Gen Z Is Souring on Trump
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/08/2026-election-primaries-democrats-gen-z-adam-mockler-youtube.html
Gen Z Is Souring on Trump
Here’s how Democrats can capitalize.
Listen to What Next:
Adam Mockler is the Energizer Bunny of liberal debate bros. When he’s not getting into it with CNN personality Scott Jennings, the 23-year-old hosts the podcast The Adam Mockler Show and runs a popular YouTube channel. And following Donald Trump’s success with young men in 2024, he has carved out a niche for himself as a Gen Z whisperer.
Mockler’s kind of a funny guy. If you squint and look at him one way, he seems like a moderate, but look at him from another angle, and he seems super progressive. In a way, he’s a bit of both. He wants a big tent for the Democrats. And for these midterms, as Gen Z voters are starting to sour on Trump, he’s getting one.
His first order of business: reframing the party’s messaging. In 2024, he said, young people fell for a “Trump vision of the country that the Democrats didn’t have, these big, bold ideas: Drill, baby, drill. Build the wall.” Kamala Harris’ messaging, on the other hand, was harder to follow. “Her policy was: ‘If you are a homebuyer under the age of 25 and you live in a certain area, you may be qualified for a $23,000 tax deduction, but only if you live in x, y, and z states,’ ” Mockler said. “It’s like: Wait a minute, you’re starting to lose me on the nitty-gritty of this.”
On a recent episode of What Next, host Mary Harris spoke to Mockler about the role of nuance in viral debate videos and what it would take for Democrats to win the zoomers. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Mary Harris: I think of you as a photo negative of Charlie Kirk. You’re both from the Midwest, you both dropped out of college, and you both have built these political media empires. In the 2024 election, Gen Z—especially Gen Z men—had a real impact. As you’re out there talking with people in your generation, are you seeing younger voters sour on Donald Trump?
Adam Mockler: Younger voters absolutely are souring on Trump. Now, I need to provide some context as to how younger voters view the 2024 election. A lot of young people weren’t paying attention to the first Trump administration. I was in middle school and near the beginning of high school when he was first president. Most young people were not super locked in during those years to what was happening in the White House.
So Trump was like a vibe. It wasn’t like a real thing.
It was like a vibe. Most young people’s vibe of that time was, “Hey, summer 2017, summer 2018 was a good time. I don’t remember things being expensive because my parents were paying for things. That seemed like a good time, right?” So when Trump began to run in 2023 and ’24, he was able to capitalize on the fact that many young people didn’t see what he was like as an executive. He was able to say: “No new wars, I’m going to fix the economy on Day 1, I’m going to do this, this, and this.” He came with these bold ideas and somehow was able to paint himself as a change agent coming from the outside. That’s not true. He had four years in the White House. He’s a billionaire. He’s not an outsider. But young people, unfortunately, seem to have fallen for that bit.
So when it comes to the economy and war, we’re seeing in real time that he’s doing the opposite. He’s not just somebody who’s starting new wars. He’s actively posting memes about him and Benjamin Netanyahu sitting on the Gaza Strip after it’s been turned into the Trump Strip. All of my generation’s lowest expectations were then beaten by Trump as he goes lower and lower and lower, as he starts these new wars, as gas prices are spiking and the tariffs are on. I think this really bothers a lot of young people. And young people really do care about the topic of Israel and Palestine, and Trump has not delivered in any sense on that. He’s been the opposite of what we expected.
So you’re saying that young voters memory-holed Trump 1. I believe you on that, but that seems like an epic fail on the Democrats’ part. There was plenty of material from Trump 1 that you could have reupped and said, “Hey, guys, maybe don’t vote for this person.”
It’s a problem with the broader American electorate. I was going to a bunch of Trump rallies before the 2024 election, and you know what topics I would ask about? Jan. 6, stolen elections, and stuff that I cared about. I thought democracy was the issue. I thought Americans cared about Trump trying to overturn an election. And I was humbled so hard on Election Day 2024. I was like: Did I really just spend four months asking Trump supporters about Jan. 6, when that’s something that no American seems to care about? So even though Trump’s first term was memory-holed by young people, the vast majority of people who voted for Trump, the 75 million, also memory-holed it. I do think it was a failure on the Democrats’ side to have a captivating vision and message for the country. During the four years that Joe Biden was president, he lost our message on immigration, so Trump was able to swoop in with the most radical immigration messaging possible. There was no tension on the other side to push back. Biden didn’t have that.
So we’re now a couple of years into the Trump administration, heading into the midterms. There’s definitely evidence that Gen Z is seeing what’s happening, as you’re saying, and being like, Huh, this isn’t what I expected. Is the messaging better now? I don’t know that there’s great evidence that Gen Z is turning toward Democrats.
Well, we have a few good examples: people like Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed, AOC, who are really captivating. We also have even more moderate Democrats, like Abigail Spanberger, who’s passing good legislation. I think this does increase and improve our messaging. Trump is also leaving all these openings. Young people see that this administration is starting wars; we’re almost 200 days into the Iran war, which they said was going to be 28 days long. The Democratic Party needs to reclaim the mantle of being the anti-war party. We still need to fix a lot, but some candidates are really starting to understand how to message. They’re going on more podcasts. Pete Buttigieg is going on Andrew Schulz and these other comedians’ shows. Theo Von is having on more Democrats. We’re starting to get there.
You’ve said in the past that liberals are losing the clip war, essentially. I see your work as trying to push back on that, to create enough content that can flood people’s feeds and combat what they would naturally see there, which might be more conservative messaging. Is that how you view your project?
That’s a big part of it. Donald Trump has turned basically every single governmental agency into a meme account on Twitter right now. I swear to God, the Department of Interior is, for some reason, posting memes of immigrants being hauled off. The “Department of War” is posting edits of wars happening in the Middle East. The White House account is shitposts right now about deporting immigrants and starting wars.
We need our own volume. If I open Twitter right now and go to Elon Musk’s feed, I guarantee he’s tweeted hundreds of times over the past week about trans people or immigrants. He’s always pushing these far-right messages. On the left, we need that same amount of volume, but we need to stick up for affirmative liberal values. It’s easy to flood the internet with fake videos of stolen elections. That’s what Trump did: A.I. videos of people planting ballot boxes in Wisconsin and Michigan. It’s much harder to flood the internet with real, factual videos about how elections deserve to be safe and secure and you shouldn’t deny elections. The facts are messy or nuanced. Reality is rather boring at times, so there needs to be some sort of explosive, in-your-face version of liberalism that tries to fight for human dignity and social harmony and all these things that we care about, while also being a little bit aggressive.
The way you do that is primarily through debate, right? You’re taking other people’s work or information and you’re finding a way to manipulate it, make it more metabolizable for the American public. Debate is one way to do that, but I’ve got to say, I struggle with that format. I worry that dunking on people doesn’t necessarily change their minds. Have you had an internal debate about that?
The goal is actually never to just dunk on people. There’s a few clips out there of me, when I first started going to Trump rallies, genuinely changing someone’s mind. Dunking on people doesn’t change their mind—you’re right. Having genuine conversation can change people’s minds, but you also have to remember the battlefield we’re on right now. It’s not just about changing the mind of the person you’re talking to. It’s that after you clip this up, it will have millions and millions of views across the internet.
I did something with Jubilee Media a few months back, where I did a Surrounded episode, and some people were asking me, “Do you really want to go on this platform and try to dunk on people?” In my mindset, if I cede this platform to the other side, then who’s going to get to do Jubilee? Ben Shapiro? Would I rather 30 Ben Shapiro clips out there of him dunking on college students that are liberal and don’t really know what they’re talking about, or would I rather have some narrative control about election fraud, gay rights, social harmony, human dignity, and ICE? And 10 out of 10 times, I would rather have my clips and my views being pushed. So the goal isn’t always to maximally dunk on somebody.
You’re doing your own debate show now, but when you describe it more fully, you talk about conversation; you talk about creating dialog at a time when America is uniquely divided. And then the headline for it on YouTube is “I Changed a MAGA Voter’s Mind in 20 Minutes.” It’s not quite dunking, but it’s like you have to play to the algorithm. I think that constrains what you’re able to do.
I agree. It’s something my team and I talk about all the time: the trade-off of playing to the algorithm versus staying true to what you’d want to do. This trade-off almost always falls on the side of maximizing your reach and volume. If I’m posting these debate videos and I’m like, “Adam Mockler Debates Brady, Blah, Blah, Blah,” and it’s just some MAGA supporter and it gets 3,500 views, at that point I am stifling a rather good video and good message because I’m not willing to title it differently.
I get emails all the time saying, “Adam, why are you even on X as a platform anymore? Wouldn’t it be morally right to get off Twitter?” Yeah, sure. In an ideal world, I’d hop off Twitter and never use it again. But the political reality is that there is a battlefield happening on Twitter. And if I and every other liberal left, we’d be ceding all of this ground.
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