The rightward shift of University of Wisconsin System campuses propelled Donald Trump to his second presidential term last November, and while his approval ratings may have taken a dive during his first six months in office, some Trump-voting students across the UW System stand with the president and his performance.
Since Donald Trump took the oath of office in January, The Daily Cardinal has spoken with four Trump-supporting students in the UW system, interviewing them after student visa revocations and deportations, cuts to federal education and research funding and Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs sent the stock market into recession territory.
Most Republican students remained unwavering in their support, yet six months after Trump’s win, Democratic-backed State Supreme Court candidate Susan Crawford regained support near college campuses. Crawford outperformed Harris by 15 points in wards containing UW-Madison residence halls.
Chair of UW-Madison Badger GOP Benjamin Rothove said he was disappointed by Crawford’s win but said it does not necessarily contradict Trump’s gains on campus. “It just shows that there’s more work to be done,” Rothove said.
University of Wisconsin-La Crosse College Republicans Chair Carter Lefevre-Tomlin voted for Trump last November with the economy at the front of his mind. He told The Cardinal Trump's budget cuts and executive orders have improved government efficiency and relieved “burdens.”
“[Trump] stays on business,” Lefevre-Tomlin said. “He's living up to promises so far and is getting the ball rolling.”
Trump’s budget cuts have been criticized by many politicians and public figures including Bill Gates who said Elon Musk has been “killing the world’s poorest children” with DOGE cuts. Gates was largely referring to cuts to USAID, a federal agency providing foreign civilian aid.
Following sweeping tariffs, the U.S. economy shrank 0.3% in the first quarter of the year. Economists typically consider two consecutive quarters of decline as a signal of recession. Trump’s tariffs also sent the stock market’s major indexes plunging, leading to the worst day for the stock market in six years.
Trump’s budget cuts and layoffs have extended to higher education, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison faces a projected loss of $65 million per year if a National Institutes of Health (NIH) decision capping research costs goes into effect. Six UW-Madison faculty were laid off in early April.
UW-Madison junior and Trump voter Elijah Rickenbach said higher education institutions have brought funding cuts onto themselves by not publicizing their research adequately. Still, he is apprehensive about the scope of the cuts.
“There are really good things in academia, and that's why I think that the broad cuts were probably too far,” he said.
Rothove, meanwhile, suggested reducing university spending by cutting “half their administrators,” “the professors not doing anything” and the UW-Madison Gender and Women’s Studies Department, using those funds for research instead.
The Trump administration has pulled federal funding from universities around the country, including Harvard University and Princeton University. Both universities have moved to sue the administration.
Other schools like Columbia University have capitulated to Trump’s demands under the threat of losing $400 million in federal funding. Unlike Harvard, UW-Madison has not lost all its federal funding, but it is under similar antisemitism investigations the Trump administration used to justify its cuts at Harvard.
UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin joined over 200 academic leaders in a letter criticizing the Trump administration's “unprecedented” overreach into higher education, calling it “political interference now endangering American higher education.”
Badger GOP Secretary Praveer Tiwari said he is supportive of DOGE’s effort to reduce federal spending.
“The economy will now not only be good for those at the top, as it was under Biden,” Tiwari said. “People's wages were suffering, inflation was quite high and rent was increasing.”
Twenty-three Nobel Prize-winning economists endorsed Harris’ economic plans in the 2024 presidential election and said Trump’s would lead to “higher prices, larger deficits, and greater inequality.”
Rothove said he would’ve advocated for a more incremental approach to Trump’s tariff changes but thinks the U.S. should still “ice out” China completely. He is willing to “deal with what [we] have” with the current state of the domestic economy, as “Kamala Harris would have been atrocious.”
Mass Deportations
These students support another major piece of Trump’s agenda: mass deportations.
“If you have entered the country illegally, you have committed a crime and should be deported,” Tiwari said, comparing his position to his parents’ experience. “My parents came to the country legally. They had to wait a decade while they worked hard. For someone to then just come in illegally and stay here is holistically unfair to people like my father and many other legal immigrants who did the right thing.”
The administration is conducting many deportations without due process under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, drawing legal challenges as the law requires the U.S. be at war; a lower court blocked his invocation of this act.
Several international students across the country have had their visas revoked for participating in pro-Palestine protests on their campuses, and some have even been arrested by immigration enforcement. Rothove blamed pro-Palestine protesters for their deportations.
“If you're coming from another country and you're gonna come to the United States and protest in support of a terrorist group, that's on you,” Rothove said. “These people are espousing terrible antisemitic rhetoric. They're supporting Hamas. You don't get to come to our country and just espouse pro-terrorism ideas.”
Offensive or controversial speech is typically protected under the First Amendment. Legal experts have questioned whether the Trump administration's revocations of student visas for protest-related activity are legal.
Lefevre-Tomlin was surprised to learn more than two dozen current and former UW-Madison students had their visas revoked, none of whom were criminals. In some cases, the Trump administration used minor offenses like speeding tickets as justification for students to “self-deport,” something Mnookin called “arbitrary and unjust.”
A few weeks after speaking with Lefevre-Tomlin, all 27 UW-Madison visa terminations were reversed, restoring their legal status to study here.
