Donald Trump, the Most Unmanly
President
Why don’t the president’s supporters hold him to their own
standard of masculinity?
(The Atlantic)
So
many mysteries surround Donald Trump: the contents of his tax returns, the
apparent miracle of his graduation from college. Some of them are merely
curiosities; others are of national importance, such as whether he understood
the nuclear-weapons briefing given to every president. I prefer not to dwell on
this question.
But
since his first day as a presidential candidate, I have been baffled by one
mystery in particular: Why do working-class white men—the most reliable
component of Donald Trump’s base—support someone who is, by their own
standards, the least masculine man ever to hold the modern presidency? The
question is not whether Trump fails to meet some archaic or idealized version
of masculinity. The president’s inability to measure up to Marcus Aurelius or
Omar Bradley is not the issue. Rather, the question is why so many of Trump’s
working-class white male voters refuse to hold Trump to their own standards of
masculinity—why they support a man who behaves more like a little boy.
I am a son of the working class, and I know these cultural
standards. The men I grew up with think of themselves as pretty tough guys, and
most of them are. They are not the products of elite universities and
cosmopolitan living. These are men whose fathers and grandfathers came from a
culture that looks down upon lying, cheating, and bragging, especially about
sex or courage. (My father’s best friend got the Silver Star for wiping out a
German machine-gun nest in Europe, and I never heard a word about it until
after the man’s funeral.) They admire and value the understated swagger, the
rock-solid confidence, and the quiet reserve of such cultural heroes as John
Wayne’s Green Beret Colonel Mike Kirby and Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo
(also, as it turns out, a former Green Beret).
They
are, as an American Psychological Association feature
describes them, men who adhere to norms such as “toughness, dominance,
self-reliance, heterosexual behaviors, restriction of emotional expression and
the avoidance of traditionally feminine attitudes and behaviors.” But I didn’t
need an expert study to tell me this; they are men like my late father and his
friends, who understood that a man’s word is his bond and that a handshake
means something. They are men who still believe in a day’s work for a day’s
wages. They feel that you should never thank another man when he hands you a
paycheck that you earned. They shoulder most burdens in silence—perhaps to an
unhealthy degree—and know that there is honor in making an honest living and
raising a family.
Not
every working-class male voted for Trump, and not all of them have these
traits, of course. And I do not present these beliefs and attitudes as
uniformly virtuous in themselves. Some of these traditional masculine virtues
have a dark side: Toughness and dominance become bullying and abuse;
self-reliance becomes isolation; silence becomes internalized rage. Rather, I
am noting that courage, honesty, respect, an economy of words, a bit of
modesty, and a willingness to take responsibility are all virtues prized by the
self-identified class of hard-working men, the stand-up guys, among whom I was
raised.
And yet, many of these same men expect none of those
characteristics from Trump, who is a vain, cowardly, lying, vulgar, jabbering
blowhard. Put another way, as a question I have asked many of the men I know:
Is Trump a man your father and grandfather would have respected?
I
should point out here that I am not criticizing Trump’s manifest lack of
masculinity solely because he offends my personal sense of maleness. He does,
of course. But then again, a lot about the president offends me, as a man, as a
Christian, and as an American. Nor do I make these observations as a role model
of male virtue. I was, in every way, an immature cad as a younger man. In late
middle age, I still struggle with the eternal issues of manhood, including what
it means to be a good father and husband—especially the second time around
after failing at marriage once already.
And
truth be told, I am not particularly “manly.” I wear Italian shoes with little
buckles. I schedule my haircuts on Boston’s Newbury Street weeks in advance. My
shower is full of soaps and shampoos claiming scents like “tobacco and caramel,”
and my shaving cream has bergamot in it, whatever that is. And I talk too much.
I freely accept that I do not pass
muster by the standards of most Trump supporters. Again, what intrigues me is
that neither should Trump. As the writer Windsor Mann has noted, Trump behaves in ways
that many working-class men would ridicule: “He wears bronzer, loves gold and
gossip, is obsessed with his physical appearance, whines constantly, can't control
his emotions, watches daytime television, enjoys parades and interior
decorating, and used to sell perfume.”
I
am not a psychologist, and I cannot adjudicate the theories of male behavior
that might explain some of this. Others have tried. Two researchers who looked
back at the 2016 presidential election suggested that support for Trump was higher in areas where
there were more internet searches for topics such as “erectile dysfunction,”
“how to get girls,” and “penis enlargement” than in pro–Hillary Clinton areas
of the country. (One can only hope that correlation is not causation.) The idea
that insecure men support bullies and authoritarians is hardly new; recall that
one of George Orwell’s characters in 1984 dismissed all the
“marching up and down and cheering and waving flags” as “simply sex gone sour.”
To reduce all of this to sexual inadequacy, however, is too facile. It cannot
explain why millions of men look the other way when Trump acts in ways they
would typically find shameful. Nor is arguing that Trump is a bad person and
therefore that the people who support him are either brainwashed or also bad
people helpful. He is, and some of them are. But that doesn’t explain why men
who would normally ostracize someone like Trump continue to embrace him.
In
order to think about why these men support Trump, one must first grasp how
deeply they are betraying their own definition of masculinity by looking more
closely at the flaws they should, in principle, find revolting.
Is
Trump honorable? This is a man who routinely refused to pay working people their
due wages, and then lawyered them into the ground when they objected to being
exploited. Trump is a rich downtown bully, the sort most working men usually
hate.
Is Trump courageous? Courtiers
like Victor Davis Hanson have compared Trump to the
great heroes of the past, including George Patton, Ajax, and the Western gunslingers
of the American cinema. Trump himself has mused about how he would have been a
good general. He even fantasized about how he would have charged into the
middle of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, without a weapon. “You don’t
know until you test it,” he said at a meeting with state governors just a
couple of weeks after the massacre, “but I really believe I’d run in there,
even if I didn’t have a weapon, and I think most of the people in this room
would have done that too.” Truly brave people never tell you how brave they
are. I have known many combat veterans, and none of them extols his or her own
courage. What saved them, they will tell you, was their training and their
teamwork. Some—perhaps the bravest—lament that they were not able to do more
for their comrades.
But
even if we excuse Trump for the occasional hyperbole, the fact of the matter is
that Trump is an obvious coward. He has two particular phobias: powerful men
and intelligent women.
Whenever he is in the company of Russian President Vladimir
Putin, to take the most cringe-inducing example, he visibly cowers. His
attempts to ingratiate himself with Putin are embarrassing, especially given
how effortlessly Putin can bend Trump to his will. When the Russian leader got
Trump alone at a summit in Helsinki, he scared him so badly that at the
subsequent joint press conference, Putin smiled pleasantly while the president
of the United States publicly took the word of a former KGB officer over his
own intelligence agencies.
Likewise,
as Trump has shown repeatedly in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, he is eager
to criticize China, until he is asked about Chinese President Xi Jinping. In
the course of the same few minutes, Trump will attack China—his preferred
method for escaping responsibility for America’s disastrous response to the
coronavirus pandemic—and then he will babble about how much he likes President
Xi, desperately seeking to avoid giving offense to the Chinese Communist Party
boss.
This
is related to one of Trump’s most noticeable problems, which is that he can
never stop talking. The old-school standard of masculinity is the strong and
silent type, like Gary Cooper back in the day or Tom Hardy today. Trump, by
comparison, is neither strong nor capable of silence.
And
when Trump talks too much, he ends up saying things that more stereotypically
masculine men wouldn’t, like that he fell in love with North Korea’s Kim Jong
Un. “He wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters,” Trump told a rally in West Virginia. “We fell in
love.” One can only imagine the reaction among working-class white men if
Barack Obama, or any other U.S. president, had talked about falling in love
with a foreign leader. (George W. Bush once said he saw into Putin’s soul, and
he has never lived it down among his critics.)
Is Trump a man who respects women? This is what
secure and masculine men would expect, especially from a husband and a father
of two daughters.
Leave aside for the moment that the working-class white men in
the president’s base don’t seem to care that Trump had an affair with a porn
star while his wife was home with a new baby, something for which many of them
would probably beat their own brother-in-law senseless if he did it to their
sister. Trump’s voters, male and female, have already decided to excuse this
and other sordid episodes.
Women
clearly scare Trump. You don’t have to take my word for it. “Donald doesn’t
like strong women,” Senator Ted Cruz said back in 2016 of the
candidate who attacked Cruz’s wife as ugly, but who is now his hero as
president. “Strong women scare Donald. Real men don’t try to bully women.”
Trump
never seems more fearful and insecure than when women question him. His anxiety
at such moments—for example, when he calls on female reporters in the White
House press room—is palpable. He begins his usual flurry of defensive hand
gestures, from the playing of an imaginary accordion to a hand held up with a curled
pinky finger like some parody of a Queens mobster, while he stammers out verbal
chaff bursts of “Excuse me” and “Are you ready?”
Does Trump
accept responsibility and look out for his team? Not in the
least. In this category, he exhibits one of the most unmanly of behaviors: He’s
a blamer. Nothing is ever his fault. In the midst of disaster, he praises
himself while turning on even his most loyal supporters without a moment’s
hesitation. Men across America who were socialized by team sports, whose lives are
predicated on the principle of showing up and doing the job, continually excuse
a man who continually excuses himself. This presidency is defined not by Ed
Harris’s grim intonation in Apollo 13 that “failure is not
an option,” but by one of the most shameful utterances of a chief executive in
modern American history: “I take no responsibility at all.”
Trump’s
defenders could argue that he is just another male celebrity whose raw
authenticity offends snooty elitists but appeals to the average Joe. The analogy
here is someone like Howard Stern, who has known Trump for years and has been
idolized by young men across America. Stern cavorted with porn stars, said
shocking and racist things, and was, in his way, the living id of every
maladjusted teenager.
Whatever
you think of Stern, however, he’s much more of a man, by any definition, than
Trump. For one thing, Stern is often self-effacing in the extreme, which is
both part of his act and a source of the charm he possesses. Stern routinely
jokes about the inadequacy of his male endowment. Trump, however, went to pains
to reassure the country—in the middle of a presidential-primary debate—that his
equipment has “no problem.” Stern knows how to take his lumps in public, while
Trump is a wailing siren of complaints.
More
important, Stern is capable of introspection and has a certain amount of
self-awareness, a quality important for any mature and healthy person. Stern,
who once encouraged Trump’s antics, now seems concerned. He has suggested that
Trump was traumatized by his childhood and his father. “He has trouble with
empathy,” Stern told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “We know that. And I wish he’d go
into psychotherapy. I’d be so proud of him if he did, and he would flourish.”
(Stern endorsed Joe Biden in April.)
Trump
is never going to get therapy. But Stern’s observation opens the door to a
better explanation of why—despite all of his whiny complaints, his pouty
demeanor, and his mean-girl tweets—Trump’s working-class voters forgive him.
Trump’s
lack of masculinity is about maturity. He is not manly because he is not a man.
He is a boy.
To
be a man is to be an adult, to willingly decide, as Saint Paul wrote, to “put
away childish things.” There’s a reason that Peter Pan is a story about a
boy, and the syndrome named after it is about men. Not everyone grows up as
they age.
It
should not be a surprise then, that Trump is a hero to a culture in which so
many men are already trapped in perpetual adolescence. And especially for men
who feel like life might have passed them by, whose fondest memories are rooted
somewhere in their own personal Wonder Years from elementary
school until high-school graduation, Trump is a walking permission slip to
shrug off the responsibilities of manhood.
The appeal to indulge in such hypocrisy must be enormous.
Cheat on your wife? No problem. You can trade her in for a hot foreign model 20
years younger. Is being a father to your children too onerous a burden on your
schedule? Let the mothers raise them. Money troubles? Everyone has them; just
tell your father to write you another check. Upset that your town or your
workplace has become more diverse? Get it off your chest: Rail about women and
Mexicans and African Americans at will and dare anyone to contradict you.
Trump’s
media enablers do their best to shore up the fiction that Trump and the men who
follow him are the most macho of men. The former White House aide Sebastian
Gorka, one of Trump’s most dedicated sycophants, has described Trump as a
“man’s man,” despite the fact that Trump has no hobbies or interests common to
many American men other than sex. In this gang of Sweathogs, Gorka is the
Arnold Horshack to Trump’s Vinnie Barbarino, always admiring him as the most
alpha of the alphas. To listen to Gorka and others in Trumpworld, the president
can turn his enemies to ash through sheer testosterone overload. Some Trump
voters have even airbrushed the president’s face onto the bodies of both Rambo
and Rocky Balboa. (The president himself approvingly retweeted the
Trump-as-Rocky meme.)
Gorka
tries to cosplay the same role himself. The photographs of him carrying guns, wearing a
suede vest, and posing next to his underpowered suburban Mustang are now
internet legends, precisely because they are so ridiculous. But he is a good
example of how so many of the men who support Trump have morphed into childish
caricatures of themselves. They, too, are little boys, playing at being tough
but crying about their victimization at the hands of liberal elites if they are
subjected to criticism of any kind.
I
do not know how much of this can explain Trump’s base of support among
working-class white women. (Those numbers are now declining.) But perhaps
these women, too, regard Trump as just one more difficult and mischievous
man-child in their lives to be accommodated and forgiven.
The
best example of women giving him a pass was after the Access Hollywood tape came to
light in the fall of 2016. Trump had been caught on audio bragging about being
able to grope women because he was famous. Republican leaders panicked; surely
this level of vulgarity, they reasoned, would kill Trump’s chances with female
voters.
Instead,
women showed up at rallies with shirts featuring arrows pointing right to where
Trump could grab them.
Melania
Trump, for her part, dutifully defended the boyishness of it all. “Sometimes I
say I have two boys at home,” she said at the time. “I have my young son and I
have my husband. But I know how some men talk, and that’s how I saw it.” Female
Trump supporters were interviewed on national television and—in a tragic
admission about the state of American families—seemed confused about why Trump
would be considered any worse than the men around them.
I recall one woman telling a reporter that her son talked
that way in front of her all the time. Part of how I was socialized into adult
manhood was knowing that if I spoke like that in front of my late mother—an
Irish American woman from an impoverished background—she would have made my
ears ring with the slap she’d have given me.
In
the end, Trump will continue to act like a little boy, and his base, the voters
who will stay with him to the end, will excuse him. When a grown man brags
about being brave, it is unmanly and distasteful; when a little boy pulls out a
cardboard sword and ties a towel around his neck like a cape, it’s endearing.
When a rich and powerful old man whines about how unfairly he is being treated,
we scowl and judge; when a little boy snuffles in his tears and says that he
was bullied - treated worse than Abraham Lincoln, even - we comfort.
Donald
Trump is unmanly because he has never chosen to become a man. He has weathered
few trials that create an adult of any kind. He is, instead, working-class
America’s dysfunctional son, and his supporters, male and female alike, have
become the worried parent explaining what a good boy he is to terrorized
teachers even while he continues to set fires in the hallway right outside.
I
think that working men, the kind raised as I was, know what kind of “man” Trump
is. And still, the gratification they get from seeing Trump enrage the rest of
the country is enough to earn their indulgence. I doubt, however, that Trump
gives them the same consideration. Perhaps Howard Stern, of all people, said it
best: “The oddity in all of this is the people Trump despises most love him the
most. The people who are voting for Trump for the most part … He’d be disgusted
by them.” The tragedy is that they are not disgusted by him in return.
