The enthusiastic at this year’s Republican National Convention were certainly of the older variety. Credit: Getty
It’s nearly 9 p.m. inside Dallas’s American Airlines Center, and Trump supporters are waving their cowboy hats in the air. They are slowly rocking from side to side as Lee Greenwood belts out “God Bless the USA” to the party faithful. The mood is triumphant, even euphoric, particularly once the president enters stage left. He is about to announce the dawn of a new golden age, but there’s a catch: “You know what happens if you don’t vote?” he asks. “You go to hell. You know that, okay? You go to hell, and I don’t want that to happen to you.”
This week’s GOP midterm convention — the first of its kind in more than 40 years — was supposed to be the big reset for a party hemorrhaging public support amid an unpopular war, rising fuel prices, and a broader cost-of-living crisis. Against this grim backdrop, the gathering, which became known as Trumpapalooza, was a chance for the party to regroup, fire up the base, and wrest back control of a narrative that could derail its electoral hopes in November.
It ended with the threat of eternal damnation (albeit a jokey one).
Trumpapalooza was meant to remind Republicans why they had put their faith in the president in the first place. But it had almost the opposite effect, drawing attention to just how different the man standing before them today was from the one they knew 10, or even two, years ago. He could still command a crowd with his impressions of Emmanuel Macron and his pronunciation of Lenin as “Len-een.” But beneath the cheers, it became clear that the populist fire that once drove the Trumpist insurgencies of 2016 and 2024 had greatly diminished, if not been extinguished altogether. Young conservatives, in particular, appeared to have all but abandoned the project, leaving behind a graying bunch.
Nearly everyone I spoke to at the convention acknowledged that a generational divide inside the party was emerging. Some dismissed it as a youthful rebellion, while others offered a bleaker diagnosis. They argued that Trump was the final string in the Republican bow, and once that snapped, there was no coming back. He was supposed to be the galvanizing force around which the entire movement was built. Now, he had become the very thing pulling it apart.
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Conventions are rarely known for attracting the young and hip. And Trumpapalooza was no different. Inside this jumbo-sized arena, where every doorway and entrance was festooned with some kind of Trump poster, it looked more like a Caribbean cruise holiday than a political convention. The vast majority of the crowd were retirees, dressed head to toe in their finest MAGA regalia: sequin jackets with “DJT” emblazoned on the back, star-spangled cowboy boots, and T-shirts with Trump’s Georgia mugshot on the front. There was no alcohol, but spirits were so high I thought something had been slipped into their drinks. It was like Glastonbury for boomercons.
On both days, the stadium was slow to fill and never reached full capacity. It did, however, grow lively as familiar faces took to the stage. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas got one of the biggest cheers of the convention when he declared that “Sharia law has no place in America” — a point that was echoed, again and again, by other speakers. Most focused on the twin threat of Islamo-communism, punctuated by a recorded message from Trump intoning, “America must never be a communist country,” between each speech.
It was like a form of exposure therapy, repeated so many times that it felt more like a mantra than a message. Older attendees lapped it up, but the few young conservatives I spoke to were less impressed. “So far, all I’ve heard is communism, communism, communism, and that Iran must never have a nuclear weapon,” said one. “It’s like their brains have broken.” Another told me that he wasn’t even sure why he came.
Part of their frustration stemmed from the president’s outright denial that anything was wrong. In his two keynote speeches, Trump struck a jubilant tone, celebrating “the most successful two years, financially and every other way, in the history of the presidency.” But it was clear that very few were buying into this narrative. Even Fox’s Laura Ingraham, a longtime supporter of the president, told Trump that he would be “cruising” if he hadn’t invaded Iran, adding that young men were feeling “demoralized.”
They have every reason to be. The same day Trump declared that Iran had been decimated, Tehran-backed Houthi forces seized a major Red Sea port, potentially giving the group greater control over a key oil-shipping route and threatening to destabilize already-shaky global energy markets. Core inflation also grew last month, further squeezing Americans’ finances at a time when gas and food prices were already rising. No one at the convention wanted to talk about these grim developments — it was a convention, not a town hall, after all — and this was about keeping up appearances.
Still, it was a telling moment on the first day of the convention that young people appeared more interested in sideline remarks from Groyper-courting James Fishback, who lost the Florida Republican gubernatorial primary to Rep. Byron Donalds last month, than in any of the speeches taking place inside the stadium. As he wandered around the arena, greeting fans and even having a tête-à-tête with the far-Right firebrand Laura Loomer, Fishback was trailed by a phalanx of young Republicans hanging on his every word.
“Guys like James Fishback and Nick Fuentes are guys we have to consider,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief adviser, tells me. “Young people are telling older people that they don’t want to hear about legal immigration anymore because legal immigrants are stealing their jobs. They’re not hearing about mass deportations anymore, either. Young people are feeling the brunt of that. They don’t care about the Greater Israel project.”
This may be an extreme position, but it reflects the anti-establishment sentiment coursing through the young Right and Left. Both camps share a deep hostility toward the party establishment and a desire for a far more radical policy program. One side wants no borders. The other wants a sealed border. One wants to abolish ICE. The other wants to deport millions. One wants to abolish the Senate. The other wants a CEO-monarch. The only point on which the two sides converge is Israel.
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I asked Sean Spicer, Trump’s former press secretary, if he is concerned by this dynamic. He agreed that young voters had become more populist in the last few years, but it did not pose a major problem for the GOP. “Young voters are very transactional, and they’re not as motivated as seniors,” he says. “If they’re not going to vote Republican, I’d rather they just don’t vote. That’s not great, but it’s not the worst scenario.”
The problem, though, is that the longer these issues are ignored by the GOP leadership, the more space they create for irresponsible actors to exploit them. Israel is the clearest example. In recent years, an overdue conversation about recalibrating US-Israeli relations has curdled into something far uglier on the Right, with the rise of figures such as Candace Owens, Fuentes, and Fishback. Yet this has prompted no soul-searching among party leaders, who refuse to countenance any kind of debate on the issue. Just last night, RFK Jr. randomly pivoted from health issues to praising the Jewish state as a “bulwark of democracy” and “America’s most critical frontline ally.” It was exactly the kind of rote statement that will be clipped, circulated, and mocked among Zoomer circles.
A little more than 40 years ago, V.S. Naipaul went to the Republican National Convention, also in Dallas. He bemoaned the quality of speeches, complaining that all contained “the same tone, the same personality (or absence of it), the same language: unallusive, cleansed, sterile; nerveless and dead; computer language, programmed sometimes to rise to passion, but getting no higher than copywriter’s glib,” he wrote. “As though, at the heart of this great, man-magnifying occasion, there was a hollow, a vacancy.”
Today, that vacancy feels deeper than ever. As one young attendee succinctly put it to me: “It’s over, but we’re not allowed to say it’s over.”
