![](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/2267299731-e1773944480149.jpg?w=2048\")
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Jack Schlossberg has a confession: He thinks Donald Trump did something right.<\/p>\n
At Fortune\u2018s CEO Initiative dinner in New York, the grandson of President John F. Kennedy \u2014 and now a Democratic congressional candidate running in Manhattan\u2019s 12th District \u2014 sat down with Fortune editor Diane Brady for a candid, wide-ranging conversation that was as much diagnosis as campaign pitch. The verdict from the 33-year-old: Democrats have a serious problem with young men, and they brought it on themselves.<\/p>\n
Schlossberg\u2019s first question was to find an issue on which he and President Trump agreed. \u201cI disagree with President Trump a lot,\u201d he immediately offered, before saying he gives Trump credit for \u201cgetting people fired up about politics.\u201d Trump \u201cpoached\u201d many of the young men away from the Democratic Party, Schlossberg continued, urging his own party to look closely at how and why this happened.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that they\u2019re not stupid, those young men, and I give President Trump a lot of credit for being able to influence new meeting environments and make politics accessible.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a striking admission from a man who spent 2024 making viral social media videos for the Biden campaign \u2014 until he quit, that is. \u201cI went down to Wilmington,\u201d he explained, only to hear \u201cno\u201d over and over again. \u201cAnyway, long story short, I quit the campaign because I thought if I don\u2019t do this my way, I\u2019m not going to be able to live with myself. A month later, I got a call from the campaign being like, \u2018Hey, can you come back and make videos for us?’\u201d<\/p>\n
Schlossberg, who holds degrees from Yale Law and Harvard Business School, has built an unlikely second identity as a progressive content creator, deploying deadpan humor to reach an audience the Democratic Party has consistently fumbled. He told Brady that he thinks his use of humor and sense of the unexpected has been an effective vehicle for conveying information, and he argued that viral social media posts actually contain a lot of information. It\u2019s misguided to think viral content is shallow or light.<\/p>\n
With the Democratic Party at an all-time low in popularity, Schlossberg said it can\u2019t be down to losing their way on policy, but rather no longer reaching young voters. \u201cPeople aren\u2019t looking for a superhero \u2026 They just want someone who knows how to speak their language, meet them where they are, and give them something of value.\u201d <\/p>\n
And he has a clear theory: \u201cThe Republican Party has embraced modernity in a way that the Democratic Party used to own,\u201d he told the room of CEOs. \u201cWhether it\u2019s space, whether it\u2019s the AI race, crypto, investing in new technologies \u2014 the Democratic Party has been way anti-everything, and anti-business in particular. Anti-modernity. Trump has flipped the script.\u201d<\/p>\n
That framing \u2014 Democrats as the party of \u201cno\u201d \u2014 is the sharpest arrow in Schlossberg\u2019s quiver. He doesn\u2019t believe the party lost its way on policy so much as it lost the plot on storytelling and cultural relevance. \u201cI don\u2019t think that\u2019s because we all of a sudden lost our way on policy,\u201d he said. \u201cI think we\u2019ve mainly been out in terms of reaching young people and telling them a story about what we\u2019re for, not just being a reactionary party.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Democratic Party\u2019s shift since JFK<\/p>\n
What would his grandfather make of all this? Schlossberg described a sense of disappointment in the current landscape and a desire to, well, make the Democratic Party great again.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel really proud of being a Democrat,\u201d he said, \u201cand that\u2019s because I associate Democrat not with what it is today, but what it was in the past.\u201d He explained that Democrats used to embrace maternity, science, and new media channels, a party that was pro-affordable healthcare, pro-immigration, pro-education. He also talked about \u201cresponsibility\u201d and \u201ccourage\u201d from political leaders to tell voters what they need to hear, not something false and harmful. This is the danger of Trumpism, he argued.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhether you support the president or not, I think he succeeds when people can\u2019t really believe in anything the government is saying. We can\u2019t even necessarily believe what he says on a given basis.\u201d Schlossberg added that he doesn\u2019t think Trump is wrong about everything, \u201cthat\u2019s too simplistic a view.\u201d But he said Trump is failing to give Americans confidence in the government. \u201cHe\u2019s not giving us confidence in our ability to solve the problems of the future, and I think we really have too many problems that we\u2019re not paying attention to right now that we need to solve.\u201d<\/p>\n
His campaign slogan \u2014 \u201cBelieve in Something Again\u201d \u2014 is a deliberate callback to that lost Kennedy-era confidence. He acknowledged it\u2019s \u201ca little cheesy,\u201d but insisted it captures exactly what this political moment demands: not a superhero, but a leader who meets people where they are and gives them something of genuine value. \u201cYoung people are not a monolith,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd young people are really smart. They can probably really tell authenticity from someone who\u2019s not telling the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n
Schlossberg is running in one of the bluest, most compressed districts in the country \u2014 Manhattan\u2019s 12th, stretching from 96th Street down to 14th \u2014 so his path to Congress runs through a Democratic primary, not a general election battle against Trump voters. But his argument, delivered over dinner to a room full of corporate executives, is clearly aimed at a broader audience: the Democratic Party, which, unless it rediscovers its appetite for modernity and courage, risks losing an entire generation of young men for good.\u200b<\/p>\n
[This report has been corrected with regard to Schlossberg\u2019s age. He was 33 at the time of the interview, not 32.]<\/p>\n
#Jack #Schlossberg #Democrats #lost #young #men<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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