Don’s Dudebros Are no Alpha Males
Can an obese old man who walks around in a faceful of makeup and lifts in his shoes be considered a he-man? In today’s warped reality, signs point to yes.
Witness one Sebastian Gorka, former White House aide, Breitbart editor and all around alt-right pest, telling his listeners that “the left” hates Donald Trump because they hate masculinity and “manly men support Trump.”
Setting aside the fact that a neonazi is not good a good #lifegoals guru, Gorka’s spew does illustrate one interesting dynamic to explain Trump’s support in certain groups. Gorka famously declared that “the alpha males are back” after the 2016 election.
If you look carefully, toxic masculinity sits at the root of the moral rot of the Trump administration. Go back to all of the president’s pronouncements about the many despots he calls friends and you will always find a tweet praising them as “tough” and “strong.” Go back down the history of any investigation or scandal and you will find at the center of it a woman who tried to do her job and was smeared, threatened or ignored by a cadre of white men. Think about Marie Yovanovich in Kiev, being warned to watch her back because she didn’t go along with the Three Amigos.
What drives the crazy train of corruption in the White House is not racism, greed, or malignant narcissism — or any sort of ideology at all. Even if all malignant ideologies are conflated in this mire, the original sin of the Trump cult is a mama’s boy fear that he’s not man enough to please his father.
Any biography or Trump (other than the books he claims to have written himself) soon zooms into his relationships with his mother (close) and father (not). It does give one pause to read that the boy with bone spurs that couldn’t go to war was sent to a military academy to toughen him up.
The compulsive womanizing, the cult of masculinity, the gay panic, the longing for the mythical past when men were men and women knew their place all speak to a latent insecurity: “I’m not a pansy, you’re the pansy.”
The cult of maleness often hides the greatest sexual insecurities. The bookshelves buckle from the weight of tomes dedicated to the connection between hypermasculinity and latent homosexuality.
But setting aside any closet speculation, one has to notice that ironically, this Alpha-Male simulacrum comes from the least likely source. As the writer Windsor Mann titled his essay in The Week, Trump is “The Least Macho President.” Mann accurately points out he is a gossipy whiner obsessed with his appearance who acts like a teenage girl.
“His machismo, like everything else about him, is a charade,” Mann concludes. ”Trump is not the savior of masculinity. He is a parody of it.”
So why do working-class white men follow him? In The Atlantic, Author Tom Nichols compares him to the blue-collar men he grew up with and finds him falling far short. Old-school manly men are strong and silent types: “Trump, by comparison, is neither strong nor capable of silence.”
His answer (and it’s a plausible one) is that it’s not about manliness, but about maturity. American men, trapped by a sick society in a never-ending adolescence, see Trump as the flag bearer for their kind.
Dudebros who can’t be bothered to act like men can claim Trump as one of their own. He is the ideal of the rich kid who got a leg up from his dad, started one business after another that foundered and left his associates holding the bag, yet kept failing upwards. In his personal life, he trades in women like sports cars on a lease, leaving the old ones to raise his children, because, as mentioned in court papers, he will not wear a condom.
“Trump is a walking permission slip to shrug off the responsibilities of manhood,” says Nichols, a professor at the Naval War College and former senate staffer. He compares Trump to America’s dysfunctional son and his supporters to the enabling parents who defend him to his teachers while the kid sets fires in the hallway outside. To denounce him is to denounce a part of themselves.
These men feel powerless and left behind by an economy that doesn’t depend on their labor and a society that doesn’t recognize them as the default model anymore. So now they get their satisfaction from disruption and destruction. Like juvenile delinquents vandalizing property, they just want to leave a mark. They may know their days are numbered and demographics are against them, but they will “own the libs.” This is their moment and they will have their day.
Until they don’t.
