PHOENIX — The megachurch in Phoenix was supposed to be a venue for President Donald Trump to drum up support among the young voters who helped deliver him to the Oval Office. Instead, he found an audience whose members skewed older and were focused on divisions within their own party.
“I want to thank all the young people,” Trump said as he opened his speech in the sanctuary at Dream City Church, where the president has given several addresses, historically to a packed room. Friday, while several thousand voters of all ages whooped and cheered for the president, there were notably empty seats.
“I’ve never seen so many young people,” he insisted.
Friday’s rally was Trump’s first in-person appearance at a Turning Point USA event since late 2024. The intervening time was marked by the killing of the group’s leader and generational force, Charlie Kirk.
Trump traveled here, to the spiritual heartland of the Turning Point movement, to address a slice of his base that polling warns is drifting away from him. A CBS-YouGov poll last week found that 70 percent of adults under the age of 30 disapproved of his leadership. More than 60 percent said they disapproved of his handling of the economy and Iran.
At the event, Trump projected confidence that he would soon end the war with Iran and highlighted his efforts to change U.S. culture, such as by ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs and conducting an aggressive immigration crackdown. He said he would soon release “many very interesting documents” about UFOs, animating the crowd before he distilled the message he hopes his party can ride to victory in this fall’s midterm elections:
“If you want a poor and weak America, a country that’s riddled with crime and death, disease and nothing but problems, you should immediately vote Democrat,” Trump said. “If you want a rich and strong — and a country that you’re going to be proud of — America, you must go out in the midterms and vote Republican.”
Despite the ostensible focus on the young, the speech included several nods to the older voters in Trump’s base, and in the crowd. At one point, he introduced a string of Arizona athletes, some of whom retired before many of today’s college students were born.
A spokesperson for Turning Point USA said more than 3,000 people attended the event. The church holds approximately 4,500 people, said Ali Pardi, deputy communications director for the Phoenix Fire Department.
Before Trump’s address, a lineup of conservative speakers acknowledged the rifts in the GOP, many of them widened by podcasters and influencers who helped motivate the young people who powered Trump’s victory. The war in Iran, in particular, has pitted conservative figureheads against one another, as they fight over how American Jews and Israel should fit into their party, and what it means to be “America First.”
“I can’t put a brick in the wall and have another Republican come and take it out as soon as you put it in,” said Mark Lamb, who bills himself as “America’s Sheriff” and is running to succeed Republican Rep. Andy Biggs in Arizona’s 5th Congressional District. “If we’re going to build a red wall that will withstand the pressures of socialism in this country, and even more so in the state, we must stand together as Republicans.”
Rep. Elijah Crane, who is running for reelection in Arizona’s 2nd District, urged unity in the party by stressing that Republicans “have our issues” and “are not the solution to all of your problems,” but are better than Democrats. In endorsing Biggs for governor — in a competitive race to unseat Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs — Crane praised the Republican congressman for his willingness to buck party discipline.
“He’s the type of guy, when our party is going off the rails and not representing you guys properly, which happens a lot, he’s willing to vote against our party over and over again,” Crane said.
Still, there was plenty inside Dream City Church that united and energized the MAGA base. A man known as “Brick Guy” walked around in a suit decorated as the wall at the southern border, which he believes Trump rightly restored.
Stickers and posters proclaimed “Make America Godly Again” and “Welcome to the Spiritual War.” Volunteers registered attendees for training to help start “Christian, classical schools.” And in speeches and in line for sandwiches, there was discussion of the failures of the Democratic Party and anger toward the hundreds of protesters who greeted attendees on their way into the church with expletives and calls for Trump’s impeachment.
“We don’t want Arizona to elect people like Eric Swalwell,” said Turning Point CEO and board chair Erika Kirk, one of many who suggested that the former congressional lawmaker and California gubernatorial candidate accused of rape was representative of the Democratic Party.
One longtime Trump supporter was not planning to come to the Friday event until she saw there was hardly a line to get in.
“I’m totally shocked,” said the supporter, Diane Niemann, who refused to give her age but said she was “older than you would think.”
She wore a shirt that read “I HEART JESUS,” and a necklace bearing a cross. She said she didn’t mind Trump’s picture depicting him as Jesus (or, as he later said, a doctor).
“He does lots of controversial things,” she said. “He’s saying we need to heal the nation.”
But Niemann, a retired dental hygienist, said she is worried about the midterm elections. Her daughter, who lives in Las Vegas, has been complaining about gas prices — and Niemann can’t blame her.
The $4.98 at the pump the other day hurt her, too, and as a longtime political activist, she knows what that might mean for her party.
Others left energized by Trump’s speech. Brady McIntyre, 17, and a member of a Turning Point USA high school chapter, drove an hour with his friends to hear the president and left even more hopeful about his future.
He said he likes that Trump’s readiness to strike enemies abroad and support law enforcement at home make America seem strong. To him, it made sense when the president said that some short-term economic pain was worth it if it helped the United States use its power to impose more order in the world.
“No one is a fan of gas being expensive, but you think back to the American struggle during World War II,” he said. “Americans do have to sacrifice when things need to be done.”
McIntyre noted how he had learned about Americans rationing food during that war for the good of the country.
“You don’t see a lot of that these days.”
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