Does Donald Trump Hate Youth?

Staff
Jun 11
6 min read

In the not-too-distant future, Donald Trump will be reviled by young people who will have to face the consequences of his failed environmental, fiscal and vaccine policies. They are inheriting worsening storms and mass animal extinctions from the effects of climate change; an untenable deficit that will lower the real value of their wages; and increased exposure to measles and other diseases that had once been contained.

Youth will ask parents and grandparents why they didn’t stop him. Rueful Trump voters will say that they didn’t realize the destruction he would cause—that they thought he was kidding—“Trump being Trump.” Our elected representatives dropped the ball and so did we.

It is no wonder that youth are “losing faith in the political system,” according to the Harvard Youth Poll. “Only 13 percent say the US is headed in the right direction, while 59 percent say it’s on the wrong track. Approval remains low for President Trump (25 percent) and both parties in Congress (26 percent Democrat; 25 percent Republicans). “Forty-five percent of young Americans say they are struggling to make ends meet."¹ Indeed, it has been forecasted that average wages will be reduced by 3.4 percent over the next 30 years,” according to the Penn Wharton Budget Model forecast.²

“At some point we’ll have a crisis and people will look back and say, “why didn’t we do something earlier?,” Shai Akabas, vice president of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center told ABC News.³

Here are three ways—climate change, the deficit and the measles vaccine—that Trump has failed America’s youth. (Note: I could easily have added immigration, affordability, child care, K-12 education, student loans, the Middle East, Social Security, gun control, Washington DC garish architecture and more, but I wanted to keep this short.) 

Trump’s Climate Change Denial

The New York Times summarized Trump’s environmental policy in one line: “President Trump has tried to cut funding for virtually every federal program that addresses climate change.”⁴ Despite strong evidence to the contrary, the president denies that climate change is real. His mantra of “drill baby drill” is destroying our country—and arguably our planet.

The research is conclusive. “The world is now warming faster than at any point in recorded history,” according to a UN report. “Fossil fuels – coal, oil and gas – are by far the largest contributor to global climate change, accounting for around 68 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions and nearly 90 per cent of all carbon dioxide emissions….”⁵ Further, the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes will rise, according to research by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.⁶ It’s even been reported that hailstones will be bigger in the future.

Trump’s actions are head-scratching. He gave $1 billion in taxpayer dollars to the French company, TotalEnergies, to halt their offshore wind projects in New York and North Carolina and invest in fossil fuels instead. By accepting, the French firm went from easing the effects of climate change to making it worse.

Worsening storms are not the only damage from climate change. University of Connecticut professor Mark Urban found that 180,000 species are in danger of extinction by 2100 if gas emissions stay at a level “in accordance with the Paris Agreement” in his review of 450 studies. Even more species will be lost if gas emissions go higher.⁷ The monarch butterfly, Florida panther, Rice’s whale and the right whale are among the species in danger. People will be forced to move because of rising sea waters engulfing their towns.⁸ ⁹   “This is the worst-case scenario—to just take a sledgehammer to all EPA climate regulations from the last two decades,” said Meredith Hankins. author of “How the Trump Administration Bakes Climate Denial into U.S. Policy."¹⁰

National Debt/Deficit—Our Children Will Pay the Price for Kicking the Can.

The national deficit is the shortfall between expenditures and revenue for one fiscal year. In 2025, the deficit was $1.78 trillion.¹¹ (The last budget surplus was in 2001--President Clinton.) Cumulative debt is the aggregate of all years. In March 2026, the debt was $39 trillion according to the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Deficit Tracker.¹² “Taxpayers are now paying nearly $1 trillion annually just to service that debt,” according to data from the nonpartisan Taxpayers for Common Sense.”¹³ It's the future generations who will pay for this,” said Professor Kent Smetters of the University of Pennsylvania.¹⁴

The headlines say it all: “Trump just raised the $39 trillion national debt with the largest budget hike since World War II — and nobody can figure out how to pay for it.” (Fortune magazine, April 3, 2026)¹⁵ “What $4 trillion in debt from Trump's spending measure could mean for future generations.” (ABC, August 5, 2025)¹⁶

“We’re the grown-ups who should be taking care of America for future generations. Instead, we’re bequeathing a fiscal mess of biblical proportions,” wrote Isabel V. Sawhill in 2006 when the debt was only $8.3 trillion.¹⁷

Trump didn’t create the national debt, but he is making it worse by reckless spending and inattention. For example, he proposed a $1.776 billion fund—paid by taxpayers—to compensate the Jan. 6 insurrectionists and others he considers to have been targeted by the Biden administration. This is despite evidence that they were determined to overthrow the results of a fair election. Some of those who may be eligible also attacked police officers. He pulled back on this on this after an outcry by Americans and politicians from both parties.

Measles

Measles was eradicated in the U.S. in 2000 as proclaimed by the Pan American Health Organization (part of the World Health Organization). This achievement was attributed primarily to the prevalence of the measles vaccine and the encouragement of officials to take it. As a result, parents no longer feared this highly contagious disease whose complications included deafness, blindness, acute encephalitis and death. Children under five are particularly susceptible.

A Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) report summarized it well: “Measles vaccines have been available in the U.S. since 1963 and are safe and effective at providing protection against illness and, importantly, against infection and onward transmission of the virus. It is estimated that two doses of a measles-containing vaccine are 97 percent effective in preventing infection. CDC recommends children get their first measles vaccine dose between 12 and 15 months of age and the second dose between 4 and 6 years of age, before entering school.¹⁸

But the US may lose its eradication status. In January 2026, Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Trump administration, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., announced that they no longer “fully” recommended a third of childhood vaccines [slashing the number of recommended vaccines from 17 to 11]. This “is an ‘astounding’ decision that will worsen vaccine access and increase disease outbreaks,” said Daniel Jernigan, former director of the National Center for Emerging Zoonotic Infectious Diseases.¹⁹

And, indeed it has. "…From January 2025 through the end of March 2026, U.S. states have reported over 3,800 measles cases.”²⁰ Cuts in key personnel, a decline in funding and the “mixed messages” of vaccine skeptics contributed. As a result, vaccination rates have decreased. The South Carolina measles outbreak that started last fall is the “worst in the US in more than 35 years.”²¹

Fortunately, on March 16, 2026, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy blocked the major vaccine changes brought about by the Trump administration in response to a lawsuit by the American Academy of Pediatrics and other groups.²² "I'm angry that many children and their parents had to worry about contracting or suffering through a disease that should have been nearly 100 percent preventable,” said Dr. Martha Edwards, president of the South Carolina chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.²³

Summary

In time, Americans will try to erase Trump from our consciousness—the President Donald J. Trump International Airport will revert back to the Palm Beach International Airport (FL) and those leering Trump banners will be removed from the Department of Justice and other federal buildings. The Trump Kennedy Center is already reverting back to its rightful name, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The Gulf of America will return to its correct name, the Gulf of Mexico, which it had been called since the 1550s until Trump changed it. Erasing Trump’s name is the easy part; undoing the damage he caused may be impossible.

Vote.

REFERENCES

Introduction

1 https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policy-topics/democracy-governance/new-poll-just-13-youth-feel-america-headed

2, 14, 16 https://abcnews.com/Business/4-trillion-debt-trumps-spending-measure-future-generations/story?id=124372328

3 Ibid

Climate Change

4 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/02/climate/trump-budget-climate-cuts-congress.html

5 https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/science/causes-effects-climate-change

6 https://www.c2es.org/content/hurricanes-and-climate-change/

7 https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/a-third-of-earths-species-could-become-extinct-by-2100-if-climate-change-isnt-curbed

8 https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-releases/analysis-seven-animals-jeopardized-by-trump-plan-to-ax-endangered-species-act-2025-12-03/