Across the African continent in 2026, a generation of young people has arrived at a posture that defies easy categorization: cautious, eyes-open engagement with a Trump administration they neither fully trust nor fully reject. A survey by the Ichikowitz Family Foundation found that optimism toward Trump's second presidency has more than doubled since 2024, settling between 58 and 60 percent across nine policy domains — not because illusions have multiplied, but because calculations have sharpened. This is a generation that has watched ideological alignment fail to produce material progress, an