Trump isn't the solution to the "crisis of manhood," he's the problem
The misogyny comes fast and furious. Anything real to make men's lives better? Not so much.
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Congratulations, men of America: The crisis of manhood is over.
You have been liberated from the shackles of political correctness, free to be as sexist and crude as you like. The government in Washington is committed to ensuring that men will wield the power they deserve. DEI has been banished from public and private institutions alike. The “manosphere” dominates online culture. Before you know it, men, you’ll have the professional prospects and romantic success you’ve been longing for.
This was one of the core promises of the Trump restoration. His 2024 campaign put reaching out to disaffected men at the center of its strategy. Trump and his advisers looked at the fact that many men (especially young men) felt uncertain about their place in the world and what was expected of them, and saw an opportunity. So he went on every dudebro podcast he could find, and it paid off: According to Pew Research Center data, he beat Kamala Harris among men by 12 points, 55 percent to 43 percent.
But what do America’s men stand to gain from the Trump presidency? We’ll get to that question in a bit, but first we should consider the attitude the president and those around him bring to politics and encourage others to adopt.
Witness this Instagram post from his son Don Jr., who is not a 14-year-old boy but a 47-year-old man:
If you didn’t get the reference, here’s the explanation: At a string of recent WNBA games, someone in the stands hurled a green dildo onto the court during play. The incidents turned out to be an effort by the purveyors of a meme coin to attract attention for their cheeky little crypto product.
The gentlemen behind what they called a “prank” insist that their meme coin is not a pump-and-dump scheme, an assertion belied by the fact that every meme coin is inherently a pump-and-dump scheme. But their choice to hurl dildos at WNBA players had a very particular message: You may think you are elite athletes, but to us you are still here to be mocked and sexualized and demeaned. And when Don Jr. posted that image to his 9.7 million followers, he was saying That’s what I think of you too, and so does my dad.
Which of course, he does. That the president believes he and men like him have the right to sexually dominate and degrade women is beyond dispute, as the two dozen women who have publicly accused him of sexual abuse can testify. “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” he said on that notorious Access Hollywood tape, then later in a deposition insisted that “if you look over the last million years, I guess that's been largely true … unfortunately, or fortunately.” There’s no doubt which he thinks it is.
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Meanwhile, Trump’s administration has gone on a holy war against diversity efforts — the chief beneficiaries of which are often women — and against diversity itself.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who has long been contemptuous of the idea of women serving in combat roles, went on a firing spree of female flag officers. As The Hill reported in late July, “All women have now been purged from the military’s top jobs, with no female four-star officers on active duty and none in pending appointments for four- or three-star roles.”
Then, last week, Hegseth approvingly retweeted a video in which pastors affiliated with a far-right religious movement Hegseth is a part of explained that husbands should vote on behalf of their wives and the 19th Amendment should be repealed.
For many on the right, this attack on female leadership comes not a moment too soon, especially given that men make up a mere 89 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs. In Congress it’s even worse — men make up 74 percent of the Senate and just 71 percent of the House. But the new attitude doesn’t stop there.
You may have noticed the “Trump look” that many women around the president have adopted, whether it’s visitors to Mar-a-Lago or members of his cabinet. It features plumped lips, garish makeup, and wavy hair; Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s remarkable physical transformation is the prototypical case. It creates a distinct aesthetic for the Trump movement, one in which even women in high-ranking positions have endeavored to make themselves look as doll-like as possible, lest anyone mistake them for professionals elevated by virtue of their experience and skills.
As sociologist and New York Times columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom pointed out recently, you may marvel at how artificial the women around Trump look, but that’s precisely the point. The fact that the plastic surgery is obvious and the effect is unnatural is exactly what Trump values, because it demonstrates that the woman was willing to put in effort to reach for a particular aesthetic standard.
Trump judges “which women are attractive based on their visible effort of beauty,” McMillan Cottom says, and the more obvious the alteration in a woman’s appearance — even to the point of being grotesque — the more she has shown her commitment to serve him. No one needs to tell Kristi Noem to get back in her place, because she’s already there.
What is Trump really going to do for men?
Some men obviously take a vicarious thrill in Trump’s mistreatment of women whether they have the ability to mimic it in their own lives or not. And his version of masculinity — boastful, belligerent, contemptuous of women and consumed with fantasies of violence — is certainly in a more culturally powerful position than it has been in some time.
But to the ordinary dissatisfied man, the dividends are all symbolic. They can listen to hour after hour of Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson while they’re at the gym, and cheer when Trump torches an uppity female celebrity on Truth Social. But by the end of this presidency, what will have changed for them?
The administration has claimed it will revive American manufacturing — where strong men use their hands to make things — and is certainly doing everything it can to destroy higher education, where women make up a majority of those earning degrees. But the administration’s manufacturing efforts are likely to fail, since they’re driven by Trump’s erratic impulses and can’t remotely be described as a coherent strategy. At the same time, we could be heading for an AI-driven white-collar apocalypse, but the administration cares much more about whether your chatbot is too woke.
After a few more years of Trump, are men going to find it any easier to have fulfilling and remunerative careers, or build lasting relationships, or understand what is expected of them? The truth is that contemporary conservatism betrays today’s men by telling them that they are entitled to receive respect and admiration from women, along with the financial fruits of a wealthy society, without giving much of anything in return.
And men suffer because the messages they get from the right are so contradictory. Is a man supposed to be strong and stoic, or such a whiny, insecure baby that the mere sight of a transgender woman sends him running to get his AR-15 to pump some lead into a bunch of beer cans?
Some have argued that men’s problems come down to economic insecurity; if it weren’t so difficult to buy a home and secure stable work, they would have less need to worry about whether they were self-actualizing as men. If that’s true, then given the way Trump’s policies are amping up the uncertainty we all live with, the “crisis of manhood” is only going to get worse. And everyone will pay a price.
That’s it for today
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Very interesting reflections today. We’ve felt the ‘unleash the beast’ attitude since Trump was first elected and it continues and grows with removing qualified women from high positions in our military. Much of the ‘average male’ attitude is felt in the everyday belittlement of women on social media. This woman finds it immensely disgusting and immature. But it does not change the truth of our intelligence and inner strength!
Great Job Aaron. Thank you for what you do, in helping me to understand, Fox News. I never watch .