Pennsylvania Trump voters say they 'don’t fully understand' what he’s doing

According to a new story from the Washington Post, even as they gathered to watch and enjoy his UFC birthday spectacle, many of President Donald Trump’s supporters still “don’t fully understand” his actions regarding Iran and other issues. What’s more, as he has floundered in both mission and messaging, polls show that he’s losing the very support bases that helped put him in office.

In an effort to sound out his supporters, the Post sent a reporter to a Buffalo Wild Wings in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where a crowd of his voters had congregated to watch the White House cage fight. While some expressed belief in Trump’s endeavor in Iran, others “were skeptical.” As one declared, the war “isn’t what we voted for.” Another raised the specter of COVID, reminding how, much like with the war, Trump had asserted repeatedly that it would be over in “two more weeks.”

“We keep hearing it’s almost over, it’s almost over,” said 26-year-old conservative Jon Showalter, who said he supported other Trump actions but questioned the war. “We could be right back to it three days from now.” He noted that he wasn’t convinced by the president’s claims that Iran was verging on building a nuclear weapon, and that he doesn’t “ like being a part of a war [where] I don’t fully understand why.”

As the Post explained, “The overwhelmingly young and 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.”

Polling shows that the Post’s claims aren’t merely anecdotal. While young men swung from supporting Joe Biden in 2020 to narrowly helping Trump win in 2024, they’re swinging back the other direction in a big way. As the Post explains, “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.”

As the Post notes, while the war is supposedly ending, “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… Americans are skeptical that the conflict was worth it, polls found.” Only 25 percent of Americans say the war was worth the costs.

According to longtime Republican pollster Whit Ayres, 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.”

This has been especially problematic with young voters who supported Trump out of the belief that he’d keep the country out of war. As pollster John Della Volpe, who oversees the Harvard Youth poll, explained, “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.”