Welcome to Trump’s America, The i Paper’s World Insight series presenting the sharpest, deepest thinking on an era-defining shift in history and politics, investigating how Donald Trump and his administration have changed the US and the world – and where we go from here.
• We’ve reached “peak America” – just don’t tell Donald Trump
• Brash America is facing its worst nightmare: loneliness
• Maga’s worst nightmare: a child-free, unmarried female president
Kameron Zeka is annoyed with himself for voting for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. The 22-year-old, from a small town near Storm Lake in Iowa, is one of many Gen Z voters who backed the President but have now turned against him.
The fracturing of Trump’s coalition threatens to doom the Republican Party in the midterm elections next month, when Democrats are expected to take back the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate as well.
Zeka, who works as a fertiliser drafter, knew that Trump was a wrecking ball when he voted for him but he thought was exactly what the country needed. “Our political system is so broken,” he tells The i Paper. At the time, he felt “we need somebody to come in and break it to the point where it actually is going to get repaired”.
“I thought Trump might get us to the point where Americans wake up and say, we have to take back our political system from these corporations,” he adds.
“It seemed everything was fairly normal when Trump was President the first time … it wasn’t too crazy.”
He brushed off concerns from many of his friends, who are Mexican, that Trump would deport them and ignored his mother, who said that Trump was a fascist. And he agreed with some of the things that Trump was saying, including that Nato countries should pay more and there should be no new wars.
Looking back, he thinks: “It’s stupid to believe what I did.”
Zeka’s regrets began within months. He was deeply upset with the President’s handling of the Epstein files. He was angry that the famous men who knew Jeffrey Epstein got away without being put on trial, especially as Trump was named in the documents. But when the war on Iran began on 28 February, Zeka finally lost faith in Trump.
“It just seemed so dumb,” Zeka said. “Middle Eastern wars are a touchy subject for Americans. Trump says this one was for nuclear weapons, but a bunch of countries have nukes. North Korea has them and we haven’t been killed by them”.
Zeka is not alone. According to a recent poll by , Trump’s approval rating among voters under 30 stands at a miserable 18 per cent. That is down 20 points from the 39 per cent of Gen Z who backed the President in the 2024 election. Trump came into office promising to end foreign wars and bring down grocery prices on day one. Instead he invaded Iran and gasoline is at its highest level in decades. For younger voters who cast their ballot in their first presidential election in 2024, the past few years have proved a brutal lesson in the realities of national politics.
“When I was at school I read the [Erik Larson] book In The Garden of the Beasts, about a US diplomat and his family who lived in Weimar Germany,” Zeka says. “It does seem every day like we’re getting closer and closer to something similar to that. I’m worried.”
The company where Zeka works is now “really struggling” due to the high cost of fertiliser. Some staff have had their hours cut from 45 to 40 a week and he fears his may be cut, too. He says he is paying hundreds of dollars more on groceries and fuel, with the cost rising with every week that passes. “I’m just disappointed with Trump,” Zeka says. “I think he’s a horrible person and I’m not happy with him.”
If Kamala Harris had taken over from Joe Biden, he believes, it “wouldn’t have been this bad”.
Addy Leugers, 21, was drawn to Trump because of his economic message, too. “The promise of an easier adulthood for people like me just starting out was very appealing,” she tells the The i Paper.
Leugers, who grew up in a devout conservative Baptist household in Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City, where Fox News was constantly on the TV, also liked the President’s bluntness. “I had a lot of friends who said, he calls it like it is,” she says. “Some people like how harsh and brash he was. He was ‘meme-able’, they think he’s funny. Some of my friends ate up the YMCA dance he does.”
Memories of the 2008 global financial crisis were still in Leugers’ mind in 2020 when, having just turned 18, she cast her vote for Trump amid the downturn caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. “He campaigned on lowering prices and people my age were getting out of high school, still working low-income jobs just trying to get by,” she says. “A lot of it was on affordability at a time we were trying to make a life for ourselves.”
At the time, Leugers was extremely pro-Maga, having watched countless hours of right-wing influencers on social media. Leugers’ views on Trump began to change during Covid when he made bizarre claims that people should inject themselves with bleach. Leugers was an essential worker with a job in a grocery store.
After the 2024 election, she was dismayed by Trump’s response to the Epstein files, which she saw as a distraction from his failings on Iran, China, ICE raids and Venezuela. As she continued to re-evaluate her beliefs, Leugers moved to Hawaii three months ago, where she now works as a behaviour technician in a clinic for autistic children.
“Trump said to us: ‘We’ll set you up for a successful future,'” she says. “We spent four years waiting and everything got harder and harder. Now diesel is over $7 a gallon. What are we doing?”
Steve Vilchez performed a similarly sharp U-turn on the President. The 22-year-old son of Mexican immigrants grew up on the North Side of Chicago. Vilchez admits that he was drawn to Trump’s brashness. He was 12 when Trump was first elected and said he was initially nervous about the 2016 presidency, but became “captivated” by conservative influencers like the late Charlie Kirk. By 2017, Vilchez was what he calls a “pretty hardcore Donald Trump supporter”.
“I like how he was very confident in himself,” he says. “Even when the experts were telling him he could do something wrong, the way he was defiant, believing he was right, that level of self assurance I really enjoyed.”
Vilchez, who is now a student biology teacher, began to have doubts about Trump due to his response to Covid and the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January, 2021. Vilchez’s view has further soured since the President took office for a second time and now he considers him a “very dangerous person”.
“It seems like a lot of Trump voters are having a lot of buyer’s remorse,” he says. “The economy is shambles, grocery prices are insane, they’re getting the message Donald Trump lied to them.
“But will they vote Democrat? I haven’t seen a lot of people saying they will do that. People are upset with the Republicans, people are dissatisfied with the Democratic Party, there’s no good option. Everyone’s just scrambling.”
Others feel that the damage caused by Trump could turn an entire generation off voting Republican.
Tina Tang, director of polling and analytics at polling company Navigator, said that their research into Gen Z showed a significant number of young voters wished they could take back their vote in 2024.
During their last survey of younger voters, Navigator asked what grade they would give the President and most people gave him Ds and Cs, but some gave Trump an F.
“Remember what it’s like being in school and getting a grade like that,” Tang said. “It’s hard to bring it back to an A”.
‘Heartbreaking’ shot wins Wildlife Photographer of the Year
The winner has been crowned for the Natural History Museum’s annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, ahead of an exhibition of the photos opening to the public later in the week.
The title went to Federico Veronesi, from Italy, for his image, “The Aftermath”, showing an elephant lifting the body of her dead calf. The chair of the judging panel described it as an emotional “gut punch” and “heartbreakingly poignant”.
An elephant-themed image also triumphed in the ‘Animals in their Environment’ category with James Lewin’s shot, one of five British photographers to win a category.
Telling animals’ stories
The winning entry from Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year featured a dung beetle pushing its cargo, which judges praised for revealing “an entire story”.
Loren Elliott from the USA won the Photojournalist Story award with a shot of a coyote walking above the Bay of San Francisco.
Families forced to spend thousands on travel for sick kids
Children’s health specialists have recommended extra funding to help families get to hospitals for treatment, after one family spent £12,000 travelling to Great Ormond Street Hospital.
Travel costs burden families
Experts from the hospital, which sees around 81,500 children and young people a year, are calling for funding to cover travel costs for all children with serious illnesses.
Laura Grimwade, whose 12-year-old son Woody has a rare autoimmune disease, estimates her family will have spent £15,000 travelling to and from Plymouth to hospitals in London by the time he is 18.
She said a fund would make “such a difference”.
Scheme should be extended, say doctors
- The Government has already committed £10m of travel funding to families of children with cancer.
- Doctors say this is a good start but other families should not miss out.
4 min read
The shocking human cost of UK’s killer kitchens revealed
Health and Safety Executive (HSE) inspectors found hundreds of breaches of health and safety law at more than 160 firms, with workers exposed to “billowing” silica dust, and issued an immediate ban to 50 firms.
What is silicosis?
The threat posed by the man-made stone comes from so-called “dry cutting” whereby particles are emitted in a fine dust as slabs are cut.
Engineered stone often contains as much as 95 per cent silica quartz – far higher than natural stone such as granite (about 30 per cent).
When engineered quartz dust is inhaled, it lodges in the lungs, triggering an aggressive immune response from the body.
Over time, scar tissue forms and spreads, slowly killing the lung. Many sufferers of silicosis remain asymptomatic until it is too late.
Hundreds of breaches
Unannounced visits by the HSE to workshops producing kitchen counters made from in-demand quartz have revealed hundreds of breaches of regulations designed to protect workers from inhaling toxic dust responsible for silicosis, an incurable and often fatal lung condition.
4 min read
Cases of deadly lung disease could reach 1,000
Almost 60 stonemasons in the UK have so far been diagnosed with silicosis, with many falling ill or dying in their 20s, 30s and 40s.
Doctors believe the true number of silicosis cases is much higher and could reach as many as 1,000 people in a workforce of 7,000.
4 min read
2 min read
The verdict from the HSE
Safety bosses said the inspection regime had revealed a “very mixed picture” of safety standards in the kitchen worktop industry.
Harvey Wild, HSE’s head of operations, said: “Where we’re finding things that are wrong, there isn’t just one thing wrong – there’s multiple things wrong. We’re taking a very strong enforcement line and people are getting multiple notices.”
3 min read
Why Trump is backing Putin over energy ceasefire deal
Donald Trump said Vladimir Putin “wants to make a deal more than” Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine as an “energy ceasefire” brokered over the weekend between Russia and Ukraine broke down overnight.
Ceasefire called into question
The US President announced a truce on striking energy facilities on Sunday, to the apparent surprise of both Russia and Ukraine.
While Ukraine claims no Russian sites have since been hit, they say Moscow has struck six plants, killing 33 people. Russia said yesterday that “contact is continuing”.
3 min read
What has the UK said about it?
Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told other dignitaries at the Warsaw Security Forum today that they needed to “take seriously” the “full energy ceasefire” and that Putin should be held to to it.
He also told the assembled officials from Poland, Norway and Germany that the resolve of Europe is “being tested” by hybrid attacks on Nato countries, but that Russia is “not winning this war”.
Two ships hit off Bulgarian coast by Russian drones
- One ship sunk and another was badly damaged last night.
- President of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, condemned the attack as “unacceptable”.
4 min read
How you can help boost dwindling hedgehog numbers
A “call to action” has been issued by researchers who found a dramatic drop in hedgehog populations since the 80s.
The study by the conservation group at the University of Cambridge found a 71 per cent drop in hedgehog populations between 1981 and 2023.
The number of rural areas where they live fell by 80 per cent between 2002 and 2023, but the numbers living in urban areas rose between 2004 and 2024.
2 min read
Why are hedgehogs in decline?
“The fact that they’re doing really badly should be a call for action”
Assistant research professor Silviu Petrovan said the hot, dry summer means hedgehogs will have less to eat than usual, as the slugs and worms they like thrive in wet weather.
The intensification of agriculture and increase in roads has caused the hedgehog’s habitat to shrink over the past few decades.
Is there any hope for the hedgehog?
The study combined data from surveys which were not specifically looking for hedgehogs, such as roadkill figures and garden birdwatches, so they may point an overly negative picture.
Gardens can act as refuges for hedgehogs, and conservationists advise leaving wild corners for the animals and small holes in fences so they can move freely. Replacing fences with hedges can also help, and pesticides should be avoided.
Terrorists could attack UK with bioweapons, warns MI5 chief
Terrorists could harness artificial intelligence to create destructive biological weapons, the head of MI5 warned today, as he launched a new spy-led AI Threat Assessment Centre to assess the risks of the emerging technology.
Head of MI5 gives annual address on nation’s security
“Many terrorists would dearly love to have some kind of capability of getting [a] biological or meteorological weapon. This is not yet manifest. But one risk is that AI could allow dangerous knowledge to get into their hands”
Sir ken mccallum, director general of mi5
New AI Threat Assessment Centre
- The centre will combine information from spies and open sources.
- The aim is to “seize the huge opportunities of Al and manage the risks thrown up by its misuse”.
5 min read
Burnham warned over Russian trolls
The head of MI5 warned the Prime Minister not to re-run old battles at risk of amplifying the Russian trolls and bots who sowed division by interfering with elections.
This came after Burnham told MPs yesterday that there was evidence Russia had interfered with the result of the 2019 general election.
Greatest threats to the UK
“Russia remains aggressor number one, as Putin’s Kremlin continues to lash out at the UK and its allies”
McCallum said Russia is “escalating” attempts at hybrid warfare, whilst avoiding “conventional conflict”.
He also mentioned Iran “attempting to expand” a similar hybrid campaign and “extreme right-wing terrorism” especially among young people.