President Donald Trump has long benefited from support in the so-called “manosphere,” with even Democrats like former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg pandering to it while female conservatives try to create an analogous “womanosphere.” But according to a recent interview between Trump’s former Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor and political organizer Ross Morales Rocketto, founder of the 2024 political group White Dudes for Harris, Trump is beginning to lose support among white men, a shift that could matter most in lower-turnout elections where even small changes in enthusiasm can shape who shows up.

“Donald Trump went from 50 percent approval in this country, that means he had some independents on his side; then he went down to 40 percent, which basically meant any independents he had, those people are gone,” Taylor told Rocketto during their interview. “They're bailing. He's losing some concerned conservatives. Then you go from 40 to 30 percent and you're literally losing millions of your followers. It means you are losing millions upon millions of your followers, and a lot of them are dudes. They're just guys that kind of got recruited into the movement. They felt like it was cool to back Donald Trump since it was provocative. They don't pay attention to politics. They're like, ‘I don't know. Everyone hates him. Could be kind of cool to see this come back into office.’”

Taylor said Trump’s various unpopular domestic and foreign policies are now turning some of those supporters off. “Now they're not happy with what they are seeing,” he said, before asking whether the shift amounts to a significant pickup moment and what the midterm numbers might show about whether people have “really started to bail and gone to the other side.”

Rocketto offered a more cautious assessment, saying Democrats could make gains, but not all at once.

“What I hope we see is more young men coming out to vote in this election cycle, because I think if we see more young men voting in this election cycle, they will probably be voting for Democrats, and I think that bodes quite well,” Rocketto told Taylor. “I think what we are likely to see is a lot of these guys will just stay home and not vote, which will also mean that we probably do quite well in the midterms. I'm still pretty bullish on us retaking the House. I'm a little more skeptical about the Senate.”

Rocketto said many of Trump’s manosphere supporters may sit out the 2026 midterms, but he suggested they could remain available to either side in 2028, underscoring how online political identity can be more fluid than a fixed partisan coalition.

“I think how we talk is going to matter,” Rocketto explained to Taylor. “I've been saying this a lot over the last six months. The 2028 election isn't going to be decided in a fight between moderates and progressives. It's going to be between people who are angry and people who aren't angry. And I think the candidates who are angry and can show that anger, and can show that they are willing to do something to completely shake up the system — I think that's who we're going to end up with as a nominee.”

Earlier in the conversation, Taylor described the recent arrest of manosphere influencer Andrew Tate as a metaphor “because the rest of the MAGA manosphere is looking around and saying, ‘I don't know if I want to be a part of this.’ Turns out these guys are losers, and they might be corrupt losers, and they might be getting us sent to jail with the things that they're doing and recommending.”

Rocketto agreed, saying that “as we've learned with folks like Andrew Tate — who spent a lot of time during the [former President Joe] Biden years not in the United States — we know that it's extremely important, and we also know that these far-right movements find a home in far-right culture. And I think what Donald Trump was able to do in both elections that he won is unite a group of people that we'd never seen someone on the right unite before.”

He added that Trump brought together the cultural right and the political right into what he called “a very unholy union.”

“The cultural right and the political right, for many, many years, had never really been able to get united to build power together,” Rocketto said. “And what Donald Trump did at its core was unite those two groups of folks in a very unholy union. And what you're starting to see is that union starting to fray as he gets a little bit older, as people remember what the first term was like, and as folks are realizing that maybe he is going a little too far.”

Rocketto pointed to far-right podcaster Joe Rogan as one of the first figures on the cultural right to criticize the administration’s immigration policy. He argued that it would be a mistake to assume those voters would return to Trump automatically, but said the backlash has created an opening for Republicans and Democrats alike to compete for voters who agree with tougher border enforcement but object to the tactics.

“It would be a mistake to say that we're going to get all those folks back overnight because of his overstepping,” Rocketto said. “But it has created an opportunity, because many of those folks might be saying, ‘You know what? We do think we should deport criminals, but we don't like it when it's being done this way. We don't like it when people are getting shot in the streets of Minnesota and Houston and cities across the United States. We don't like it when masked people show up in our communities and just kidnap folks who haven't done anything wrong.’”

The manosphere has been widely condemned for promoting toxic behavior. In March, Irish Times writer Kathy Sheridan summed up that criticism in a review of documentarian Louis Theroux’s film Inside the Manosphere.

“Watch again and the soulless, ignorant young men become savagely wounded children with podcasts, millions of social media followers and a guru in the shape of the alleged rapist and sex trafficker, Andrew Tate,” Sheridan wrote.