What The Hell Would Four More Years Of Trump Do To Young Men?

It's not going to be pretty.

Photo: Anthony Crider

There’s been a lot of talk about men this election — young men in particular. The way that polls show them going for Trump, or polls show fewer of them voting for Harris than voted for Biden, the worry that more young Black men are going for Trump and, of course, the many, many think pieces and new channel pundit discussions about whether or not Harris and Walz can win enough of them over.

The thing is, their votes are not the only reason young men are important this election. They’re also important because of what the effects of four more years of Trump could do to many of them — because that’s what should scare the crap out of us. (And them, if they had any sense.)

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We’ve had four years of Trump already — and we’ve talked a lot about how his presidency negatively affected everyone who is not a cisgender white man. People are more comfortable publicly spewing racist nonsense than they once were, conservative parents have wholly dedicated themselves to bullying drag queens and LGBTQ+ teachers and LGBTQ+ kids, and, of course, there was the loss of reproductive rights in many states. But it also had a pretty big impact on a lot of young men who came of age when Trump was president and really absorbed the message: This is acceptable behavior for “the leader of the free world,” so why not me?

This is not about feeling bad for these men, it is about not creating more of them.

There’s little question that men were getting increasingly radicalized in the years leading up to Trump — there was Gamergate, the manosphere, incel murderers, the whole “anti-SJW” hysteria, white supremacists like Andrew Anglin getting larger followings, 4chan /pol/ attacks on Black women on social media, all culminating, really, in Trump’s election and the Charlottesville rally to Unite The Right.

But since then, it’s gotten a lot worse — and a lot more mainstream. Prior to Trump, the only people who knew about half of this shit were people like me, who wrote about it for a living (in order to warn the larger populace that it was becoming a serious problem). Now, people like Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate are household names with absolutely enormous followings largely made up of young men whose formative years occurred during the Trump presidency.

That’s not a coincidence.

There’s certainly a bit of irony in the fact that the men who complain the most about the birth rate are also the men who are inspiring other (straight) men to be entirely undateable. We hear stories all the time about how Trump-supporting men can’t get dates on the apps, polls finding that 76 percent of young women with a college education wouldn’t date a conservative, other polls finding that one in three men aged 18-24 hasn’t had sex in at least a year. Another poll found that 63 percent of men under the age of 30 are single, while only 30 percent of women in that same age range are — at least partly due to both women dating older men and the surge in Gen Z women identifying as bisexual. That, too, seems like it might be at least slightly inspired by the influx of terrible men. I’m not saying that women are “turning gay” because so many men are becoming terrible, but I do think they are perhaps more open to exploring that side of their sexuality because so many men are becoming terrible.

Shockingly, if a man goes around sounding like Fuentes or Tate or Tim Pool or Matt Walsh or Ben Shapiro or any of those other douchebags, if they are virulently racist and misogynistic, if they’re going around storming Drag Queen story hours like fucking weirdos, women are probably not going to be lining up for a date with them. That shit is a one-way ticket to Red Flag Town, USA.

There are studies showing that men of all ages are lonelier than they’ve ever been before — and as much as many of these misogynistic male leaders like to fantasize about women “hitting the wall” at 30 (lolforever) and finding themselves unattached and lonely and crying out into the night “Why oh why did I party throughout my 20s with Chad when I should have met a nice mediocre man to settle down with!? Now I will never find true love!” … that’s kinda bullshit. The unmarried cat ladies JD Vance complains about are often happy as can be.

“Women don’t need to be in long-term relationships. They don’t need to be married. They’d rather go to brunch with friends than have a horrible date,” Greg Matos, the author of an article titled “What’s Behind the Rise of Lonely, Single Men,” told The Hill in 2023.

He’s not wrong. I mean, there’s a reason there’s no female equivalent to the incel boards. That’s not to say that loneliness is not a problem for women as well, just that we usually deal with it in a healthier way.

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The rise of Trump and the subsequent rise of Trump-esque far-right influencers has done nothing for the men who have been influenced by them, except make them more angry and more likely to engage in behavior that other people consider socially unacceptable, thereby making them even more lonely and more angry. And what have they gotten out of it? As far as I can tell, all they got was some lousy schadenfreude and, depending on whether or not they participated in January 6, prison time and a record.

The absolute last thing we need is another cohort of boys growing up thinking that Trump is normal — because this time, I assure you, it will be a thousand times worse. Young men may be voting for Trump right now, but the best thing we can do for the young men in the future is to ensure that he loses.

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