Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photos: Getty
Joshua Divens describes the end of his marriage as the “largest failure of my life.” A law-enforcement officer from a small town in Ohio, Divens married his first wife at age 19; they stayed together through more than 20 years and four attempts at marriage counseling. In 2018, Divens told his wife he wanted a divorce and filed for a dissolution — a process by which spouses come to an agreement on ending the relationship without getting the court involved. He says she responded by filing papers herself. “I got served at work, which was embarrassing,” he tells me. “It was just downhill from there.”
The couple share a son, who’s now 8 years old, and it rankled Divens that his ex-wife filed for primary custody. “I said, ‘I don’t care about the house, I’ll split the pension. The only thing I’m not negotiating on is 50-50 custody.’” Divens says their split became a “knock-down drag out in court.” The rancor spilled into other areas of his personal life; Divens says several of the couple’s mutual friends cut him off.
The divorce process may have driven him away from his community, but it also drove him closer to one person: Donald Trump. “It was kind of like a microcosm of what I felt like was being done to Trump” at the time. “I was accused of having multiple affairs. None of it happened.” He compares the rumors he says his social circle spread about him with accusations that the former reality-TV star colluded with Russia during the 2016 election, or that he bragged about sexual assault in the Access Hollywood tape. (Trump wasn’t saying he forcibly grabbed women’s genitals, Divens insists. He was saying they let you do it.) When guys like Divens and Trump stand up for themselves, he argues, outsiders will “totally flip your world and demonize you.”
Trump has long polled significantly better with men than women and has recently made inroads with even the youngest male voters, fueling a historic 51 percent polling gap between Gen-Z women and men. But according to an analysis of polling from the conservative American Enterprise Institute, his pull may actually be strongest with divorcés like Divens. While divorced men have been trending right for at least the past two decades, the poll found some 56 percent of divorced men now support Trump — more than single men, married men, and women of any relationship status. Daniel Cox, who conducted the poll, tells me that the divorce divide started widening in the mid-2010s, around the time of Trump’s first presidential campaign and changes in how we handle sexual assault and harassment. “Politicians like Trump are saying men are getting the raw end of the deal here after the Me Too movement, and giving voice to some of the pain and challenges men are facing,” he says. “You have an undercurrent of resentment that leads them to try to leverage it for political purposes.”
Whether they agreed with Trump’s policies or just related to him on a personal level, the experiences of the five divorced men I spoke with seemed to deepen their beliefs in a visceral, almost intimate way that is difficult for a bad debate performance or a splashy campaign ad to dislodge. Today, six years after his split, Divens supports Trump on nearly every issue, from the economy to foreign affairs to immigration. (“In my mind, having a secure border is an exact example of setting up a boundary,” he told me, borrowing the vocabulary of his new favorite psychologist, Jordan Peterson.) He was on his way to pick up a Trump yard sign when we chatted. “I wasn’t that outspoken back then,” he told me, referring to the time before his divorce. “But I clearly don’t have an issue vocally supporting him now.”
It is a statistical rarity for a man to be the one to initiate the end of a marriage. According to a widely cited study by researchers at Stanford University, some 69 percent of divorces are set in motion by women, who are more likely to feel relieved, liberated, and happy after the split. Men, meanwhile, are more likely to feel dissatisfied with life and report a first instance of major depression.
This is the place where John, a 33-year-old from Florida, found himself after his wife filed for divorce in 2021. The couple had been together for ten years, shared two daughters, and had moved cities to be near John’s wife’s family. John — who asked to go by a pseudonym to protect his privacy — says that while he’s a conservative and his ex-wife is a “down the line Democrat,” they rarely argued over politics. Her decision to leave took him by surprise. While the divorce was amicable — they still don’t have a formal custody agreement — he says the months afterward were “probably the worst spot I’ve ever been in, mentally and emotionally.”
In search of an explanation for the end of his relationship, John turned to the internet. On Reddit and other message boards, he stumbled across the red-pill community — a misogynistic online space that blames women’s liberation for men’s misfortunes. While John says he disagrees with most of what he read there, he seems stuck on one popular red-pill talking point: that women’s growing workforce participation was partially to blame for declining marriage rates. “For good and bad, there’s been a lot of social mobility and economic freedom that’s been given to women,” he tells me. “And I think that’s important to take into account when you’re looking at divorce rates.”
John seems aware of the red-pill community’s bad public image — the belief system has been cited in multiple mass shooters’ manifestos — and eager to distance himself from it. He insists that women’s economic empowerment is a good thing, and that men are partially to blame for not getting onboard. But the emotional turmoil of his own split still creeps out when we speak. “It makes me sad, my current situation,” he says. “I do think it’s worrying that so many women don’t see the value in [raising a family], or they don’t see the value in doing that with the men they procreate with.”
This is all why, perhaps, he supports a controversial policy floated by Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance: ending no-fault divorce. Among the misogynistic policies advanced by the Trump administration — overturning Roe v. Wade, cutting support for family-planning clinics, weakening Title IX protections, and more — ending no-fault divorce is perhaps the most blatantly patriarchal. Its implementation has reduced domestic-violence rates and improved women’s well-being, but John told me he would support, if not ending it, at least capping the amount of money the divorcing party could receive. “To upend a family like that, with zero consequences financially, is too easy a decision for some people,” he said.
John and his ex-wife both worked and made equivalent salaries, which he says made dividing their assets relatively easy. But it’s been harder for him to adjust to his increased responsibilities as a parent. “I think that a lot of times men can’t distinguish or separate their roles as fathers from their roles as husbands,” he says, adding that he, too, saw his roles as husband and father as “one and the same.” He admits: “To take on 100 percent of both roles, 50 percent of the time was — I can tell it was a much harder adjustment for me than it was for her.”
Deciding who is going to take care of the kids, and when, is a difficult part of any divorce. It was also a source of ideological grievance for some of the men I spoke to. Divens claims to have spent three years and $80,000 on his custody fight, and he rattles off the ways he feels family court discriminated against him: giving his wife primary custody at the outset, for example, or failing to sanction her when she withheld phone calls or visitations. “I don’t mean to be vulgar,” he told me, “but you haven’t truly been effed until you’ve been effed in family court.”
There is no conclusive evidence to support the idea that family courts are broadly biased against men, and in fact, some studies have found bias against mothers — particularly those who report domestic abuse. (Previously unreleased data from AEI shows that 72 percent of divorced men feel family courts favor women, while just 29 percent of divorced women feel the same.) Trump, himself a two-time divorcé, has made no specific policy proposals around reforming the family court system. But something about that feeling of bias, of simply believing the odds were stacked against them, seemed to push some men toward his campaign. Brian Clark, a divorced dad from Illinois who started a Facebook support group for men in similar situations, explains it to me this way: Trump “speaks what they want to hear,” he says. “He says the system has screwed you over, politicians are terrible, the only way to fix the system is to burn it down.” Clark insists that he is not a Trump supporter, but he sympathizes with their line of thought. “There’s a lot of very angry, very bitter, very hurt people,” he told me. “And you cannot blame them.”
Ralph Brewer, who runs an advice site for recently divorced men called Dad Starting Over, has talked to thousands of recent divorcés and says many of them are stuck in old-school notions of themselves as providers and their wives as caretakers. Adapting to a world in which women can provide for themselves — and therefore, can just as easily pack up and leave — can be frightening for them. Brewer sees how this can lead some men onto the Trump train. “The overall message from society is that [they’re] just not important anymore, then here comes a right-wing populist message saying, ‘Let’s bring back some of this hypermasculinity. Guns and trucks are cool!,’” he tells me. “A lot of this is just a big middle finger to the establishment and society telling them that they’re no good anymore. And Trump is the ultimate embodiment of that.”
But the Harris campaign has been making overtures to men, too. The vice-president has recently spoken about owning a gun — an issue that consistently polls better with men than with women — and talked warmly about cryptocurrency, which is popular among younger men. Her campaign also vetted almost exclusively white men for her running mate, ultimately settling on Tim Walz, a Midwesterner who loves cleaning gutters and listening to dad rock. And Harris supports divorced men enough to marry one. She shares two stepchildren with entertainment lawyer Doug Emhoff and seems to have a supportive relationship with Emhoff’s ex-wife, Kerstin, who even made a showing at the Democratic National Convention.
Is this enough to sway a guy like Alex Wacey? In theory, the 28-year-old from Philadelphia is the kind of voter the Harris-Walz campaign should be able to convert. He grew up liberal and dislikes Trump personally; he thought Harris came off as polished and professional at the September debate. But he’s also worried that her administration would spend too heavily on social programs, which — perhaps paradoxically, for someone in his situation — he does not support. Wacey says his wife walked out on him in 2022 and left him alone with their now 5-year-old daughter. “I’m not getting any child support,” he says. “If I were a woman, there’s no chance that would be the case.” So while he’s comfortable calling Trump a “buffoon,” he’s also thinking about his own bottom line. During Trump’s presidency, he says, “I was better off economically than I’ve been in the past four years.” The last time we spoke, he was resigned to voting for the Republican.
Divens, meanwhile, has no such qualms. He moved on from his divorce, remarrying a woman with two children of her own. He eventually secured 50-50 custody of his son with his first wife and says the two are “cautiously co-parenting.” But the relative peace in Divens’s personal life has neither weakened his support for Trump nor lessened his need to come out on top of a conflict. “I know President Trump caught a lot of flack for being kind of braggadocio or abrasive,” he says. “Can he be a bully? One hundred percent. But if you’re in a fight, don’t you kind of want that?”
