When, in October 2016, it was time to build the border wall — or at least a plywood replica on the campus of Washington State University — the job fell to Jacob Heinen. He was only a freshman, but he was one of the few College Republicans who knew how to work with his hands. When he was done, he spray-painted TRUMP across the wall in gold, then stood back and watched as a crowd of classmates showed up to protest his creation. …
I spoke to Heinen as part of a project to figure out how the next generation of Republican leaders is thinking about politics. Are they Trump supporters? Trump skeptics? Some mix of both? To try to answer these questions, I interviewed 52 young conservative leaders nationwide, most in their early 20s, in the hope of finding common threads, or illuminating differences, that might tell us where conservatism as a whole is going in the decades to come. CONT.
Eliza Gray, Washington Post