Donald Trump’s recent actions against Iran, including a US strike and the reported death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have elicited a complex reaction from some of his supporters, who grapple with the implications for his “America First” foreign policy pledge.
Michael Leary, a 19-year-old student who cast his first presidential ballot for Trump in 2024, exemplifies this internal conflict.
He initially questioned whether the US strike honoured the “America First” promise that secured his vote, fearing it could drag the country into another Middle East quagmire.
Yet, Leary welcomed news of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death and was not prepared to condemn Trump’s decision outright.
He expressed hope the joint operation with Israel would be swift and spare American lives. “One of my things with Trump was it was going to be ‘America First.’ That was the rhetoric he was running on,” Leary stated.
He added, “It’s not that I disagree with the war or the strikes … We need to learn more and see what’s going to happen. But it felt like a step back from what he was saying.”
This blend of approval for Khamenei’s demise and apprehension that Trump’s push for “regime change” might lead to a protracted conflict was mirrored by five other Trump voters on a student panel interviewed by Reuters this week at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire.
Young male voters were one of the biggest surprises of the 2024 election, swinging toward Trump after years of Democrats dominating the youth vote. But recent public opinion polls show that support slipping amid frustration over persistent inflation and hard-line immigration enforcement, tactics that some view as overly harsh.
Only one in four Americans support the U.S. strikes, Reuters/Ipsos polling at the weekend found.
The student panel, while a small sample, offers an early snapshot of how some young men are processing the Iran strikes, suggesting Trump may have a limited window to deliver clear gains for the United States and stabilize a conflict that has spread to Lebanon, rattled global markets and sent oil prices sharply higher.
A swift end to the Iran war could help Trump project an image as a decisive commander in chief, but a drawn-out conflict risks alienating the young men who helped power his 2024 resurgence.
John Fitzpatrick, a 20-year-old politics major, said he supported “decapitating” an Iranian regime he viewed as a longstanding threat to Americans and dismissed Iran’s retaliatory strikes as “scrambling for one last gasp of air.”
“It would be nice to see regime change — not that we should have boots on the ground or be as deeply entrenched as we were in Iraq,” said Fitzpatrick, who chairs the Saint Anselm College Republicans. “I think it’s overall positive.”
Artemius Gehring, 20, agreed, saying Trump’s objective was to bring closure to a longstanding conflict stretching back to the 1979 hostage crisis, when Iranian militants seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held dozens of Americans for 444 days.
“I think what he’s trying to do is just end it,” Gehring said. “It’s the right move.”
Lack of an end-game a worry
Tyler Witzgall, a 20-year-old sophomore, said that while he supported the killing of Khamenei he was worried about the apparent lack of a concrete plan by the Trump administration to replace him, a vacuum he feared could fuel instability or even civil war.
“He’s telling the people of Iran to rise up and take over the government, and that’s easier said than done,” Witzgall said. “Why are we taking these actions when there’s no specific plan right now or none that we know of?”
Witzgall said the Iran strikes, along with the capture of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro in January, reflected what he saw as an overemphasis on foreign policy.
He said he voted for Trump to boost the economy and deliver on domestic priorities and would like to see him focus more of his attention there.
Trump’s promises to rein in inflation, boost growth and toughen immigration enforcement helped attract young men to his campaign. Exit polling analyzed by the Pew Research Center shows he won 46 per cent of men ages 18 to 29 in the 2024 election, compared with 51% for the Democratic nominee, former Vice President Kamala Harris.
That marks a big shift from 2020, when Trump lost young men to President Joe Biden by 14 points, 53 per cent to 39 per cent.
Yet recent polling shows those gains have evaporated. In February, some 33 per cent of men aged 18-29 approved of Trump’s performance in the White House, down from 43 per cent in the same month of 2025, according to Reuters/Ipsos polling during those periods.
How the Iran crisis is resolved could determine whether Trump’s approval rating rises or falls, with potential consequences for Republicans in November’s midterms.
A CNN poll of 1,004 Americans found that voters ages 18 to 34 registered the strongest opposition to the strikes, with 71 per cent saying they disapproved.
Leary said it was too soon to say whether the Iran attacks were the correct course of action.
“It could absolutely turn into the right move, or we could stay in Iran for 30-plus years, spend a ton of money – money that could have been spent at home.”
