Near the end of the 2016 presidential campaign, the world learned about the “Access Hollywood” tape in which Donald Trump bragged about groping women.
Days later, he apologized for those comments but dismissed them as “locker room talk.”
Not today: Instead of defensively downplaying his vulgarity, he has leaned into it. Instead of worrying that his loutish behavior might alienate women, he’s embracing it.
He’s not trying to close the gender gap among voters, particularly younger voters; he wants to exploit it. Locker room politics are the basis of his closing argument.
For months, Trump has been engaged in a foulmouthed assault on Vice President Kamala Harris, reposting lewd comments about her on social media, reportedly referring to her with an expletive behind closed doors and demeaning her as “stupid.”
Last week at a rally, he said, “We can’t stand you, you’re a shit vice president,” shortly after sharing an admiring anecdote about the size of the late golfer Arnold Palmer’s penis.
We’ve heard this kind of talk from Trump before. In 2016, responding to a dig from Marco Rubio, he said, “He referred to my hands: ‘If they’re small, something else must be small.’ I guarantee you there’s no problem.”
This all speaks to a toxic masculinity in which the definition of what it means to be a man is reduced to the size of a sex organ. There’s an almost Neanderthal quality to it, a primal call to what Trump seems to perceive as the base nature of men.
All the threads of his message invoke this sentiment: from his doomsaying about America’s future to his accusation that “Kamala’s agenda is they/them, not you” and his ever more caustic anti-immigrant language that focuses on white, female victims of brown, male perpetrators.
In 2015, when Trump said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you,” and ended with, “They’re rapists,” it was one stanza in a long speech. Now? That theme is core to his political pitch.
The language he uses with increasing frequency and vitriol is meant to trigger the defender impulse in men. It’s “The Birth of a Nation,” but instead of native-born Black men being the scary other, it’s men from the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central and South America. It’s a way of valorizing the instinct to punish immigrants, whether it be through a Muslim travel ban, family separations or possibly rounding up millions of people for deportation.
To my ear, Trump is telling men that voting for him is the only way to validate their manliness. His calls to defend women, unborn children and cisgender female athletes are his way of drafting men into his legions.
Those calls seem to be connecting with the men who feel that their societal dominance is slipping. Women have now exceeded men in educational attainment, nearly two-thirds of Americans say same-sex relationships are “morally acceptable,” and among younger Americans, fewer women than men say they want to become parents. Career paths that were once all but closed to women and people of color now require white men to compete with everyone else.
Great replacement theory — the idea that shadowy “elites” are orchestrating a demographic shift in America that dethrones straight, white Christian men — has gained traction.
Trump isn’t delivering his message in such explicit terms. And though it’s pretty clear he’s playing to white men’s anxieties, there are universal male anxieties about economic security and displacement that even minority men have connected to, in spite of Trump’s racial overtones. (And yes, some women respond to Trump’s appeal; in a recent interview, a Black woman who supports Trump told MSNBC’s Alex Wagner that she wants a “manly” president.)
I think of all of this as the John Wayne replacement theory: the cultural convulsion in our society over the gradual unseating of the unreconstructed straight, usually white, male individualist and the building of a more pluralistic view of the country, inclusive of a multiplicity of genders, races and sexual identities.
For a long time, the John Wayne ethos prevailed. He was a cowboy icon and a rock-ribbed Republican. He was seen as the epitome of the American man, his racist beliefs notwithstanding — consider what Wayne said in a 1971 Playboy magazine interview:
With a lot of Blacks, there’s quite a bit of resentment along with their dissent, and possibly rightfully so. But we can’t all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the Blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the Blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.
But white supremacy was as American as baseball, and that declaration was consistent with Wayne’s image and his prominence.
Though he doesn’t overtly express that type of sentiment, I hear it in Trump’s MAGA sloganeering. It’s the “again” in “make America great again” that gives him away.
Trump, by all appearances, isn’t just a toxic man’s toxic man. He wants to be seen that way — his version of a shirtless Vladimir Putin. He’s betting that his road back to the White House runs through a haze of testosterone. He’s summoning it with language that is rarely given voice in the company of the women he swears he loves but constantly diminishes.
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