Can Trump Use Foreign Policy to Appeal to Young Men?

I dunno about this hypothesis...

Photo by Majestic Lukas on Unsplash

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has previously written about Donald Trump’s transactional appeals to young men — by embracing cryptocurrency, vaping, and RFK Jr. in no particular order.

Another arena where this is playing out is which podcasts are able to book Trump (and which ones he backs out on). Over at NOTUS, John T. Seward writes that Trump has talked to, “sympathetic podcast hosts like Logan Paul, Ben Shapiro and Dave Ramsey.” Furthermore, as Seward observes, “Unlike his rallies, the audiences aren’t necessarily Trump superfans. The shows aren’t purely politics; they span gun culture, combat sports and shock-value humor.”

None of this is terribly surprising in 2024. What is surprising, however, is when Seward writes that, “in more than 12 hours of Trump’s podcast interviews, NOTUS found the former president oscillating between familiar lines from his rallies to more expansive proclamations — particularly on foreign policy.”

Say what now? As someone who has gone on record to say that foreign policy will not play a large role in the 2024 presidential election, this was a shocking sentence to read. But Seward listened to Trump on these podcasts, and he brings the receipts:

He almost always quotes Viktor Orbán, the far-right prime minister of Hungary, when asked how he sees global issues being resolved under his possible presidency. On multiple podcasts, Trump has warned about the great possibility of World War III. And whenever the wars in Ukraine or Gaza come up, he paints a particularly dark future.

“The stick is generally more successful, and you know, we’re talking about war,” Trump said about his approach to geopolitical negotiations on the tech and politics host Lex Fridman’s podcast, which has gained a following among Silicon Valley’s “anti-woke” elites….

“Viktor Orbán, a tough guy, a smart guy, as you know, he runs Hungary,” Trump tells Shapiro. “And he made the statement that if Trump comes back, everything will be settled.”

At another point, Trump implied he’d use the American military’s might more as president: “The fact is our military, if you have the right leader, is very powerful. It’s very good,” he said.

On Fridman’s show, Trump slid into praise for Orbán yet again.

“He said, ‘The world has to have Trump back because everyone was afraid of Trump.’ Now that’s what he said, so I’m not using that term, but I think they respected me,” Trump tells Fridman listeners. “He said, ‘China was afraid, Russia was afraid, everybody was afraid.’”

On Andrew Schulz’s show, “Flagrant,” he boasted about his relationship with Vladimir Putin.

“I got along with Russia. I get along with pretty much everybody,” he told Schulz. “Actually, the tougher they were, the better I did with them. That’s a good thing, not a bad thing because the other ones are easier to handle.”

As an aside, Seward observes that Trump comments, “notably run up against the isolationist tack he has been associated with.” But this is not entirely accurate. On the substance, what Trump says in these podcasts is entirely consistent with his overall foreign policy statements. He’s made it pretty clear that he would adopt an appeasement strategy toward the Putins of the world so he can pursue a militaristic approach towards Latin America. As I wrote recently, “Remember, even though the term is directed at him a lot, Trump is not an isolationist — he is a mercantilist who prefers using force in this hemisphere.”

On the politics, however, it is not obvious at all that this would appeal to young voters. Indeed, Let’s pull on that thread a bit more, shall we?!

The very idea of Trump appearing on these podcasts is to appeal to young men. But as the pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson noted recently on the New York Times’ “Matter of Opinion” podcast, Trump’s appeal to young men is not rooted in a more militaristic foreign policy — quite the opposite, in fact:

One of the issues where you see the biggest generation gap, and this is particularly among Republicans, is that older Republicans still have a very kind of Cold War American projection of power can be a good thing type mindset. And for younger people, especially young Republicans, there is a belief that America is not good at doing good around the world. And so we are much better off just staying at home, focusing on the myriad of problems we have here within our own borders.

And I think that is, in some ways, a kind of under-discussed reason why many young people gravitate toward Donald Trump, that his message of we’re going to focus on the problems here at home, we’re not going to try to go police the world, that really does have resonance with a younger generation who would probably not in a poll ever tell me that foreign policy was their number one position.

If Trump is trying to use his foreign policy to appeal to young men, what he is saying is unlikely to make the sale. Sure, he can try to instill panic that World War III will break out if he’s not elected. He can also claim that he will end the intractable conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. Both of these claims are rather risible, however, and I suspect even young men are aware that Trump’s record as a peacemaker is, um, not great.

Trump’s podcasting outreach might appeal to a certain young male demographic. His foreign policy musings on those podcasts, however, do not sound terribly attractive to the young men who might have to be tasked to fight in Latin America. Which means that I stand by my previous declaration: foreign policy will have, at best, a minimal effect on the 2024 U.S. presidential election.