By David Futrelle
Donald Trump is never more ridiculous than when he’s trying his hardest to look tough. He can never quite pull it off; his insecurities give him away. Instead of inhabiting his masculinity with quiet confidence, he’s awkward, unconvincing, a little boy trying too hard to be a big boy.
Here he is in an appearance with Bikers For Trump just outside the White House, offering up what he evidently sees as an extremely macho duckface:
Here he is pretending to be a big tough truck driver on the White House lawn.
Here he is demonstrating his weird handshake-pull maneuver, designed to throw the person whose hands he’s shaking off-balance, literally and figuratively.
Stung by press coverage of this weird little maneuver, Trump does seem to have given it up — at least when he knows cameras are present.
Here he is shoving his way to the front of a group of fellow world leaders like some sort of preening baboon.
And last but certainly not least, here he is trying — and failing — to drink from a bottle of water in a macho way, as if there is such a thing.
For those without the requisite confidence, “effortless masculinity” takes a lot of work. And this work is often painfully obvious to anyone watching. It’s all about overcompensation.
The most toxic kind of masculinity, as Amanda Marcotte reminds us in a Salon essay, is the kind rooted in insecurity; and that’s what we see virtually every time we look at Trump. “Toxic masculinity aspires to toughness but is, in fact, an ideology of living in fear,” she notes.
The fear of ever seeming soft, tender, weak, or somehow less than manly. This insecurity is perhaps the most stalwart defining feature of toxic masculinity.
Her first example of this kind of masculinity?
Donald Trump flipping out when someone teases him about his small fingers. (Or about anything, really.)
And did we mention the hair?
But if the effortless masculinity Trump hungers for so deeply tends to elude him in real life, he comes much closer in the world of memes. Clearly sensing his masculine insecurities (and perhaps sharing many of them), Trump’s fans delight in making memes that portray him as some sort of idealized macho man.
Cartoonist Ben Garrison, a Trump-worshipping alt-right enabler, invariably portrays the pudgy 72-year-old Trump as a buff, ageless, hunk of man meat:
And he’s hardly the only one:
Overcompensating a bit themselves, his fans love to portray him as an absurdly over-the-top hero:
Sometimes they turn him into an actual superhero:
Even those who balk at giving Trump the full Charles Atlas treatment still like to portray him as a something of a man’s man, comfortable in his masculinity if not positively glowing.
This one comes with bonus (ungrammatical) transphobia:
QAnon/”The Storm” conspiracy theorists — who have convinced themselves that Trump is secretly fighting (and winning) a war against the Illuminati pedophile cannibals who secretly run the US government and the world — also have a vested interest in portraying Trump as a tough, smart, confident hero. Basically. everything he isn’t.
And while they shy away from the Beefcake Trump, they love to repurpose photos of Trump at his smuggest.
This last one, seems to me, suggests that some portion of the QAnon faithful don’t actually believe that their opponents are really pedophiles, but see unsupported charges of pedophilia as a cheap and easy way to smear their foes. If you really thought that millions or even tens of millions of Americans were part of a vast pedophile conspiracy, why on earth would you laugh?
But that’s a whole other topic.
The question remains: why are so many Trump fans so invested in shoring up the anxious masculinity of an aging narcissist who can’t even pull off a convincing impersonation of a macho man in real life? It’s easy enough to understand why Trump overcompensates for his own insecurities; that’s basic psychology. But why do his fans engage in a similar kindof overcompensation, trying to convince themselves and others that Trump really is the macho man he only pretends — so badly — to be?
Part of it, certainly, is a yearning for a patriarchal father figure who will make the country and the world safe and secure again. Indeed, the entire QAnon conspiracy is about reassurance — it’s built around the idea that Trump, however badly he might appear to be struggling on the surface, is actually totally in control of the situation, and all that decent Americans need to do is to “Trust the Plan” and wait for him to win. So it makes sense that QAnonners’ Trump memes are all about a quietly confident man bringing vengeance to the unrighteous.
But what about all of those Beefcake Trumps? Do they reflect some more secret desire not for a father figure, exactly, but rather for some Tom-of-Finland-style Leather Daddy Figure? For a few, probably yes. But I suspect far more of Trump’s male fans — and I suspect the meme makers are mostly guys — would rather be Beefcake Trump than get topped by him.
Ultimately. I think the only way to really understand the strange ubiquity of Macho Trump memes is by coming back to the issue of insecurity. Trump and his fans aren’t just insecure about masculinity — in particular, his masculinity. They are also insecure about his basic competence — as is Trump himself.
As much as they loathe to admit it in public, Trump fans wince a bit at some of his Tweets. They worry that despite his bluster he doesn’t actually know what he’s doing. They can see the way he’s screwing them over with tariffs and a trade war that he conjured up out of nothing. They suspect, or more than suspect, that he’s corrupt as hell if not actually conspiring with Russia. They fear the “blue wave” coming.
And so they are as invested as Trump in the notion that Trump is always and forever “winning” even when he obviously is not. They desperately want him to be the confident, hyper-confident macho man he pretends to be. And so they are compelled to do their part in shoring up his masculinity, at least symbolically — for his sake and for their own.
In the short run, this is probably one of the reasons Trump’s popularity rate has rebounded from its lows and has been bumping around in the 42% range since May (according to the FiveThirtyEight weighted poll average), despite one policy disaster after another and endless scandal.
But in the long run, it can’t hold. This fragile man can’t be saved. And despite the fervent wishes of his most enthusiastic fans, this fragile man can’t save them either.
Oh yeah, sounds like TERFs.
I think someone on Tumblr a while back posted something like “even if questioning/exploring one’s gender is a trend, it sure beats the previous trend where no one was permitted to do so and many people lived lives of private misery as a result.”
That is so totally awesome, and true!
@drab analysis:
It stops calling transwomen “autogynephiles” or it gets the Contrapoints video link again.
i HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR A TRUMP POST TO SHARE THIS LITTLE GEM:
@Surplus
Now that’s a Silence of the Lambs reference I can get behind!
@Dvärghundspossen
From what I saw from an article discussing transitioning in Sweden a few months ago, I think there might be more hoops there than parts of the U.S., but it seems like it’s almost up to sheer chance sometimes. I know one person who just had a quick interview and walked out with a script, and another friend who’s homebrewing herbs right now after being told she’d need a CAT scan. Those were doctors in adjacent towns, and the one that denied a script was in what I would have called the more liberal town.
Ugh, TERFs. Can we just, like, ship them all off to an uninhabited island or something, where they don’t have to see us disgusting transes? We could put the incels there too! The two groups basically deserve each other. 😛
The TERF stuff makes me think of John Varley’s work back in the 70s and 80s, or Tanith Lee’s from about the same period. Both of them wrote SF in which changing bodies and/or changing gender was a normal part of society. There are others writers who’ve done the same, but those are the authors that tend to stick with me for this trope.
Maybe I need to generate a reading list. 😛
Do you consider such stories to be inherently transphobic? I’d think the ability to easily change sex if you were gender dysphoric would be beneficial to transpeople. Or does it depend on whether the story erases gender by making it just a choice, versus recognizes it as part of someone’s psychology that isn’t easily mutable, even if the body can more easily be changed to match?
Some of the TERF responses sound very close to what antigay people argue about homosexuality, that people aren’t really gay, that they’ve been tricked into believing they are. And there are more people claiming to be gay these days because the “recruitment” is more successful than in the past. Of course this brings up the whole question of why homosexuality exists in the first place, just like the TERF arguments bring up the question of why people are trans if there’s not a physical basis there. At least the religious antigay people have a rationalisation: It’s Satan’s doing!(Or whichever “First Evil” it is they believe in.)
@Surplus to Requirements
I’d say the stories in question taught me empathy for transfolk. I’ve discussed them with a friend who’s genderfluid, in fact, and my friend said that a world where they could be pretty or handsome in turns would be wonderful.
This is why diversity in storytelling is so important. Storytelling is a way to show us what it can be like in a society where a person can say, “I’m 80% masculine” or “She’s ultrafemale, never anything but.” (Both examples from Tanith Lee’s Four BEE series, btw.) Or where someone can casually talk about being a father to a loved one’s children and then about how they’d love to bear their loved one’s children in turn (to borrow from Varley). I’d like to think these stories would change a TERF’s mind, or at the least teach someone that the TERF POV is a limited and limiting mindset.
You might like Greg Egan then. There’s often some gender bending in his stories. Distress has infra- and ultra-versions of the usual genders, as well as (I think) nonbinary people. Diaspora has androgynous or nonbinary people with their own pronouns. I’m fairly sure there’s more in that vein. That’s among humanoid or human-derived cultures. The aliens usually have some clear allegory for gender relations issues in their societies. Orthogonal has an obvious analogue of patriarchy, and some villains trying to enforce this, including by denying access to contraception to a gender in whom giving birth causes death. Dichronauts has aliens with immobile, highly dependent separately-intelligent symbionts who give them important added sensory capabilities, whom are often abused and whom are seeking greater rights in society.
The actual main threats driving the plots in these stories tend not to be villains, though, but natural disasters of some sort, usually involving exotic physics; the villains involved in oppressing a gender or other sector of society, in the stories that even have any, tend to be the B-plot, though their interference with the heroes of the A-plot can cause them to become a larger threat than they otherwise would be.
IIRC, Egan himself is gay so his own experiences with patriarchal oppression based on gender, sexuality, and enforcement of gender norms likely colors his work, and probably for the better.
Ellesar,
I love it and will share with my mother, who is a bit of a Francophile and who also hates Trump.
Ex-freaking-zactly!
Tee hee.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/8/15/17692552/charlottesville-unite-the-right-jason-kessler-father
I remember first seeing that picture of Trump dressed in colonial period attire, holding a mini gun, and I assumed it was meant to be satirical. It’s just so over the top that you can’t take it seriously, much like a JibJab. But regardless of its origin, I’ve seen the MAGA crew take it as straight up. And the Jon Mcnaughton stuff has just always been creepy as hell. I’d find art like that creepy even it were casting in such light politicians who I supported. It really shows that sometimes one’s own personal ontological of the world is so skewed that that person really does live in a different world.
But these memes and art are very much indicative that Trump’s appeal has never had much of anything to do with policy; he’s never really had a substantial policy platform other than anti-immigration (and even that’s pushing it as far as calling it an actual policy platform). “Make America great again” and “lock her up” are just slogans, not policy platforms. It’s been this brand of knuckle dragging machoism that’s been the primary driving force over the past half decade in mainstream conservative politics. The new mainstream conservative voters are not William Buckley acolytes. They’re not reading P.J. O’ Rourke. Instead, they’re watching rant videos from Tomi Lahren and Graham Allen. The problem is pride in one’s own ignorance and voting based upon perception of who is the most alpha person in the room could have devastating consequences. In the U.S. we’ve actually been somewhat blessed in disguise that Trump has been such an incompetent nincompoop on most domestic issues, which means that he’s largely been ineffectual in executing his batshit ideas like building a border wall. I’d like to think that we’re just checking off time in that regard. My worry, however, is he will eventually have to make a major decision regarding foreign policy, where one of his blunders may wind up costing a lot of people’s lives.
But Trump is a symptom, not a cause. The Republicans have been letting this cancer spread, and it became metastatic when they embraced the Tea Party a decade ago. It really will be interesting to see what the party will look like once the fallout of Trump starts dropping.
My abusive dad is a trump turd, having slowly become a monster over the last couple decades thanks to fox news. But he was primed for this shit by an upbringing full of toxic masculinity, thanks to his own abusive garbagedad.
This post is spot on. That’s all I’ll say.
Off-topic, but I think you folks might be interested to read this:
Alex Jones’ home station shut down
@Bina
It’s nice to have a president with balls and a first lady who doesn’t [touch those balls because the man is a gross, disgusting Nazi].
The text in square brackets is grammatically — and commonsensically — implied.
The first part of the sentence is sarcasm — just messing with your head.
@Liquidmidnight:
You misspelled “century” in “past half century in mainstream conservative politics”. HTH.
Or maybe that should be “millennium”. How old is patriarchy, exactly?
Good question, and one the historical community has been trying to solve! Possibly as old as pastoralism, or even as agriculture as a whole?
@Liquidmidnight
This isn’t new. This is what conservatism has always been and will always be. There’s no halcyon past of ‘real conservatives’ who had policy positions not based in bigotry; what conservatives wish to conserve is existing patterns 9f privilege and oppression, nothing else.
Scildfreja Unnyðnes:
That right there, that’s literally the epitome of today’s regressives/conservatives/alt-right/patriarchy/etc. Cishet white male feelings trump facts. Because their feelings are actually objective rational thought and everything else is fake nooooose.
I actually had a man tell me once that he finds “technical facts” (aka scientifically supported facts) boring, saying that it’s not “nuanced” or applicable to real life, and prefers logical reasoning (aka whatever shit he makes up out of thin air).
@Jane Done:
By which he means, if he doesn’t like it he can’t convincingly argue against it, waaaah! No fair!
If only that were true. The damage he’s caused to environmental law alone is horrendous. Plus the ACA. Plus the Supreme Court. His loathing of Obama has made him focus on rolling back every good thing Obama ever did and then some.
There are a strong band of Trump apologists, and the cross-section is wide and varied, that could not care less about any of this. They want Trump to succeed (within even the most limited framework) exclusively to annoy liberals, progressives and leftists. That’s it. That’s their whole thing. And in the meme-posting world, putting together a grandiose, tongue-in-cheek is seen as putting out a lure for the SJWs to trigger themselves into an apoplectic rage and they just see it as funny. That’s what Trump is to them: something to kick back against progressive movements.
And they will also look at any negative response that these things get as proof that they succeeded.
I think talking about this being a reflection of their misguided and fragile sense of masculinity falls into that. Because they don’t care. All they care about is kicking back against the SJWs.