MILWAUKEE — Donald Trump’s “big tent” convention includes the ringleader of the right’s most notorious circus. Rolling Stone ran into Clay Clark, the organizer of the conspiratorial, Christian nationalist road show known as ReAwaken America Tour, eating lunch near the security perimeter for the RNC convention.
Clark — whose roving road show has platformed pardoned-felon Michael Flynn, and hosted a variety of dubious christian “prophets” like Julie Green — has forged ties with the Trump family. Eric Trump has spoken on tour stops, and ReAwaken America even held an event at the Trump Doral resort in Miami, where things got weird, like demon mermaid weird.
The ReAwaken America roadshow has played a significant role in keeping the Trump base mobilized and active in the years since the 2020 election. For better or worse, few Americans have a better finger on the pulse of the often bizarre and baseless ideas and ideologies that motivate the ultra-MAGA set than Clark.
While most right-wingers in Milwaukee are sounding triumphant amid Trump’s many turns of good fortune, Clark is morbid. “I think I just watched the funeral for the Republican Party,” he says, reflecting on the RNC convention.
Clark, who hails from Tulsa, Oklahoma, is deeply religious, and he’s angry that the GOP platform has stripped its usual boilerplate about limiting marriage to heterosexual couples, and softened, slightly, its language on abortion, which Clark describes as a move “away from a pro-life stance.” Clark turns serious: “I think we’re asking for judgment from God.”
The ReAwaken leader also believes that the GOP’s “unity” message is a dire mistake: “Jesus, in the Bible, says he didn’t come to bring peace, but a sword.” Clark says he is “pro-Jesus at all times,” and describes Christ an unpopular figure for “laying hands on the sick, and casting out devils and teaching the Word of God, which was a divisive idea.”
Clark is most troubled by Trump’s choice of J.D. Vance as his vice presidential candidate. “J.D. Vance was made relevant through the endorsement and funding of Peter Thiel,” Clark says, referring to the Facebook investor and PayPal co-founder who brought Vance into his venture capital firm and later invested millions into Vance’s campaign for Senate.
For Clark, this is a problem that transcends money and politics. In Clark’s conspiratorial worldview, a nefarious group of “globalists” are involved in a dark plot to push what he describes as “a one-world government, the Great Reset, and transhumanism,” a scheme he says also includes “central bank digital currencies, surveillance under the skin, and RNAmodifying nanotechnology.”
Clark also believes that the secretive international Biderberg Group is a key player in the plot of the globalists. And he notes, conspiratorially, that Thiel is listed among the leadership of the organization. “Peter Thiel is part of the steering committee for the Bilderberg Group — and he’s the one steering J.D. Vance.” Feigning enthusiasm Clark adds: “It’s gonna be exciting to have Peter Thiel as Vice President.”
Clark also tells Rolling Stone he’s planning to wind down the ReAwaken tour. “I’ll do one, final one in October,” he says, “just so that people can learn about the Great Reset — and contrast that versus what I would call biblical worldviews.”
He’s had Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speak on his tour, but don’t expect Clark to cast his ballot for the independent candidate in November. Despite his disappointment, he says he’s still riding the MAGA train, insisting: “I will vote for President Trump.”
President Donald Trump discussing Venezuela at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago.
Why Venezuela Could Be a Turning Point in Gen Z’s Support for Trump
When Donald Trump called himself “the peace president” during his 2024 campaign, it was not just a slogan that my fellow Gen Z men and I took seriously, but also a promise we took personally. For a generation raised in the shadow of endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it felt reassuring. It told us there was a new Republican Party that had learned from its failures and wouldn’t ask our generation to fight another war for regime change. That belief stood strong until the U.S. overthrew Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Growing up in the long wake of the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan shaped how my generation learned to see Republicans. For us, “traditional” Republican foreign policy became synonymous with unnecessary conflicts that caused young people to bear the consequences. We heard how Iraq was sold to the public as a necessary war to destroy weapons of mass destruction, only to become a long conflict that defined the early adulthood of many millennials. Many of us grew up watching older siblings come home from deployments changed, and hearing teachers and coaches talk about friends who never fully came back. By the time we were old enough to pay attention, distrust of Bush-era Republicans wasn’t ideological, it was inherited from what we had heard.
As the 2024 election was rolling around, that dynamic had flipped. After watching wars in Ukraine and Gaza dominate headlines while Joe Biden was president, the Democrats were now the warmongers. My friends constantly told me how a vote for Kamala Harris was a vote to go to war. On the other hand, Donald Trump and the Republicans were the ones my friends thought could keep us safe. “I’m not voting for Trump because I love him,” one friend told me. “I’m voting for him because he cares about us and I don’t want to go fight in a stupid war.” For many of my friends, much of their vote came down to one question: Who was less likely to send us to fight? The answer to them was pretty clear.
Fast forward to now, and Venezuela has begun to complicate that belief. Even without talk of a draft or a formal declaration of war, the renewed focus on U.S. involvement and troops on the ground has brought back the same language of escalation my generation was taught to distrust. Young men online have been voicing the same worries, concerned that the ousting of Maduro mirrors the early stages of wars they were raised to fear. When I asked a friend what he thought about Venezuela, he shared that same sentiment. “This is how all these wars always start,” he told me. “They might try to make it sound like it’s not actually a war, but people our age always end up being the ones that pay the price for it.” For young men who supported Trump because they believed he represented a break from interventionist politics, Venezuela blurs the line between the “new” Republican Party they thought they were backing and the old one they were raised to reject.
For many young men, Venezuela has become a major part of a broader shift of how they view Trump. A recent poll from Speaking with American Men (SAM) found that Trump’s approval rating has fallen 10 percent among young men, with only 27 percent agreeing with the statement that Trump is “delivering for you”.
Gen Z men’s support of Trump was never about ideology or party loyalty, it was about the idea that he had their back and would fight for them. But that’s no longer the case. Recently, Trump proposed adding $500 billion to the military budget. Ideas like that will only hurt the president with young men. My friends don’t want more military spending that could get us entangled in foreign wars; they want a president who keeps them home and fights for their economic and social needs. As Trump pushes for a bigger military and more intervention abroad, the promise that once made him feel like a protector of young men now feels out of reach.
For my generation, Venezuela isn’t just another foreign policy dispute, it’s a conflict many young men worry they could be the ones sent to fight. Gen Z men didn’t support Trump because he was a Republican, but because they believed he was different from the old Republicans. He would be a president who would have their back, fight for their interests and keep them from fighting unnecessary wars. Now, that promise feels fragile, and the fear of being the ones asked to face the consequences has returned. For a generation raised on the effects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the idea of another war isn’t abstract, it’s personal.