Politics
The women who could make or break MAGA
Among the sweeping tent of President Donald Trump’s winning coalition in 2024, there’s a niche that’s often overlooked despite the potency of its role in the burgeoning young right: conservative women.
It’s these women, like Christian conservative influencer Savanna Faith Stone, who say “we’re not really identifying with the MAGA party anymore.”
“Promises that were made have not been delivered on at all, and I think young women are realizing that,” Stone said in an interview with Blue Light News. “They’re realizing, ‘Hey, you promised lower gas prices. You promised the economy would be better. Like, that’s why we voted for you.’”
Stone, who turns 21 this week, is one of a flurry of influencers who flocked to San Antonio this weekend, young families in tow, to gather under a bevy of bright pink lights at Turning Point USA’s Women’s Leadership Summit. It’s the biggest gathering of its kind for the young female right — a space for a collective disdain for “woke” culture, a love for God and kinship under the theme of “faith, family and freedom.”
But bubbling under the surface are divisions within the GOP that have enveloped the online voices of the young right and a budding disillusionment among young women with the politics of the second Trump administration. It’s all part of a growing divide between being “MAGA” in 2026 and being “America First.”
Trump is “not America first,” Stone said. She voted for a president who promised no new wars, who was pro-family and would bring down costs. “It’s harder than ever for a young couple to be able to buy a home,” she added.
Young women moved from 33 percent for Trump in 2020 to 40 percent in 2024, while recent polling has shown the partisan gender divide is more stark than ever. Now less than six months out from the midterms, the young female right’s biggest voices are warning women could sit out the midterm elections.
“I cannot express to you the level of alarm bells that should be ringing for the GOP,” as women consider not voting, conservative influencer Alex Clark told Blue Light News, adding that young women are looking at everything from the ongoing war in Iran to the persistence of pesticides and it’s breaking their trust.
Clark is a Turning Point darling, a 33 year-old podcaster with half a million followers who grew under the tutelage of the late Charlie Kirk. She’s built a MAHA-focused health and wellness platform that she calls an “unaggressive way to share conservative ideals” with a loyal following. (“You’re trailing my show!” she recalled Kirk telling her in 2024. “Yeah, you better watch out!” she responded.)
She hasn’t shied away from sharing her criticism of the administration. “I straight up told [the White House], ‘People want ‘fight, fight, fight Trump.’ They don’t want ‘ballroom Trump,’’” Clark said. “I feel like some of the magic and the spark that helped us win 2024 is missing.”
Along with other voices like Isabel Brown or Riley Gaines, they’ve become emblems of the Turning Point faction of Gen-Z and millennials. They believe women’s biology will push them to follow strong men — part of what they credit for some young women’s embrace of the GOP in 2024 as the party penetrated the manosphere. Stone drew controversy for saying voting should be one vote per household. Clark told Blue Light News she doesn’t think a woman should be president.
But the universe of female influencers is vast and oftentimes at odds. Raquel DeBono, the self-proclaimed NYC conservative of “Make America Hot Again” fame, said in an interview that she “would not be caught dead” at Turning Point’s summit and rejects the rigidity of the online faction that has cast out figures like Megyn Kelly. “If you want to let women into the tent and you want more women to vote conservative, you need to be less cringe and horrible,” DeBono said.
And then there’s influencers like Emily Wilson, of “Emily Saves America,” and Priya Patel, conservatives living in West Hollywood who embrace traditional values but often find an audience in women who don’t. “I read my Bible. I want to get married young. I’m saving myself for marriage,” Patel said. But the pair who co-host “Pretty Political” have followers that are “girls that do Only Fans, makeup artists, graffiti artists” who all “love America,” Wilson said.
Whether city conservatives or Turning Point young moms, they agree on key issues — including around foreign policy or accountability for the Jeffrey Epstein files — that they say are diverting them from MAGA or the White House. And with young voters already a turnout challenge in midterm years, they’re all concerned many young conservative women simply won’t show up come November.
The White House, in response to a request for comment, touted the “most pro-woman agenda in American history” — pointing to women’s sports, decreasing violent crime, expanding the child tax credit and cutting food dyes, as well as “creating the most renter-friendly market we’ve seen in years,” in a statement from spokesperson Anna Kelly.
The administration, Kelly says, has “achieved win after win on issues women care about most — and we’re just getting started. The MAGA coalition is stronger than ever, and women continue to play a powerful role in the movement.”
But GOP women politicians know it’s “100,000 percent” a problem. “It’s something that I have spoken to the White House about, ” Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) — who co-chairs the Republican Women’s Caucus — said in an interview. She added the GOP has to be “laser focused” on delivering on affordability, “and if we don’t, we’re failing at earning their trust and support in the election.”
And the Republican Party made the mistake before of not messaging directly to women, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders told Blue Light News. “Women want a lot of those same things. We want safe neighborhoods. We want the opportunity to make decisions about how we raise our families,” she said.
Yet there’s skepticism about whether the GOP will take these concerns seriously, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former congresswoman who appeared with Turning Point more than once, texted. “I think about all the single mothers and women out there trying to make it, and it is extremely difficult, with inflation continuing to rise and overall cost of living continuing to rise,” she said. She also called Trump’s tone and language “a major turn off to women.”
These young conservative women — some clad in florals, others still donning their ruby-red Trump hats — don’t regret their vote, and many expressed a desire for the administration to succeed.
But any future for the growth of the budding female right has a bridge of trust to re-build.
“After Trump in 2028, if we want to see this energy continue that we had in 2015 and 2024, if we want that to have any sort of life after 2028 — it has to become an America First movement,” Clark told Playbook. “That is the cry of the base right now.”
Politics
Trump wants the Postal Service to radically overhaul mail voting. But ballots are already going out.
President Donald Trump’s controversial demands for the Postal Service to overhaul and monitor millions of mail ballots hit another snag on Friday, when North Carolina became the first state in the nation to start sending out ballots for the November election.
In March, Trump signed the initial executive order, which aimed to crack down on mail-in voting — which he regularly alleges without evidence is a vector for widespread voter fraud — and assert an unprecedented amount of federal control over the upcoming elections.
Under this order and the subsequent rule drafted by the U.S. Postal Service, the USPS would refuse to deliver ballots to states that failed to provide lists of eligible mail voters or did not adhere to an approved envelope design style.
Since then, the order has faced legal challenges, and it remains paused by a federal judge’s orders. But the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to allow the new rule to proceed — something current and former election officials from both parties say would be both a legal nightmare that oversteps the federal government’s traditional role in elections and a logistical one that is happening far too close to the November election to implement even if they agreed with it.
“Why the hell are you rocking the boat this late in the game?” said Stephen Richer, a former Republican recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona, who has clashed with Trump allies for defending the security of the 2020 election.
Still, election officials are trying to project a sense of normalcy for voters, particularly in North Carolina, which serves as a test of whether established local election systems can operate normally amid intensifying federal scrutiny.
“I want to emphasize this point because there has been a lot of outside noise: Our county workers are ready,” Sam Hayes, a longtime Republican lawyer in the state and now executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, said in a Thursday afternoon press conference.
He added, “All we can do is what we’re doing. … It is business as usual as far as I’m concerned.”
Despite the legal challenges, the Trump administration has continued to press the courts to let it proceed. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to lift an order from a Massachusetts judge which temporarily prevents the USPS from enforcing their rule. It is the second time the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to step in, after winning an earlier victory in which the high court dismissed an earlier hold on the rule as premature.
“The uncertainty is coming from a single activist judge who continues to try and obstruct President Trump from implementing commonsense measures to protect the security of mail-in ballots and ensure only Americans vote in American elections,” White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement. “These safeguards for mail ballots were proposed months ago giving election officials ample time to prepare for the 2026 election.”
The USPS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Election officials said that if the rule goes into effect this close to November, it would cause chaos and place added strain on the USPS and election officials. And an anonymous federal whistleblower said in a report circulated earlier this week by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) that the USPS was moving forward in a “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed process” to try to implement the new system ahead of the midterms.
In the coming weeks, states across the country will follow North Carolina’s lead. Nine other states will begin mailing ballots in the next two weeks, according to a tracker from the National Conference of State Legislatures — with the biggest day for mailing coming 45 days before the election in mid-September.
“It would be so outrageous to try to let this go into effect. It’s hard to even imagine,” said Ben Hovland, a senior fellow for democracy at the progressive think tank Center for American Progress and former Democratic commissioner with the Election Assistance Commission who was fired by Trump in July.
He added, “It would be a break-glass moment for our democracy.”
The rule would require meticulous changes to ballot handling and tracking practices that Hovland said are impossible to implement before Election Day in about two months, effectively disenfranchising millions of voters.
“Ballots are printed. Envelopes are printed. You can go on and on with all the practical reasons that show that implementing something like this at this time is not feasible,” he said.
Richer said he doubted the new rules would bring about more security. Even if the USPS received lists from the states, according to the postal service’s final rule, it would not do any additional vetting of the list, Richer said.
“It’s just that the mail ballots have to be on that list, and I don’t see what added value for election integrity that does,” he said.
He added, “It creates a lot of administrative burden, and I think it creates a lot more opportunity for error.”
While a decision looms in the courts, election officials and experts cast doubt on the likelihood of the rules going into effect before November. A more pressing issue, they said, is the confusion and uncertainty surrounding mail-in ballots, which could subvert and change the behaviors of voters.
“It makes things seem messy or difficult, and it can dissuade people from participating or coming out to vote,” Hovland said. “It certainly also helps establish a pretext to make bad faith claims about election results.”
Hovland said that while none of these claims of voter fraud are backed up with facts, they could cause Americans to lose faith in the voting process.
Still, some current officials contended they were well-prepared for whatever happens — and that they’d be able to communicate effectively with voters who have become increasingly buffeted by dramatic rhetoric about the once-unmentioned nuts and bolts of actually running an election.
“There’s always a lot of noise around elections, that’s not going to change, and it can be hard to differentiate that from what’s actually going on on the ground,” said Jason Tyson, director of external affairs for the North Carolina State Board of Elections.
As Election Day approaches, Tyson and election officials said they urge voters to check their registration status and make a plan to vote.
He added, “I think we’ve got a really well-trained, solid staff who are ready, and who have gone through all of the checks and balances and points of contact that we need to do to get to where we are.”
Missouri’s Supreme Court suspended a congressional map that state Republicans drew last year that would have netted the GOP an additional House seat, likely keeping the seat in Democratic hands this November.
The court ruled unanimously on Thursday that a referendum petition organized by Democrats to put the new congressional maps to a vote was incorrectly deemed insufficient by Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, and ordered that the gerrymandered map be put to a vote in the fall.
Voters will ultimately decide the fate of the new lines in November. But in the meantime, it cannot be in place for the midterms, meaning Rep. Emanuel Cleaver’s original Kansas City-based district will likely stay in Democrats’ hands this fall.
Construction crews could begin the excavation process for what will be President Donald Trump’s massive 250-foot-tall arch in as soon as the next two weeks, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced on Thursday.
The monument — which will be erected in a traffic circle at the head of the Memorial Bridge over the Potomac River, coming between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Cemetery — has generated controversy as concerns emerged about the design and traffic congestion during construction.
The arch would take two to three years to construct on the proposed schedule, according to documents released in June.
“We are pleased to announce that after a very long wait (over 125 years!), we are preparing to start, over the next two-week period, the excavation work necessary for the Great Triumphal Arch and Military Observation Deck,” Burgum said in a social media post.
The 250-foot-tall arch will be among Trump’s most visible projects, as the administration continues its attempts to remake Washington. Critics, however, have voiced fears that the structure may be too large, and overshadow other monuments, like the Lincoln Memorial on the other side of the Potomac River.
The proposed arch will dwarf the Arc de Triomphe in Paris in size. It is unclear at this time how much construction will cost; the National Endowment for the Humanities earmarked $15 million for the monument.
“This will be one the the Great Pieces of American Architecture, honoring the history and significance of Arlington National Cemetery and befitting the most powerful Capital in the World,” Burgum said.
The monument will be constructed on land overseen by the National Park Service, and critics have argued Trump’s latest project requires explicit congressional approval. However, the Interior secretary continues to rebut these claims.
Instead, Burgum echoed previous statements and said historically “Congress and various congressionally chartered commissions decreed that a monumental work should adorn Columbia Island,” the traffic circle where the monument is planned to be constructed.
“Despite Congress’s intent, the site became and remains today a barren traffic circle lacking any monumental treatment and significant historic value,” he said.
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