Ever since the 2024 election showed a wave of young voters supporting Donald Trump, Jordan Klepper and “The Daily Show” have been interested in exploring the reasons behind that shift. The Comedy Central senior correspondent and occasional host knew the topic would be perfect for a deep dive. But what he didn’t expect was how hollow this new wave of ideology would feel.
“There is more movement and excitement about the MAGA movement, but there’s not an ideological yearning for it,” Klepper told TheWrap.
The topic lies at the center of Klepper’s latest “Fingers the Pulse” segment. Though it’s part of a satirical comedy show, Klepper views these segments as a kind of anthropological experiment where his own preconceived notions are tested by reality. Over the course of the roughly half-hour special, “MAGA: The Next Generation” travels everywhere from the “Gulf of America” during spring break and a UFC fight to the campus of Texas A&M, all in the pursuit of answering one question: Why did so many Gen Z people — specifically Gen Z men — vote for Donald Trump?
“For some people, they were into some of the trappings of MAGA culture and what the ideology behind that is. But more often than not, MAGA felt empty. It felt in some ways cool,” Klepper explained.
That emptiness Klepper describes can be seen in the special itself. Though most of Klepper’s interviews start with his college-aged subjects enthusiastically praising Trump and rightwing influencers, the more the “Daily Show” host presses them on their values, the more they falter. A telling example comes during Klepper’s interview with the Tampa Bay Young Republicans, the group that made headlines for inviting charged human trafficker Andrew Tate to their campus. When Klepper pressed the group on whether they support sex trafficking, all of the young men backpedal, trying to distance themselves from Tate.
“They didn’t agree with what [Tate] had been accused of, yet they were playing this adult version of MAGA with all its cruelty and attention-getting. They are younger versions of this, playing the cruel blueprint of the elderly, and they’re struggling with it,” Klepper said.
“There’s a cruelty to the MAGA movement, to the things that Donald Trump does — a lack of empathy for people in need, at times a loss of humanity. It’s what we see happening with deportations, what we see happening with cutting cancer research. I think cruelty is not just a byproduct of the MAGA movement. In some ways, it is a defining feature and something that attracts people to it,” he explained. “I expected to see that reflected in the younger MAGA movement, and I rarely saw when I was out there. That gives me hope. I don’t think people are drawn, at least that at that age, to the cruelty that is inherent in it.”
Klepper’s on-the-ground experience also aligned with what the research shows. Though there is a so-called “Trump bump” among all of Gen Z, Gen Z men are more likely to align themselves with the sitting president than Gen Z women.
“We’ve heard about this vibe shift, this move towards the right for the youth, but you can’t quite lump the male experience in with the female experience. We saw that every step of the way,” Klepper said. Whereas young men were typically the ones “The Daily Show” found enthusiastically sporting Gulf of America swag, the female Trump supporters Klepper spoke to often cited religious values for their political alignment.
“When they talked about what they liked about the MAGA movement, they would point to Charlie Kirk specifically and how he talks about traditional values and bringing religion back to American culture,” Klepper said. “As with all of these specials, we’re zooming in on a few different spaces, and we can’t speak for the entirety of the experience. But from what we came away with, the manosphere and the broness is, in and of itself, a different experience than the entire youth experience.”
So why are the kids going MAGA? Old school rebellion may be an answer to that question as is the sense of community these rightwing influencers offer. It’s in that alluring kinship that this ideological shift takes on a more nefarious tone. Part of the special zooms in on a Turning Point USA event at Texas A&M. Just as credit card companies and nebulous startups used to shell out free hats in exchange for personal information from college students, now that role has been filled by a conservative political organization peddling the influencer of the week. In the case of “MAGA: The Next Generation,” that influencer was Charlie Kirk.
“So many people [at this event] were looking for somebody to articulate the world to them, and they were surprisingly open about it,” Klepper said. “One guy literally says, ‘I’m bad with words. I want somebody who can articulate those words so that I can memorize those words and have a point of view.’ To me, that was very telling.”
Klepper noted that many of the conservative college students he spoke to were “very critical” of what they were being taught in the classroom. Yet at the same time that skepticism and paranoia did not translate to the adult influencers who showed up on their campus to beg for their attention.
“What the special explores is the manipulation of the adults on the younger generation. That is what seems most dangerous. The bad guy in our special is not the naiveté of the youth. It is the predators who are older who are trying to manipulate that naiveté and that desire to find identity for their own means,” Klepper said.
As dark as political influencers courting young men through swag may seem, diving into this world did leave Klepper hopeful that conversations and “real information” will change these voters’ identities as they mature.
“I don’t think the MAGA movement in its current form truly fits them,” Klepper said. “I wouldn’t want to be 19 years old right now, navigating social media and platforms that are attacking your eyeballs and trying to manipulate what you think and what you buy. It’s overwhelming for me, a 46-year-old man who has some experience with it and has formed an identity and a life through living it. Nineteen-year-old me would be lost at sea. So I feel for the youth, but I also feel a little bit of hope.”
