Donald Trump recently told a group of donors that if he wins the 2024 presidential election, he will “throw out” students who attend pro-Palestinian protests, according to the Washington Post. “One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave,” Trump said, according to donors at the event, whom the Post did not name. It is unclear if he meant he would throw out all students, regardless of their nationality, or only non-U.S. citizens studying here.
Over the past several months, anti-war protests have cropped up at dozens of schools and universities across the country, beginning with Columbia University in New York, where tent enclosures and campus occupations disrupted final weeks of class, canceling its graduation ceremony. Though the demonstrations have been largely peaceful, the NYPD violently cracked down on them, arresting hundreds of people in April and May. (Many of those charges were later dropped, according to the news organization The City.) During the donor event, which per the Post occurred on May 14 in New York City, Trump called the protests a “radical revolution” and commended the NYPD’s reaction to the organizers, which he said “[have] to be stopped now.” If re-elected, he promised, “we’re going to set that movement back 25 or 30 years.”
This is not the first time the former president has threatened student protesters. As Rolling Stone previously reported, Trump told attendees at a campaign rally that he would not tolerate foreign students participating in demonstrations. “If you come here from another country and try to bring jihadism or anti-Americanism or antisemitism to our campuses, we will immediately deport you, you’ll be out of that school,” Trump told a crowd in Wildwood, New Jersey on May 11.
According to the Washington Post, Trump joked at the private donor event that “98 percent of my Jewish friends” were present in the room, and went on to promise support for Israel in the event that he wins in November. He said he believes Israel’s actions to be a justified “war on terror” and as president he would support the country. This is also not the first time he’s expressed support for Israel in the current Gaza war. During an appearance on Fox News in March, Trump said that he was “firmly in Israel’s camp,” and said of Israel’s strikes on Gazans, “you have to finish the problem.” According to Al Jazeera, at least 36,050 Palestinians have been killed in the war so far, as have at least 1,139 people in Israel.
Though the Post noted that a representative for Trump did not answer detailed questions about their reporting, they did receive an email from the campaign’s national secretary, Karoline Leavitt. “When President Trump is back in the Oval Office, Israel will once again be protected, Iran will go back to being broke, terrorists will be hunted down, and the bloodshed will end,” she wrote.
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.