Do You Even Vote, Bro?
In today’s newsletter, can the left win back support from young men, in time for the midterms? And then:
The Battle for the Bros
Andrew Marantz
Marantz has been writing about technology, media, politics, and pop culture for The New Yorker since 2011.
The young men are not O.K. They are at elevated risk of addiction, unemployment, and suicide; in one survey, more than a quarter of men in their teens and twenties reported having no close friends. In his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump made sure to pander to this demographic. He invited the Nelk Boys—prank-video influencers with their own brand of hard seltzer—to eat Chick-fil-A on his private plane. He sat in a Cybertruck with Adin Ross, a baby-faced, fascist-curious Twitch streamer, and tested the stereo. “Who’s, like, your top three artists?” Ross asked. “Well, we love Frank Sinatra, right?” Trump said.
This may not sound like riveting content, but it worked shockingly well. In 2020, Trump lost the young-male vote by a wide margin. In 2024, he won it comfortably—a swing of nearly thirty points. After the election, Democratic pundits floated the idea of cultivating a “Joe Rogan of the left,” a notion that strikes me as flawed. For a piece in this week’s issue, I spent some time with Hasan Piker, a popular Twitch streamer and one of the few leftists actively competing for the attention of the disaffected-bro demographic. Piker hates Trump, but he also positions himself in opposition to the Democrats, whom he calls “smug” and “fake as shit.”
At a moment when there seems to be an ever-shortening algorithmic pipeline from bench-pressing tips to misogynist rage, Piker tries to model a more capacious form of masculinity: a straight guy, six feet four and movie-star handsome, who’s as comfortable wearing camo to a gun range as he is walking a red carpet in split-toe Margiela boots. When viewers have come to trust him, they may be more open to his riffs on the rights of the poor or of trans people—delivered not as a primer on Judith Butler but in the register of “Bro, don’t be a dick.” While I was at his house in West Hollywood, he interviewed the antitrust regulator Lina Khan, the author Ta-Nehisi Coates, and the profane comedian Stavros Halkias—all in the same day—as nearly forty thousand simultaneous viewers offered him real-time feedback in his chat. “Young men, like a lot of Americans, feel increasingly alienated,” he told me. “My way is to go, ‘Look, be angry if you want. But your undocumented neighbor is not the problem here. You’re looking in the wrong direction.’ ”
Read or listen to the story »
The Briefing Room
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A flight carrying Venezuelan migrants out of the States landed in El Salvador this weekend, even after a U.S. district-court judge halted such deportations—yielding a tense moment in the Trump Administration’s ongoing conflict with the courts over its immigration orders. For many immigrants from Venezuela, as Stephania Taladrid has reported, the perilous journey to the U.S. once offered great promise.
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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer angered voters and fellow-lawmakers by backing the Republican bill to keep the government open, arguing that a shutdown would be the worse of two bad options. As speculation builds about an end to his tenure, read why his final successes as Majority Leader failed to catch on with the public.
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DOGE has brought major staffing cuts to the National Nuclear Security Administration, which manages the country’s nuclear-weapons stockpile. Read Eric Schlosser on the past near-misses with the nation’s nukes, and why almost everything in “Dr. Strangelove” was true.
John Cassidy
Source photograph from Bettmann / Getty
Even Donald Trump’s Historical Role Model Had Second Thoughts About Tariffs
President William McKinley—who believed that high tariffs were crucial for growing the U.S. economy—has become a role model for the “tariff man” Donald Trump. “But a closer inspection of McKinley’s trade policy reveals some surprises and warnings,” Cassidy writes. “In purloining a simplistic version of McKinley’s attitudes toward tariffs, Trump is ignoring the valuable lessons they have to offer.” Read the column »
More Top Stories
Daily Cartoon
“Is that your ‘thinking about dinner’ look, or your ‘lost in a wordless fog of horror’ look?”
Cartoon by Meredith Southard
More Fun & Games
P.S. The astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who were in orbit for nine months after malfunctions extended what was supposed to be a dayslong test flight, are on their way back to Earth. Read Dhruv Khullar on what might happen in their bodies after they splash down. 🚀
Ian Crouch contributed to today’s edition.
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