A report published Monday by Alternet highlighted a new column from MS NOW arguing that President Donald Trump's second term has badly failed one key group of voters who took a chance on him in 2024 — the people who placed "the greatest hope" for their future in him. The piece is opinion commentary rather than a study of new data, and it homes in on a voting bloc the column identifies as having backed Trump decisively in 2024.

Writing for the network on Monday morning, author and reporter Paul Waldman laid out what he called "the unmanly truth" about the Trump administration, citing the most recent federal jobs report as evidence that "Americans continue to fall behind on affording the necessities of life." He suggested that the grim poll numbers for Trump and the GOP may be explained by the acute disappointment of one particular group that broke for him in a big way in 2024: young men. The evidence he leans on is checkable — the latest federal jobs report and the president's own poll ratings — which makes this the kind of argument readers can track against the data as it is updated.

"To look at President Donald Trump's poll ratings, one would think we're in the middle of an outright depression, not just a mediocre economy that isn't providing the kind of security and opportunity people want," Waldman wrote. "That may be explained by a yawning gap between what Trump promised and what he has delivered — especially for those people, including young men, who put the greatest hope in him to improve their lives."

The column framed Trump's 2024 campaign pledge as a central source of that letdown. "It was clearly a mistake for Trump to say on the campaign trail in 2024, 'When I win, I will immediately bring prices down, starting on Day One,'" Waldman wrote. "But that's not all he hasn't been able to deliver. Ever since he ran in 2016, he has offered a vision of a return to an America of the past, one in which manufacturing was the driver of the economy and the people who today feel they have been left behind — especially men, and especially men in rural areas — could rely on well-paid, secure jobs that offered not just a good living but also a sense of accomplishment and status."

Waldman acknowledged that no president could realistically have brought prices down as swiftly and dramatically as Trump promised. In his view, however, the deeper sting for voters stems from actions that directly made conditions worse "for the people who counted on him the most" — above all the war with Iran, which has inflated gas prices. That burden, he noted, falls hardest on rural, Trump-supporting areas, where "residents have to travel longer distances and many of them drive pickups."

"If you were driving to one of the great manufacturing jobs that Trump claims he created, you might be willing to absorb that cost. But there has been no factory boom," Waldman argued. "In fact, there are fewer manufacturing jobs now than there were when Trump took office."

According to the column, the few sectors adding jobs under Trump have included home healthcare and social services — professions that do not "involve manly men pounding raw materials into finished products" and are therefore not the kind of work "Trump will encourage men to go into."

"If Trump had chosen to, he could have used his influence with young men to convince them that the economy of tomorrow isn't going to be about upper-body strength," Waldman continued. "Instead, he told them that the past could be recaptured. With the help of a thousand right-wing podcasters and social media influencers, his administration has worked to promote a vision of manhood based on bullying, violence and anxiety. Just look at the comically insecure secretary of defense, who throws insults at every vulnerable group and is obsessed with testosterone levels."

He concluded: "Even so, when you ask young men what's necessary to be a man, the top answer will usually be providing for their families. They don't want to be isolated and atomized, desperately injecting themselves with supplements but unable to find a good job. With the election just a month away, they know Trump hasn't delivered what he promised — and like other voters, they may have run out of patience." For readers weighing the column's thesis, the numbers to watch are the ones it cites: overall hiring, manufacturing payrolls and gas prices.