LANCASTER, Pa. – President Donald Trump was celebrating a deal to end the fighting in Iran. But some of his supporters who gathered at a Buffalo Wild Wings here to watch his UFC birthday bash were skeptical.
One young man said the more than three-month conflict “isn’t what we voted for.” Another said it reminded him of the coronavirus-era shutdowns that kept extending with calls for “two more weeks.”
“We keep hearing it’s almost over, it’s almost over,” said Jon Showalter, a 26-year-old conservative who questioned the war’s necessity. “We could be right back to it three days from now.”
The young crowd’s dismay shows why Trump was under pressure to end the war and why the political fallout could linger. The conflict has divided Republicans, alienated independents and intensified Americans’ angst about the economy less than five months before the midterm elections.
The attacks on Iran also frustrated some young voters drawn to Trump’s past anti-war rhetoric, at a time when young men who helped power his 2024 victory were already turning on him.
Trump said his deal with Iran this week would prevent the country from obtaining a nuclear weapon, but Iranian officials have suggested those conversations are still underway. Most Americans are skeptical that the conflict was worth it, polls found.
The U.S. and Israel quickly killed Iran’s supreme leader in February attacks, but have failed to topple its regime or deliver the “freedom” for the Iranian people that Trump once hoped for. The war halted traffic through a key oil route, the Strait of Hormuz, upending the global economy and sending gas prices above $4 a gallon.
Reopening the waterway is the primary achievement of Trump’s deal, which is set to be signed Friday. “Let the oil flow!” Trump declared on social media Sunday.
But gas prices could remain elevated for months even if the conflict winds down soon, analysts have warned.
Whit Ayres, a longtime Republican pollster, said the war “feeds into preexisting concerns about inflation that was caused by tariffs and other policies.”
“The war has not been popular from the start in part because the rationale was never clearly explained,” he said.
A June Reuters-Ipsos survey found 53 percent of Americans saying U.S. military action in Iran was not worth the costs, compared with 25 percent saying it was.
The war also drew an outcry from some influencers long sympathetic to Trump who viewed it as a betrayal of his campaign promises to keep the U.S. out of foreign wars. Right–wing stars such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson loudly criticized Trump; the popular podcaster Joe Rogan vented about the war on his show last week.
“Most people in the country don’t want it,” Rogan said. “All the people I know that are like America First, or people that are like no new wars, that really thought that we’re going to change things … those people are all upset.”
More than two-thirds of independents disapproved of how Trump has handled Iran in a recent CBS-YouGov poll, along with a quarter of Trump voters and 16 percent of self-identified “MAGA” supporters. And nearly one in 1 in 5 people who voted for Trump said they disapproved of his job as president overall.
Trump’s approval rating fell from 40 percent in February to 36 percent in polls since early May, according to a Washington Post average, his worst mark since returning to office. An Economist-YouGov poll last week found Trump with a negative 34 net economic approval rating, compared with negative 20 before the war began.
White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales said in a statement that Trump “remains committed to lowering costs for American families with his proven, commonsense agenda of deregulation, tax cuts, and energy abundance” and touted gains from his military interventions.
“Time and again, the Panicans have been proven wrong about President Trump’s foreign policy agenda,” Wales said.
Many of Trump’s supporters have brushed off the war as a temporary disruption. The deal announced this week gave them new hope the president could move on from it.
“Everybody’s freaking out about the oil and stuff … but I think it was necessary,” said Roland Oatman, an Amazon employee, said from the Buffalo Wild Wings bar where patrons roared at each UFC knockout.
“It needed to be done,” echoed Dylan Canavan, a 37-year-old who stood up from the bar a few seats over at one point to shout, “Let’s go Trump!”
Showalter, who questioned if the war was truly ending, said he mostly likes what Trump has been doing, including his immigration crackdown and his opposition to transgender athletes in women’s sports. Iran was the exception.
He wasn’t convinced that Iran was on the verge of getting nuclear weapons.
“I don’t like being a part of a war [where] I don’t fully understand why,” Showalter said.
The overwhelmingly young male watch party audience also reflected the widening cracks in Trump’s coalition, although most of his detractors were reluctant to be named criticizing him. Asked about the president’s job performance, one 36-year-old Trump voter hesitated and then said: “He’s doing … a job.” Another, a 28-year-old three-time Trump voter, said the president had misled voters.
Young men swung toward Trump in 2024, with men under 30 narrowly favoring him four years after exit polls showed them backing Democrat Joe Biden by double digits. Now that support is eroding.
An April Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found 70 percent of men ages 18 to 29 disapproved of Trump. And a Harvard Youth poll found this spring that among young registered voters who backed Trump in 2024, 72 percent said they would vote for a Republican candidate in the midterms compared with 89 percent of Kamala Harris voters who would vote for a Democrat.
“Clearly the experience that younger people are having, including younger people who voted for Trump, has not met the expectations or the promises they felt that Trump was making,” said pollster John Della Volpe, who oversees the Harvard Youth poll.
Scott Clement contributed to this report from Washington.
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