further than the president himself was already. That person could be like Representative Thomas Massie, a frequently anti-war lawmaker famous for being a thorn in Trump’s side. It could also, theoretically, be someone like Fuentes, a dark-minded man with a growing following.
“If Trump did one of things, we would be happy!” Singh told Schulz in an episode last July. “Stop the endless war, stop the spending, release the Epstein files — we’d be like, ‘You know what? Okay, cool!’” Whoever follows those promises just might conquer the world.
