Trump Prizes Masculinity Above Everything. Is His Team Man Enough?

Trying to find an ideological consistency to conservatism in the Trump era is a task most find increasingly daunting, especially for those of us old enough to remember Ronald Reagan. In that sense, Donald Trump and JD Vance’s ambush of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House recently, and the fallout from it, was an interesting inflection point.

Trump famously stole his most famous slogan—the one he has printed on the series of progressively larger red baseball caps he seems to wear on most occasions, and that showed up in Nazi font on Edgelord Elon Musk’s black one—from Reagan. And if there’s one thing anyone remembers about Ronald Reagan, it’s that he hated Russia. Seriously, go watch Reagan (though Dennis Quaid’s performance in it is a distant second to his best of 2024, in The Substance). If you removed all references to Russia, communism, or Mikhail Gorbachev from Reagan, the authorized biopic would’ve been about five minutes long. And that’s how many of us grew up experiencing American conservatism: defined above all by its hawkish stance toward the Cold War’s big baddie, the USSR.

And so it was weird to see the most famous co-optor of Reagan’s most famous slogan coming out hard against a proxy war with Russia. Again, Ronald Reagan loved those. If you grew up hating Reagan and being generally anti–American Empire, it was hard to know what to make of the Republican president and vice president angrily dressing down the leader of a country whose Russian anti-appeasement stance America's national security apparatus had up until very recently supported wholeheartedly. A lot of the Trump administration’s policies present a similar conundrum.

I would submit that the best, and possibly the only, way to square the Trump-Reagan circle is to understand them both less as global ideological projects and more as generational examples of America’s recurring masculinity crisis. Are we really to believe that all the War on Terror–era feds and Cold Warrior military administrators that Trump has replaced with Fox News personalities were “too woke”? It’s much more likely that they just didn’t read bellicose—manly and masculine—enough for Trump’s tastes. (There’s a thousand pounds of irony to that coming from Trump, of course, but we’ll get to that.)

It’s only when you see right-wing reply guys talking about Zelenskyy “looking like a waiter” that Trump starts to feel like a proper echo of Reagan. (This post, from Frank Stallone, which imagines Trump telling Zelenskyy to “come back with a suit ya bum,” is a representative sample—the Frankster always being a great window into the id of your average MAGAchud.) Ronald Reagan saying “make America great again” was ostensibly about ending stagflation and doing more Cold War, but virtually all politicians of the time were saying basically the same things. Reagan managed to actually stand out by positioning himself as the masculine rebuke to the cuck (in modern conservative parlance) Jimmy Carter. Where Carter wore feminine sweaters and told Americans to stop worshiping consumption, Reagan was a movie cowboy who always wore a suit in public, told Americans consumption was what made us great, and brought back “Hail to the Chief” once he was elected. Carter urging self-reflection made him easy pickins for a made-for-TV politician like Reagan.

Carter called America’s problem “a crisis of confidence,” but in a lot of ways it was a crisis of masculinity. You can see this play out in almost every popular movie of the 1980s (a decade during which, among other things, action stars evolved from guys who looked like Charles Bronson to ones who looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger). To choose just one representative example, there was Back to the Future, in which Marty McFly goes back to 1955—presumably the time harkened to by the “again” in “let’s make America great again”—makes out with his mom, teaches his dad to be a man, and when he returns to the present he’s rewarded with a shiny new pickup truck. Pickups have, of course, only gotten bigger and bigger ever since, as they’ve basically become the emblem of manly consumption; did Elon Musk’s overt swing to the right not begin with him releasing a truck with a bed in back? In the second Back to the Future, Marty goes to a shitty alternate future where bad guy Biff owns a casino. It feels like a metaphor for our times even if you don’t know that Biff was, according to Back to the Future’s screenwriter, literally based on Donald Trump.

I digress, but certainly Trump’s motives for scolding Zelenskyy go deeper than Zelenskyy showing up in a T-shirt. Trump has long had business connections to Russia, as everyone mostly now knows. And yet, Zelenskyy’s outfits happened to dovetail neatly with classic conservative attack lines, and in fact, even classic Trump ones. Remember that old story about Donald Trump arriving to Don Jr.’s dorm room to pick him up before a baseball game and then slapping him for being dressed in a Yankees jersey? “Put on a suit and meet me downstairs” was the button to that alleged scene.

Zelenskyy, it seems, had offended in much the same way. Which is to say, he presented the wrong kind of masculinity. Or, at least, that was the text of the interaction. While it wasn’t the only thing going on with the Zelenskyy encounter, many of Trump’s latest moves don’t make any sense unless viewed through the lens of promoting a specific type of masculinity.

How else to explain Trump lobbying to get Manosphere influencer Andrew Tate and his brother released from jail in Romania after they’d been arrested for human trafficking? The entire QAnon phenomenon and the success of the Sound of Freedom movie were built around the idea of Trump leading some kind of global anti-trafficking movement. Everyone conservatives didn’t like became a “pedo” or “groomer.”

And yet, here was Trump, taking the side of an actually jailed human trafficker. Why? Easy: Because Tate represents, or purports to represent, the same kind of reactionary masculinity that Trump does. It’s a masculinity that prizes such values as: wearing suits, never apologizing (especially for being too manly), and being able to do or say whatever you want, especially to females and various lessers. This is and has been the only consistent theme of Trump’s ideology, beyond self-enrichment. As a banker famously told the Financial Times after Trump’s election, “I feel liberated. We can say retard and pussy without the fear of getting cancelled…. It’s a new dawn.”

Indeed, most of this current political project can be read as a wild overreaction to the mere perception of being scolded. Most of Trump’s appointees—Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, Dan Bongino; obvious dopes with résumés heavy on podcasts and talking-head gigs—are only qualified in the sense that they have made themselves avatars of not apologizing, the manliest virtue according to modern conservatism. They are the logical evolution of TV cowboys like Reagan: internet tough guys and podcast he-men.

It sounds funny to say, because, as always, the presentation of hypermasculinity can only go so far before it turns into parody. Indeed, the Zelenskyy moment itself seems to contain multiple instances of presentation falling apart and signal coming unstuck from signifier. It’s worth noting that Zelenskyy himself, like both Reagan and Trump a TV guy before he was a politician, only took to wearing his sort of “operator”-inspired tactical gear in order to project the image of the wartime leader he thought people wanted to see. That clearly backfired with the Trumpists, assuming any of their criticism was in good faith. It probably wasn’t, but it gave them ammunition nonetheless.

And yet, bringing Zelenskyy in for a three-way scolding may have also backfired, in the sense that, as we’ve covered, there’s nothing less masculine than being a scold.

Trump, maybe because of his years of experience playing a character on TV, seems to play his part well enough. It’s mainly through JD Vance that we can see the most obvious cracks in the façade. The part of the scene that most stuck in people’s minds was arguably Vance’s plea to Zelenskyy: “I haven’t heard a ‘thank you.’”

It was clearly intended to be straight talk, but it was the pleading part that stood out, and more than a few commentators likened Vance to a nagging girlfriend. Memes of Vance, his already round face artificially be-fattened into Fauntleroy-esque proportions, have metastasized to the point of inescapability. The internet loves turning him into a bug-eyed little piggy.

I won’t say that JD Vance puts the lie to the entire reactionary masculinity enterprise, but it seems clear now that there’s something faulty in his presentation. He wears the same suits as Trump, with the same long, shiny ties (“they point at your dick,” says Sebastian Stan–as–Trump in The Apprentice), but somehow it only ends up accentuating his tight pants, and the way the tapered legs get stuck on his calves when he sits and end up revealing the skin above his socks. He’s frequently accused of wearing eyeliner. He tries to look tough in front of a foreign leader but ends up being ridiculed for sounding like a woman. Above all, he gives the impression of an eager pupil wearing his dad’s clothes, a barely grown Stilwell from A League of Their Own.

It’s almost solely the presentation that the public has managed to puncture thus far, but when all you can offer is presentation, what happens when you can’t even maintain it?

The danger with all presentations of masculinity is that they’re just that: presentations. The same way too-obvious makeup and overly elaborate hairstyling on women eventually starts to imply drag queen, there’s a level at which the presentation of hyper-masculinity starts to seem feminine, or gay porn–y.

Subconsciously, Trump is already there. He seems to play “YMCA” as often as Reagan played “Hail to the Chief,” and the Village People practically invented hypermasculine presentation as a winking gay in-joke. Trump is a political cockroach and one of the dumb-luckiest humans alive, so it’s hard to speculate about what types of obvious hypocrisy will actually hurt him. But the preponderance of JD Vance memes at least seem to suggest that parts of the tough guy act aren’t having the desired effect. And further, it’s hard to imagine that the motley crew of manosphere stooges surrounding Trump in the rest of the administration won’t drive the whole shtick into the ground.