Up the Down Escalator

The Trump School of Unnecessary Masculinity

Every so often you have to listen to the gobbledygook. Here, courtesy of Night Owls podcast partner John Ellis, is part of what Donald Trump said to the assemblage of general officers in Virginia:

We were not respected with Biden. They looked at him falling down stairs every day – every day, the guy’s falling down stairs – and I said, that’s not our president. We can’t have it. I’m very careful, you know, when I walk down stairs, I walk…very…slowly. Nobody has to set a record. Just, try not to fall, ‘cause it doesn’t work out well. A few of our presidents have fallen, and it became a part of their legacy, you know. Walk nice and easy. You don’t have to set any records. Be cool! Be cool when you walk down, but don’t…don’t bop down the stairs. The one thing with Obama…I had zero respect for him as a president, but he would bop down those stairs, I’ve never seen…da-da-da-da-teh-deh-bop-bop…I’ve never seen…he would go down those stairs, bop-bop, he wouldn’t hold on, he’d go down those stairs, I said, it’s great! I wouldn’t want to do it. I guess I could do it, but eventually, bad things are gonna happen, and it only takes one. A year ago, we were a dead country. We were dead; this country was going to hell. We were dead in every way, from immigration to military. We didn’t have the weapons, we had given everything to Ukraine, we had nothing. And by the way, I have to tell you, now, as you know, I went over and I met with NATO…

I can not imagine a less military-sounding speech. Trump is all about the royal I; the military is about We. Military leadership is about merit; Trump leadership is about a sticky-pubescent fantasy of masculinity. It is about ejaculation. The solipsism and indiscipline would be shocking if we weren’t inured to them. I've watched Trump several times in the past few weeks—including, the day before Quantico with Benjamin Netanyahu—and he seems to have lost several miles off his fastball. The “careful” walk down the stairs is a metaphor. The superstructure of the Trump Administration is rickety, and the president’s mental illness is manifest. He is stumbling, and trying to paper over his gathering decrepitude with threats and bully-ragging. The enemy within, and all that nonsense; the assault on Tylenol; the Comey indictment. These are ridiculous things. It is hard for me to take the much ballyhooed “fascist” threat seriously, when promulgated by such a feckless jerk. He is a Potemkin authoritarian, all facade. He invites Schumer and Jeffries to the White House and childishly offends them with Trump 2028 hats on his desk. What transparent baloney. Of course, there is a credulous faction on the left that continues to empower Trump by taking his showbiz threats seriously. The silent reality of a room full of general officers at Quantico should be an indicator of how best to respond to Trump. You don’t indulge him. If he was expecting a pep rally—and he obviously was, he always is—he had to be very disappointed.

This second Trump term terrifies a lot of people; it confuses me. It is more orderly than the first; aides like Suzie Wiles and Russell Vought and the indescribably awful Stephen Miller have been effective. There has been some good policy. The proposed Gaza peace plan is a reasonable one. And there is good strategy: let the Dems shut down the government. But there has been a lot more bad policy than good—I mean, jaw-droppingly bad policy like the abandonment of solar and wind power, the evisceration of funds for scientific research; the indiscriminate hollowing out of crucial sectors of the federal workforce; the mistreatment of some of our most valuable residents, who happened to have been born elsewhere. These are long-term, slow-rolling disasters. And yet, he prevails. The inability of our nation’s greatest institutions to stand up to the bullying is shocking to me. It began with the quick cave by the venerable—impregnable, I thought—liberal law firm Paul, Weiss. Then came the universities, the media. The world according to Trump is a simple one: Money talks. You threaten to withhold money, the powers bow down.

How does he get away with it? Is the world really that simple? Why isn’t the public more restive?

Well, he’s a guy. That’s a big part of it. And he is leading a guy rebellion after a 30-year incursion of women into the corridors of power. But it’s a particular sort of guy rebellion, assaying a juvenile manliness for guys who don’t quite know how to be men. Just ask Pete Hegseth, who—I suspect—is flashing his testosterone after having to fend off MeToo accusations. Trump is vulnerable there, too. The successful lawsuits against him have mostly involved ghastly locker-room behavior. (One can only imagine what the real Jeffrey Epstein story will be.) And there’s always Hillary Clinton to remind the Trumpers who the real enemy is:

“The idea that you could turn the clock back and try to recreate a world that never was dominated by, you know, let’s say it: white men of a certain persuasion, a certain religion, a certain point of view, a certain ideology, it’s just doing such damage to what we should be aiming for,”

She actually said that on Morning Joe. Of course, Clinton is expressing the presiding, if unspoken, philosophy of the Democratic Party—which is also the very-much-spoken wellspring of the Republican populist revival. It has its roots, as much of the Democratic overreach does, in a fundamental truth: Men and Women are equal, but different. In fact, given the educational performance of boys in recent decades, women may be more than equal. Certainly, they have driven the cultural drift of the 21st century—they have set the rules for how we speak and how we act in polite company, especially within the fearful confines of the Democratic Party. The feminists, along with the gay community, have set the predicates…and the pronouns. Kamala Harris actually was for they/them.

An imbalance has resulted, which has worked very much to the political advantage of Republicans. I do not know where the proper balance resides; I do know that in the feminist welter of the past 50 years, very little attention has been paid to the coarse deficiencies of juvenile maleness. We’ve not paid sufficient attention to how to educate—and socialize—boys. In human history, it was aboriginal hunting packs and, later, the military that did the heavy-lifting of male maturation. It is why a more male American military has become such a fetish for second-raters like Hegseth, even though women have added mental toughness, courage and intellect to the ranks. For Trump’s legions, though, the military is all we (boys) have left, except maybe sports (which is warfare by other means)…and even there, women’s sports have become more compelling in recent years.

The public perceives a masculinity gap between Republicans and Democrats. As long as Democrats continue to deny this—to not even discuss it—Republicans will have an electoral advantage. Yes, women vote more than men…but an awful lot of women voted for Trump because he conveyed a sense of rude masculinity, of strength and the ability to restore order, even if his actual agenda may well result in the exact opposite.