Donald Trump and the cult of masculine dominance

Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on

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During a rally in Pennsylvania on Sunday, Trump told a crowd of supporters that he wouldn’t ‘mind so much’ if an assassin shot through the news media to get him. A sinister ripple of laughter travelled through the assembled multitude.

Trump knows how to channel the dark energy of base. His narcissistic personality is replenished by their applause: I suspect he would run for election by applause meter if he could. As he told supporters in Pittsburgh this week:

‘Remember, the rallies are the most exciting thing. There’ll never be rallies like this. You’re going to have some leading candidate come in in four years and, honestly, if they’re successful they’ll have 300 or 400 people in a ballroom some place. This is never going to happen again.’

The dialogue between the wannabe autocrat and the mob is crudely dialectical. At a Trump rally in Greensboro, N.C., a supporter shouted a ‘joke’ suggesting Kamala Harris was a prostitute. Trump could be seen chuckling as he paused midway through his monologue. He looked at his advisors and then to the crowd for reassurance. There were audible groans as a sea of heads turned towards the guy who said the quiet part out loud. The fellow had gotten overexcited - understandable perhaps but the cameras were rolling. ‘Just remember,’ Trump said while shaking his head disapprovingly, ‘it’s other people saying it. It’s not me.’

The proviso was for the cameras. Trump is the master of the callous and cruel verbal broadside - against the mob’s enemies as well as his own. Kamala Harris is ‘a low IQ individual’. Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi is ‘evil, sick, crazy’ and a word that ‘starts with a b, but I won’t say it’. House member Liz Cheney should have ‘guns trained on her face’ because she is a ‘war hawk’.

The trash-talk is intended to disconcert and menace. Trump intuitively grasps that many of his supporters feel like losers but believe it is their birthright to feel like winners. Though he shares many of their brittle resentments, he doesn’t harbour much genuine affection for the down-at-heel, despite claiming to ‘love the uneducated’. Their utility to him is as a point of comparison. ‘I love losers because they make me feel so good about myself,’ he told an audience in Colorado during his 2016 presidential bid. His nephew Fred Trump says he uses people as pawns.

His supporters too understand that he isn’t really one of them. Not that it seems to matter. As Trump writes in The Art of the Deal (1987): ‘I play to people’s fantasies. People do not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do.’ Trump’s political skill, like that of other populist demagogues, lies in his ability to persuade these ‘losers’ not to move against their bosses and masters. Instead he warns them apocalyptically that the fragments of status they hang on to are threatened by various ‘un-American’ miscreants. Top of the list are women, immigrants, and a hectoring liberal elite whose heads are full of college rot.

Much remarked upon during the 2024 election campaign has been the gender divide between Harris and Trump voters. According to the latest polling, women support Harris by a 16-point margin (57 per cent to 41 per cent) whereas men back Trump by 18 points (58 per cent to 40 per cent). Trump has an especially large lead among white men without college degrees - a demographic that has experienced a relative loss of status over recent decades.

Plenty too has been written about the supposed crisis of masculinity, much of it spurred by the popularity of the manosphere, a loosely affiliated network of masculinist websites, blogs, and online forums. Trump is widely popular in the manosphere - his macho and belligerent persona is seen as a rejoinder to a ‘feminised’ culture that is reducing men to a touchy-feely subspecies.

His MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement and the manosphere also have much in common. Both see feminism as the starting point for when things began to go downhill for white men. Both also blame women for the relative decline in men’s status. At one time men at the bottom of the economic ladder could still lord it over (sorry, ‘protect and provide for’) their families - much as poor whites in the Old South were once compensated for their lowly standing by the illusion of superiority over the black population beneath them. Today that cult of patriarchal dominance is no longer supportable: modern women are disinclined to put up with being treated as social inferiors. Nowadays they have options - and a certain type of conservative commentator never stops bleating about it.

If Trump embodies the idea that men should always be dominating those around them, the GOP intends to use his presidency as a vehicle for exerting power over women. Conservative lawmakers and influencers have already moved to control women’s access to reproductive healthcare. Next in their sights are no-fault divorce laws and other legacies of the hated ‘sexual revolution’. Trump plans to ‘protect’ women by handing responsibility for their healthcare to anti-vaccine crank Robert Kennedy Jr. Prospective vice president JD Vance (who admits to having been ‘red-pilled’) complains about ‘childless cat ladies’. Trump’s spokesman Steven Cheung has called the husband of Harris’s campaign manager a ‘cuck’ - incel slang for cuckold - who is ‘used to not knowing what’s going on behind his back’.

The rot goes deep. Vance’s billionaire benefactor Peter Thiel thinks capitalist democracy is an ‘oxymoron’ because women are allowed to vote. (Thiel funded 16 federal-level Republican candidates during the 2022 US midterms, including Vance). A book¹ by a far-right internet personality which, according to a former Ron DeSantis flunkey, has been read by ‘every junior staffer in the Trump administration’, describes the emancipation of women as the most ‘ridiculous’ thing ever attempted ‘in the history of mankind’. Even the red pill subreddit - at one-time a hugely popular forum whose sidebar describes women as ‘irrational’ and ‘Machiavellian’ - was founded by the Republican New Hampshire Representative Robert Fisher. 

Besides Trump, the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin perhaps best embodies this right-wing fantasy of chest-puffing masculine dominance. ‘You see more Putin memes than you see Trump memes on [far-right] Telegram,’ Alexander Reid Ross, the author of Against the Fascist Creep (2017), told me when we spoke earlier this year. Everything Putin does is calculated to show, as Ross put it during our conversation, that ‘there’s never a consent relationship in an equal way. It’s always about reestablishing hierarchies’.

In the Putinist social stratum, each person dominates someone below him in exchange for submission to somebody above. Putin may have little to offer Russian men besides poverty and war but in the home he lets them rule like feudal lords. In 2017 he signed a law that partially decriminalised domestic violence in Russia, a country where a woman is killed by a man in a domestic setting every 40 minutes.

Trump is not quite Putin (though he admires him) but in common with the Russian leader he views politics more like a mafia boss than a democratic politician. This similitude is deftly hinted at inWhen the Clock Broke, a new book on Trump’s 1990s antecedents by the writer John Ganz. Like the late New York mobster John Gotti, Trump believes in ‘an order more real and deeper than the law, upheld by brute power’. In Trump’s world, as in Gotti’s, beneath all the popular humbug about democracy and equality and liberty there is only force and fraud. It’s one thing to put such a person at the head of a crime family. It’s quite another to put them in charge of a democratic country.

1. Bronze Age Mindset, Bronze Age Pervert, 2018. The book’s main appeal is to a clerk class of men who chafe resentfully under female-dominated HR departments at work and languish in the ‘friend zone’ outside of it.

• ‘Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.’ - It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis, 1935.