Young Men Gave Us Trump 2.0. Now They’ve Taken It Away. No One’s Talking About the Reason Why.

Life Men Are Ready to Be Normal Again There’s a reason so many men swung to the left. It’s time we looked at why. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Luke Winkie? Nov 11, 20265:26 PM Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by FG Trade Latin/E+. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Here is a question I have asked myself with increasing urgency over the last decade: Am I normal? I’m a 35-year-old man with a wife, a career, and a bountiful network of friends. My lifestyle overlaps with every stereotype attached to my demographic. I play video games on weeknights and watch football on Sundays. I am known to make the occasional $20 wager; I wear a lot of J. Crew; I order Jameson at bars. I have rolled my eyes at some of the more exhausting overreaches of wokeness, but I’m directionally progressive in nearly all political lanes. I listen to every episode of The Bill Simmons Podcast; I do arms and shoulders at the gym. These are the rituals that have put me in touch with my masculinity—taught me to appreciate my inner brawn, to learn to love what it means to be a dude. And for a very long time, I assumed that most of my fellow men knew themselves in the exact same way that I did. But then along came the shambolic reign of Trump, and his total capture of my identity. How did Trump storm back into office? Or more to the point, how did he get there in the first place? Too many reasons to count, but one storyline reigned supreme in the wreckage of 2024: The president cultivated a coalition of disaffected bros, whom he expertly managed both at the ballot box and in the zeitgeist. MAGAdom enthralled all avenues of male interest and culture, infusing them with Trump’s unique brand of grievance politics. Sports media? That’s now dominated by Barstool oafs—in garish ballcaps—handing out doomed parlays in moldering basement podcast studios. Video games? YouTube is awash with a class of snarling incels warding consumers away from Grand Theft Auto VI because, surely, controlling a female protagonist with a joystick is evidence of a cuckolded mind. The list goes on and on. You can’t go see the summer’s hottest blockbuster because it is insufficiently deferential toward Western sovereignty. You can’t download a dating app because all women are conniving and evil—and furthermore, enjoying sex makes you gay. Trump alone did not engineer the rot eating away at American manhood—tremors of this generational backslide were already rumbling underneath our feet. But he capitalized on it with aplomb. That is why Logan Paul gets invited to the White House; that is why J.D. Vance retweets the white-supremacist World of Warcraft personality Asmongold; that is why we’ve all been propagandized with the faulty idea that Elon Musk—who has one of the strangest bodies the world has ever seen—is a Chad. And so, I ask again: Am I normal? Or is my station in life—a straight dude who relishes his masculinity without being a total freak about it—in rapid decline? Am I the outlier? For a while there, I really thought I might be. The MAGA takeover of the things I hold dear seemed too comprehensive, too airtight, too meticulously planned. Its virulent worldview was drilled into the basic fundamentals of manhood, online and elsewhere. I had resigned myself to the rare life of an adult male liberal; the last of a dying breed. Then came the midterm rebuke, in which young men backed the Democrats by a 60 percent margin—moving further left than any other demographic—injecting fresh life into my flagging caucus. Innumerable factors contributed to the Republican demise—the skyrocketing cost of living, yet another Middle East adventure gone wrong—but when the dust settled, and the scale of the defeat became clear, some analysts floated the term “chud fatigue” to articulate what had happened. Chud fatigue is essentially the theory that voters were exasperated beyond repair by the figures who gained prominence on the back of the Trump wave. That maybe society was better off when a boring liberal consensus rested at the center of our nation. Undoubtedly, chud fatigue has existed for ages within the party’s most reliable constituencies—women and people of color, who never needed to grow tired of the Paul brothers in order to despise them. But at long last, it seems like chud fatigue has crossed over into the black box of the swing-voting white male. That means a new political dawn is upon us; men are ready to be normal again. I say all of this because I saw it coming. Weeks before the midterms, the chud fatigue reckoning came to me in a sibylline vision; a flash of light portending a future in which men returned to the Democratic Party en masse. Where was this prophecy unveiled? In one of the great melting pots of male culture: the Instagram comments for ESPN’s College GameDay. Just go with me for a minute. College GameDay is an ESPN show that airs before the weekend slate of college football games from late summer to early winter. It’s been around since 1987, and has traditionally starred a roundtable of grizzled former coaches offering their insight on, say, LSU’s rushing attack. GameDay is genuinely beloved, more so than other pregame shows. If you are a man under the age of 50, there is a good chance you spent much of your youth watching Lee Corso rev up the Michigan State Spartans on an otherwise dreary campus in mid-November. However, in 2022, ESPN changed the nature of GameDay. The broadcaster turned over one of its marquee panel slots to Pat McAfee—an NFL punter turned sports-media mogul with a distinct MAGA-ish gestalt. McAfee isn’t explicitly partisan, but he does fit a chud-shaped mold. He is perpetually sleeveless, making many of his public appearances in a black tank top and a crimson sunburn. His artistic interests do not extend beyond WWE and remedial country music. And yes, he has run into several baffling political controversies that seem to indicate where he stands on the culture war, such as allowing Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback—and hardcore MAHA truther—Aaron Rodgers to promote vaccine disinformation on his show. Nevertheless, everyone implicitly understood why ESPN made this move. McAfee’s ascension was designed to defang the network’s buttoned-up aesthetic, making it more palatable to this profane horde of Trumpified young men who—especially during the bleary-eyed miasma of 2025—were understood to represent a new cultural mainstream. That worked for a while, but in 2026, the worm began to turn. Here’s what I mean by that. If you scroll through the College GameDay Instagram posts featuring McAfee, you will find a ton of people trolling the host in the exact same way. Their thesis? McAfee is cringe, and his shtick is tired. This point is expressed through an online dialect that derisively mimics his brand of Barstool-tinged masculinity. For instance: McAfee is known for taking his shirt off and flexing for the crowd on the GameDay set, a macho non sequitur that—I guess?—the audience is supposed to find endearing. This routine, more than any other, is savagely mocked by the commenters. They do this under the guise of a cloying tribute. Here is what one user left on a video of McAfee stripping down at a Utah Utes game in late October: “NO WAY! Pat took his shirt off again! I can’t stop belly laughing,” reads the post, studded with cry-laughing emojis. “I can’t wait to bet on all the games on Kalshi, Polymarket, Fanduel, Draft Kings! And the one where Sydney Sweeney has no clothes! I love you Pat, I’m going to start drinking again!” That comment racked up over 16,000 likes. Hundreds more just like them are spread across GameDay’s social media accounts, and all of them share the same diction. They are scripted in capital letters, and are smothered with emojis emblematic of a certain type of chud—fires, pint glasses, eggplants. They often make reference to the rapidly ballooning college football postseason bracket, perhaps the most visible example of enshittification eating away at male culture. (“Expand the playoff to 1,000 teams!” reads one.) Some comments sarcastically beg for the country-rap star Jelly Roll—perhaps the most overexposed MAGA-friendly celebrity of this era—to appear on the GameDay desk; always they are threaded with a rabid distaste for the suffocating array of sports-betting commercials. My favorites are the ones punctuated with a biting characterization of the sort of person who would ever find McAfee charming. (“I don’t care that it’s 9am! No weekend custody, am I right Pat!”) And it is especially illuminating that so many of these GameDay comments scornfully quote the Shaboozey song “Tipsy”—ground zero for the conservative takeover of the Billboard charts—and pop culture as a whole: “Pour me up a double shot of whiskey!” You might be wondering why I am drawing parallels between an embattled GameDay host and a gender-wide political earthquake. That’s easy. College football fans are not a reliably liberal voting bloc, to say the least. That they are also broadly fed up with McAfee signals, to me, a vibe shift that transcends party lines. When I read those Instagram comments, what I see is a contrived, fratty, 2020s-era right-wing machismo that is officially past its sell-by date. A critical mass of men no longer subscribe to this way of being—if they ever did in the first place. (It is telling that according to polling, manosphere figures like Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate have rapidly ceded popularity from their mid-decade highs, with many of them being held accountable in ways that have felt elusive for years.) Why is it all coming to a head now? For my money, I think men are simply tired of being treated like they’re idiots, which was the only thing the MAGA blueprint could ever offer. What do boys want? According to the White House, it is A.I.-generated anime ICE agents, and mashups of Iran war footage with Call of Duty iconography. It is Tony Hinchcliffe making low-effort jokes about Puerto Ricans, and RFK Jr. holding court with Russell Brand. It is a horrifically chintzy worldview that hems in all frontiers of the mind; one where you are assumed to retain the exact same taste you did as a high-schooler—where irrelevant ploys for your nostalgia, like a Legend of Zelda edit starring Donald Trump, are expected to leave you clapping like a seal. It is, most succinctly, Pat McAfee ripping off his shirt on the set of College GameDay. But last week, along with the rest of the country, young men rejected that vision. I imagine they were lured by promises of more accessible healthcare and cheaper gas, and were disgusted by the institutional right-wing hubris that they could be kept in line by yet more racist tweets. MAGAdom never did respect the intelligence of the men it so desperately wished to court. It coasted along on swagger alone, stoking conspiratorial fears that the sanctity of masculinity was under threat. Well, now it is 2026, and after enduring a decade’s worth of the garish Trump ethos—this onslaught of sky-darkening Kalshi commercials, and awful Morgan Wallen chart-toppers, and mind-numbing arguments about the ethnicity of Athena, all of which reached a keening crescendo these past two years—I, and so many other men, have concluded that enough is enough. Please, for the love of god, can we just be normal? Democrats Donald Trump Football Gender Instagram Politics Social Media TV College Sports Men 2026 Midterms