As a teenager, Alex Johnson joined rallies for Donald Trump believing that he was “exactly what we needed.”
Now 26, Mr. Johnson was deployed to Iraq and Syria for seven months as an Army combat photographer before starting classes at Syracuse University last fall. And he rejects what he views as the naïve idea that war is never justified.
But Mr. Johnson is no fan of the conflict in Iran — and he’s not pleased with the president.
“He’s just not the same person,” said Mr. Johnson, who leads the campus’s chapter of College Republicans. He and many of his peers believe that the party needs a complete overhaul. “I think that’s just emblematic of how much we feel betrayed,” he said.
Young adults across the United States have increasingly flexed their political muscle. They proved formidable in races from the 2022 midterms to New York City’s mayoral election, turning out in droves to help fuel Zohran Mamdani’s rise to office. President Trump worked hard to court them in 2024, and he saw the results at the polls.
But in nearly two dozen interviews with current and recent college students, a sharp divide emerged over the war with Iran — a divide that could imperil that support. Most of them led conservative political organizations and voted for the first time in 2024, for Mr. Trump.
On American campuses stretching from upstate New York, to Midwestern cities, to a university that’s a 20-minute walk away from the Situation Room, young Republicans disagreed over whether the ongoing conflict represents a milestone for a bold administration — or the nadir of one that has lost the plot.
For Braeden Prunier, 20, a second-year student at the University of Chicago, the military action has instilled pride in the United States for standing up for the Iranian people and in an intrepid commander in chief who remains adamant that Iran never acquire the capability to build a nuclear weapon.
“For the longest time as a young voter, I felt like Iran was a threat,” said Mr. Prunier, the president of the campus’s College Republicans group. “It’s the right thing to do. We have to shut down the Iranian regime. We have to take out the ayatollah. They are killing protesters.”
More than 750 miles away, the president of another College Republicans chapter, Garrett Tomberlin, 21, was staunchly opposed to the war.
A junior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he has struggled to identify what the United States has gained from the war. But he sees what it is losing, he said. He has become a de facto chauffeur for his friends with gas cars; he drives a Tesla.
“This isn’t something that we voted for,” said Mr. Tomberlin, who currently plans to sit out the midterm elections.
The split over the war in Iran among young adults is borne out in public opinion polls. While a majority of Republicans back the decision to take military action, support is far shakier among the party’s youngest constituents.
In a survey last month by the Pew Research Center, 49 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds approved of how Mr. Trump was handling the war — compared with more than three-fourths of those 50 and older.
Aneesh Swaminathan, 20, a junior at Johns Hopkins University, said he believed that the president had been solid on international affairs. But at his school’s College Republicans chapter, which he leads, “no single issue has divided our club more than foreign policy,” Mr. Swaminathan said.
“I think that disagreement within the right — especially the young right — is going to be the defining issue of the midterm elections and the future of the Republican Party,” he said.
As many Americans broadly express opposition to the war, Mr. Trump has frequently suggested a deal is close. A 10-day cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon went into effect on Friday, removing a major obstacle to peace talks.
Elected leaders have taken note of the simmering discord. Vice President JD Vance on Tuesday told a crowd at a Turning Point USA event at the University of Georgia: “I recognize that young voters do not love the policy we have in the Middle East, OK.”
At George Washington University, whose politically active campus in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington, D.C., sits about five blocks from the White House, several conservative student organizations recently convened for a forum on the war.
The room broke virtually 50-50, in favor and against.
Kieran Laffey, 20, a junior, said in an interview that he believed a weakened Iran was good for the United States and that he supported the mantra of peace through strength. But he worries messaging to young people has fallen short.
“I hear from a lot of my peers that they don’t feel like he’s kept the promise of no new wars and peace,” Mr. Laffey said.
“I think the one thing we can do as conservatives here on campus is really have trust in our president,” Paul Lieb, 20, a sophomore, chimed in.
In conversations with young conservatives, the war in Iran sometimes became a test case for views on the second Trump term. Some who mostly see successes were willing to remain patient, whether because they felt a strategic and moral imperative in Iran — or because they had maintained faith in the president’s case for why a short-term conflict was necessary.
For others, who were already disillusioned about what they regard as broken promises to deport millions of people and promote transparency on the Epstein files, Feb. 28 — the day that the United States and Israel launched the attack on Iran — was the final straw.
Several were skeptical of the role that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has had in pushing for the war, a stance reflected in polls of young people.
“I was completely for freeing the people of Iran when it started,” said Sierra Fernandez, 19, a freshman at the University at Buffalo. “It’s been feeling more like we’re doing this because Israel’s telling us to do it. And I’m not a big fan of that.”
The wide-ranging views among young conservatives reflected a broader tension between hawks and isolationists that has stretched across generations.
Several recalled Mr. Trump suggesting during his 2016 campaign that former President George W. Bush should have been impeached for invading Iraq. And they had been galvanized by the more recent promise of a golden age of American prosperity and the rejection of the notion that the country should serve as the world’s police.
“I fell hook, line and sinker for the concepts of America First,” said Jack Lyle, a 22-year-old junior at Clemson University who is the chair of the campus’s College Republicans chapter. “At the end of the day, this is a total repudiation of 2016, 2020, 2024.”
When Operation Midnight Hammer, the bombing of three Iranian nuclear sites last June, unfolded, Mr. Lyle said, “That was like, OK, I get it: You lied. You tricked me.”
To some young people, the preoccupation with the Middle East seemed misplaced as many students were struggling with rising costs of living and grim career prospects. The unemployment rate for college graduates who are 22 to 27 years old rose to 5.6 percent at the end of last year, up over the past three years.
“The Gen Z population in America, they’ve been left out,” said Utkarsh Jain, 23, a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, who described himself as generally supportive of a limited endeavor in Iran. “Economically, socially, just all around — they’re lost.”
“It’s just not a good time to be a young person,” Mr. Jain said.
Daniel Silvester, 22, a fourth year-student at Eastern Connecticut State University, works two jobs, including one that pays minimum wage for 12 hours a week. Those paychecks mostly cover the cost of gas these days: He just spent $110 filling up his truck.
Mr. Silvester, who plans to pursue a master’s degree in education, wishes political leaders were more focused on affordability at home than affairs abroad.
“It doesn’t look like I’m going to be able to afford a house,” Mr. Silvester, who vehemently disagrees with the war, said. “Renting is going to be expensive. Then you have to layer on insurance costs and utilities, food to put on the table — my gas prices.”
It remains unclear how deep the fault line runs.
To Ben Rothove, a junior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the narrative that the United States is losing the war is patently wrong, and broad support for the actions in Iran remains prevalent among his peers.
“I see people online saying that there’s these mass revolts among young people,” said Mr. Rothove, a 21-year-old and the president emeritus of the College Republicans chapter on campus. “I’m just not fully convinced of that.”
Others feel more intense political tremors. Carson Carpenter, 20, a recent graduate of Arizona State University who led his own campus’s College Republicans chapter, sees a deep disconnect “between the Boomer and the Gen Z generation of conservatives.”
“It truly can’t be overstated,” he said.
Troy Closson is a reporter for The Times covering children, teenagers and young adults in New York City.
The post They’re Young. They’re Conservative. And They’re Split Over the War. appeared first on New York Times.
