Hello, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Leigh Ann Caldwell.

A lot has happened since the last time I was in your inbox. President Donald Trump praised New York City Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani during an Oval Office meeting on Friday, undercutting every future House Republican campaign ad that tries to link an opponent to the woke democratic socialist. Then, later that evening, former Trump favorite Marjorie Taylor Greene announced that she’d be resigning from Congress in January. Both events represent of growing fissures within the MAGA movement that transcend left-right ideology: Disaffected youth who flocked toward Trump in 2024—especially the young men on whom he built his winning coalition— are starting to migrate in the other direction. I get into all of that below the fold. But first…

Suburban women sound off on the White House ballroom: Trump’s destruction of the East Wing—traditionally the site of the first lady’s offices—is not popular with most Americans, 56 percent of whom opposed the project in a recent Washington Post–ABC News poll. But the Republican Main Street Partnership, a PAC supporting “conservatives who get things done,” has specifically surveyed its listserv for the views of suburban women. Of course, their sample of 500 suburban women respondents is not representative of this much bigger, crucial voting bloc, but the results help to inform the nearly 100 lawmakers the PAC supports, and are all the more striking given that the pool leans conservative: 72 percent of respondents disapproved of the ballroom project, and 68 percent said it represented misplaced priorities.

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The effective list: The Center for Effective Lawmaking, a good-governance group where I serve on the board, has released its ranking of the most impactful lawmakers in Congress. The list reveals which members are actually doing the job that they were elected to do, and passing laws on major issues—and which ones are doing very little legislating. Among Republicans, Rep. Sam Graves of Missouri was ranked most effective in two areas: transportation (he is, after all, the chair of the House Transportation Committee) and the environment. Rep. Andy Harris, who represents a rural Maryland district, was ranked most effective on agriculture—noteworthy, since he also chairs the House Freedom Caucus, the group of far-right lawmakers better known for obstructing than for legislating.On the Democratic side, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was ranked most effective on energy issues, though her score was still low, which means very few Democrats managed to move energy legislation in the last Congress, where they were in the minority. Rankings like the C.E.L.’s—a collaboration between the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt—are meant to encourage lawmakers to do their jobs, but they’ve also become political tools. Lawmakers with high scores often tout them in ads, where they become fodder in campaigns against low-performing legislators.

Now, for the main event…

The Bros Fade on Trump

A generational civil war has erupted within the MAGA coalition, with some young men gravitating toward extremists like Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, and others abandoning Trumpism entirely. For Democrats, it’s an opportunity to win back disaffected voters who flipped in 2024.

Leigh Ann Caldwell

On Friday evening, longtime MAGA enfant terrible Marjorie Taylor Greene delivered another shocking announcement: She was resigning from Congress. Over the previous several weeks, she had grown increasingly outspoken about her disagreements with Donald Trump on healthcare, the administration’s military adventurism, support for Israel, and its fight to withhold the Epstein files. When the president responded by calling her a “traitor,” she declared that she would rather leave on her own terms than become a “‘battered wife’ hoping it all goes away and gets better.”

Greene’s farewell is only the latest evidence of the fissures that are beginning to appear in Trump’s coalition. The party has also been riven by debate over the antisemitic turn of Tucker Carlson, who recently hosted the avowed white nationalist and Hitler admirer Nick Fuentes on his podcast, fueling fierce disagreements within both far-right media and Republican think tanks over whether to condone or “cancel” Carlson for his views. Trump declared this month, “I know what MAGA wants better than anybody else.” But there is a growing feeling that the movement itself is up for grabs. Multiple factions are all laying claim to Trump’s mantle: America Firsters like Greene, groypers like Fuentes, and provocateurs like Carlson, to name just a few. In many ways, this battle is really an ideological struggle for the hearts and minds of young men—a key demographic that swung hard for Trump in 2024, fueled by a potent mixture of political disillusionment and economic dissatisfaction. Since then, these resentments appear to have metastasized, with manifestations ranging from simple frustration at Trump’s broken promises to the embrace of antisemitic and racist views among young party operatives, and the elevation of extremists like Fuentes. Other members of this constituency appear to be swinging back toward Democrats. As my colleague Peter Hamby recently documented, in this month’s elections, men under 30 broke for Dems by double digits in exit polls in Virginia (+14 for Abigail Spanberger), New Jersey (+10 for Mikie Sherrill), and, of course, New York City (+40 for Zohran Mamdani) and California (+52 for Prop 50).

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These were, of course, off-year elections in blue territories, but Trump skepticism is growing even within the conservative influencer ecosystem. The libertarian internet personality Dave Smith, who has also hosted Fuentes on his show, devoted a recent episode of his Part of the Problem podcast to “the collapse of Donald Trump”—calling his administration “fundamentally unserious” and asking how $20 trillion in tariff revenue helps those who drive Ubers, hate their jobs, and can’t afford homes. Elsewhere in the manosphere, Theo Von criticized Trump’s strikes on Iran, Joe Rogan complained that ICE is “ripping parents out of their communities,” and Andrew Schulz declared that Trump is doing “the exact opposite of everything I voted for.”

Young conservatives I spoke to echoed these sentiments. “Only Catturd [the anonymous social media personality] and the Trump sycophants are the people who still stand with him,” said Dominic Tripi, a political commentator who voted for Trump three times but has since soured on the president and his policies. “His second term has been a resounding disappointment.” Those attitudes are showing up in survey data, too. In April, the Harvard Youth Poll found that just 34 percent of men under 30—a majority of whom voted for Trump in 2024—said they approved of his job performance. This week, in a new NPR–PBS News–Marist poll of men and women, only 29 percent of Gen Z voters said they approved of Trump, lower than any other group; a YouGov/Economist poll from late October reflected a 30-point drop in Trump’s approval rating among the cohort since February, from 50 percent to 20 percent. Asked for comment, White House spokesman Kush Desai said: "President Trump is just getting started implementing the policies that created historic economic prosperity in his first term, and Americans can rest assured that the best is yet to come."

Men Not at Work

By now, everyone knows the story of how men under 45 swung 16 points from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024—the largest shift of any demographic group. Trump leaned into the backlash to Covid and all things “woke” with appearances on Nelk, Rogan, Full Send, and the Logan Paul podcast, among many others. He showed up at UFC fights, the ultimate display of testosterone and the notion that masculinity was back. He popped up in the drive-thru window at McDonald’s. In the end, Trump won men ages 18-29 by 14 points over Kamala Harris.

But it wasn’t just the performance of masculinity. Trump had promised to fix the economy, tame inflation, and prioritize American workers. The pitch was especially urgent for a demographic that came of age in a post-9/11 era pockmarked by the twin calamities of the Great Recession and Covid lockdowns, during which the economic performance of young men lagged behind other groups. Pretty much every reputable study has shown declines in young men’s college graduation and attendance rates, as well as their participation in the labor force. Trump vowed to blow up the system, end racial preferences, and deport millions of people, all ostensibly to help young men—and, yes, white men in particular—get their shot at success. But that was 10 months ago. Tripi and other young conservative men I spoke with said Trump has focused most of his attention on foreign policy. He gave Argentina $20 billion to prop up political ally Javier Milei, supported Israel’s war in Gaza, and still hasn’t ended the war in Ukraine (although he offered a lopsided peace proposal this week). Plus, Trump has become exactly what he used to criticize, they say. He vowed to release the Epstein files, but fought to keep them under wraps before capitulating out of political necessity. Meanwhile, after railing against elites on the campaign trail, Trump invited them into his newly gilded White House—partying with tech C.E.O.s and Gulf oligarchs while enriching his family with crypto deals. Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who was in town this week, was given permission to acquire American-made F-35 fighter jets while Trump’s family has ongoing business deals in Saudi Arabia. Longtime MAGA influencer Mike Cernovich remarked on X that “during a recent visit in D.C., the talk of everyone was how overt the corruption was. It’s at levels you read about in history books.” Indeed, Trump may have inadvertently created the perfect metaphor for his administration’s priorities when he unexpectedly demolished the East Wing of the White House in order to build a massive ballroom, funded by billionaire donors and tech and crypto companies—a project that is overwhelmingly unpopular with independents, as well as four in 10 Republicans. “At every turn he’s chosen the political elite,” Tripi said, adding that Trump has said the phrase “drain the swamp” just once this year. “A criticism of Trump this entire time is that Trump cares about Trump first, and his behavior has been pretty indicative that he really is Trump First.”

After Republican losses during the off-year elections this month, Trump’s team has shifted its messaging to emphasize affordability. But the president’s own media-inflected usage of the word—always with quotation marks—shows he doesn’t get it. Tariffs, the foundation of Trump’s geopolitics, have raised prices without creating net new jobs. (In fact, the manufacturing sector has contracted by some 58,000 jobs since April.) Young men are worried about whether the president’s embrace of A.I. will benefit them, or just make them obsolete. Earlier this month, Trump threw his support behind H-1B visas, telling Fox News’s Laura Ingraham that there are not enough talented Americans for certain jobs. Meanwhile, his administration recently responded to growing concerns around homeownership by floating the idea of 50-year mortgages—a proposal that infuriated the young men I spoke to. “What, we’re going to be indebted to a bank for 50 years?” another young man who voted for Trump three times told me.

But what has especially animated this group of disaffected voters is Israel—and the strains of extreme anti-Israel rhetoric that have risen after October 7 and Israel’s destruction of Gaza. Plenty of people on both the right and the left believe that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and pro-Israel lobbying groups have too much influence over Congress and the Trump administration. But in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder, right-wing conspiracy theories surrounding Israel have gained prominence in this discourse. And Fuentes, an adversary of Kirk, has tried to step into the leadership void, offering a more hateful, antisemitic message for young men who are disillusioned with mainstream politics or flirting with fascism. “People are waking up to what Nick Fuentes is saying,” one 29-year-old man who works in Republican politics in the Midwest and is disillusioned with Trump and sympathetic to Fuentes told me. “No Ezra Klein New York Times think piece is going to change what media people are consuming.” Another Republican who works on the Hill told me that there is a growing community of Fuentes followers in D.C. “They want to be in the cool club but they don’t want to be exposed as being in the cool club,” he said, referring to the underground nature of the so-called groyper movement. “There is a discreetness that is inherent in this culture.”

The Greene Machine

Meanwhile, Greene has emerged as an unlikely champion of a different kind of populist politics, apologizing for years of “toxic” rhetoric and calling on Republicans to actually follow through on their promises to working-class voters to lower healthcare costs and curb the power of big corporations. In the video announcing her resignation, she referred to the economic struggles of her children, who are in their 20s: “No matter which way the political swings, Republican or Democrat, nothing ever gets better for the common American man or woman. … Today, many in my children’s generation feel hopeless for their future and don’t think they will ever realize the American dream,” she said. “And that breaks my heart.”

A Republican source told me that Greene “sounds like she heard everything my son and his friends were complaining about, and was channeling them.” Others have suggested that she is positioning herself to run for president in 2028 in a post-Trump First, semi-normalized Republican Party. If she does, Greene would actually be aligning her politics more with those of Trump in 2016—the one who pledged to drain the swamp and provide “insurance for everybody,” and whose populist appeal stretched across the aisle. After all, according to many of the young men I spoke to, there are plenty of disenchanted Trump voters who don’t identify as Republicans or Democrats, but place themselves at the point on the political spectrum where the left and the right occasionally overlap. The 29-year-old who works in Republican politics, for instance, told me he likes what Mamdani has been saying about affordability. “At least [Trump] gets Mamdani’s appeal,” he said, after the president fawned over him in the Oval Office. Of course, Trump won’t be on the ballot again, so his sliding approval with young men has limited implications for his own career. That dynamic could, however, imperil the (presidential) employment prospects of another disaffected young man: Vice President J.D. Vance.

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