Trump and his MAGA allies push weird version of masculinity on Americans – MSNBC
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This is an adapted excerpt from the Jan. 16 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
During Tuesday’s Senate confirmation hearing for President-elect Donald Trump’s prospective secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, Montana Republican Sen. Tim Sheehy made sure to use his time to ask the nominee some vitally important questions … like how many genders there are and how many pushups he can do.
According to Hegseth, he did five sets of 47 pushups that morning. The number was presumably a tribute to Trump, who is about to become the 47th president. The question from Sheehy and Hegseth’s response is par for the course with this downright weird version of masculinity that MAGA and its boosters are pushing on Americans.
The question from Sheehy and Hegseth’s response is par for the course with this downright weird version of masculinity that MAGA and its boosters are pushing.
You can see it in what people are calling a “vibe shift.” There’s this odd, off-putting thing happening, where cultural figures and business titans are embracing Trump out of proportion with his 1.5% victory margin, one of the narrowest wins in American electoral history.
A huge part of this has been these pathological expressions of gender frustration by men who seem to think that the real way to “be a man” is to insult people and endlessly whine about DEI and the unfairness of the world to rich dudes.
And that begins with the man himself, Trump, who is, more than anything else, a crybaby: endlessly complaining in ever more dramatic language about how much of a victim he is.
Trump and his campaign expressly courted the bro vote in November, giving speaking slots at the Republican National Convention to men like Hulk Hogan and UFC owner Dana White. Both embody a kind of cartoonish vision of masculinity that is particularly appealing to adolescent boys.
White, who admitted to slapping his wife after it was caught on tape, has also become fast friends with Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg. Earlier this month, Zuckerberg put White on the board of directors of Meta, Facebook’s parent company.
That was the same time Zuckerberg announced Meta was ending its fact-checking program, in part, he said, because it was offending the fragile sensibilities of men.
“I do think a lot of our society has become very like — I don’t know, I don’t even know the right word for it — but it’s … kind of like neutered, or like emasculated,” Zuckerberg told podcast host Joe Rogan.
He added: “I think having a culture that, like, celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive. … I do think the corporate culture sort of had swung towards being this somewhat more neutered thing, and I didn’t really feel that until I got involved in martial arts, which I think is still a much more masculine culture.”
Zuckerberg also met late last year with Trump aide Stephen Miller and signaled “that he would do nothing to obstruct the Trump agenda” of fighting DEI, three people with knowledge of the meeting told The New York Times.
Zuckerberg also reportedly “blamed his former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, for an inclusivity initiative at Facebook that encouraged employees’ self-expression in the workplace.”
I mean, at one level, it’s actually a perfect example of masculine energy to not own your decisions and instead blame them on a woman who was your subordinate. But it’s a kind of masculine energy — if you want to call it that — that’s pretty damn pathetic.
That’s the other weird thing about all these “manly men” and how they perform masculinity. Not only does it involve a ton of whining and blame-shifting, but it also involves abject levels of, dare I say, emasculating subservience.
All these “manly men” are so eager to submit to the awesome will of Trump while simultaneously bragging about their superhuman feats. Whether it’s all the pushups you can allegedly do, in Hegseth’s case, or claiming you are one of the best video gamers in the universe, as Elon Musk has recently done.
During an appearance on Rogan’s podcast in November, Musk claimed to be one of the top 20 players in the world at Diablo 4, a role-playing online video game. It’s a bold claim, which Musk made again recently with another game, Path of Exile 2. But hard-core gamers quickly took him apart after watching a livestream of Musk playing that game, in which he committed tons of mistakes that no top-flight gamer would make.
Some suggested Musk had hired a ringer to play the games for him, or cheated in some other way. Musk’s response to the barrage of criticism was to throw a tantrum and post criticism of one of those gamers who roasted him. He also took away that gamer’s blue-check verification on X, the social media site Musk owns.
Remember when Musk bought Twitter and said it was totally unfair how they were using blue checks to separate users into “lords and peasants?” And now the tech titan, who complains about the “woke mind virus” and says his trans daughter is figuratively dead to him, is showing how thin-skinned he really is.
We are under the thumb of desperately thin-skinned thirsty men who are convinced, as New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie put it, “that ‘masculine’ energy means license to act like a chud in public, as opposed to more traditional notions of public masculinity, such as those that put a premium on the performance of integrity, honesty, honor and generosity.”
It’s actually a perfect example of masculine energy to not own your decisions and instead blame them on a woman who was your subordinate.
Bouie’s comments made me think of my grandfather, a lifelong conservative Republican, stridently anti-communist and anti-abortion. I loved him, but he and I had very different politics and worldviews, certainly around gender.
But I’ll say this for my grandfather, or “The Bear,” as we called him. There were two character traits he had that I admired: He was his own man through and through; he didn’t bow and scrape. And he didn’t whine and had no tolerance for those who did.
If all these powerful men are going to fetishize some throwback conception of manhood, maybe start with that. Be your own man. Don’t debase yourself by bending the knee.
Allison Detzel contributed.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Monday through Friday on MSNBC. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “A Colony in a Nation” (W. W. Norton).
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