Trump's Basest Impulse: A Dominating Kind of Masculinity

New York Times

03-03-2025

President Trump's outsize performance of masculinity has won him attention, elections and the support of manosphere influencers from Andrew Tate to Joe Rogan. In this episode of 'The Opinions,' the deputy editor of Times Opinion, Patrick Healy, speaks with columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom about what Trump's focus on gender means for men, women, minorities and American politics.
This episode was recorded before President Trump's Friday meeting in the Oval Office with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
Below is a lightly edited transcript of an episode of 'The Opinions.' We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Patrick Healy: This is The First 100 Days, a weekly series examining President Trump's use of power and his drive to change America.
Donald Trump spent a lot of time during the 2024 campaign really courting what's called the manosphere — going on these podcasts with Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson and trying to talk directly to male American voters of different ages, and zeroing in on what he saw as their frustrations, their grievances.
I've been thinking about how that strategy is playing out now during his presidency.
To talk about Trump and masculinity, I'm joined by my colleague Tressie McMillan Cottom. Tressie has spent a lot of her career — both as a writer and a sociologist — thinking about gender, race and how they interact within American society. Thanks for joining me, Tressie.
Tressie McMillan Cottom: It's always a pleasure, Patrick.
Healy: So, Tressie, we are over a month since the inauguration of Donald Trump and a lot has happened. Big question: What has really surprised you so far?
McMillan Cottom: That is a great question, because if you had asked me a month and a half ago, I would have said nothing so far has surprised me.
Healy: Yep.
McMillan Cottom: So I'm actually surprised that I could still be surprised. Nothing about Trump's success at rebranding some of the core tenets of contemporary conservatism really surprised me, except for one. I underestimated the efficacy of messages about gender in this election, and in how Trump continues to use them so successfully for governance.
I was surprised how well this messaging worked across what I would consider typically strange political bedfellows, Latino male voters, Black male voters. It worked up and down the class divides that normally sort voters by political party and ideology. In many ways, masculinity and Trump's performance of it and his branding of it as content, as political messaging, has worked as well, if not better, than race as a political tool, and frankly, that surprised me.
Healy: It surprised me too, because this is a guy who has divided people along racial lines for much of his career,but it actually turned out to be gender, and that ad that we saw during the campaign about how Kamala Harris is for they/them and Donald Trump is for you.
McMillan Cottom: Yes, that one really got me.
Healy: That had such power. And I think Tressie, I had the same experience you did when Donald Trump came out —
Clip of Donald Trump: 'I speak to you this morning in an hour of anguish for our nation…'
— and blamed that plane collision and crash in Washington, D.C., on D.E.I.
Clip of Donald Trump: 'The initiative is part of the F.A.A.'s diversity and inclusion hiring plan, which says diversity is integral to achieving F.A.A.'s mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel — I don't think so. I don't think so. I think it's just the opposite.'
At first, I was like, 'Give me a break. What is he doing? This is so gross. This is so cynical.' And then I stepped back and I thought: I actually am a little surprised that they are that clever in a way. And this is about shrewd tactics that partly — what you were getting at — that they see gender and they see masculinity even more than race and race relations as something that I think kind of resonates with a lot of voters in America with a lot of quote unquote kind of regular people.
I mean, why do you think that is? Why is gender and masculinity so effective in a way, just as kind of a political tool or tactic for Trump?
McMillan Cottom: I am obsessed with this question of late, and I have a couple of things that maybe feel like answers. One of them is something that you just hit on here, which is like that D.E.I. moment when the plane crash happened and this sort of critique of the Federal Aviation Administration was ongoing.
It's very easy, and not untrue, for us to say that D.E.I. was a sort of broad, crude gesture to race and racism, but I think we forget that D.E.I. included women.
Healy: Yes.
McMillan Cottom: And arguably benefited disproportionately white women and that the pilot in that case, one of the people that was being dismissed, was a woman.
Clip of news tape: 'The army identifies Captain Rebecca Lobach from Durham as one of three soldiers inside the Black Hawk helicopter involved in a deadly midair collision with an American Airlines plane.'
I actually think that D.E.I. in that context, while it sort of primed some racial energies, it was really doing its most effective work as a broad dismissal of women.
I think one of the reasons that works is because we worked really hard — especially in the last like 15 years — to develop and deepen the repertoire that Americans have to talk about race and racism. I will be honest with you, I'm not sure that we did as good a job of developing that capacity when it came to gender. And I don't want to critique feminism like it's just one big group, but I think we thought we'd already won that war maybe, we'd already done that work. And so we didn't continue to do it in these really deep ways.
One of the things that Trump did that is both historically continuous and new and fresh is that the G.O.P., the Republican Party, has actually been quite good at rebranding things politically for quite some time. So Trump, in one way, is like just doing that thing — using D.E.I. to rebrand; he's really good at that. I think Make America Great is an example. But what is different is that when the right used to do that before Trump, they were sort of liberal washing these unpopular ideas. They were making them more palatable to the general voter by de-emphasizing how divisive these ideas were.
What Trump has done, particularly with masculinity, is different. He is doubling down on these negative qualities: boorishness, cruelty, strength without empathy. Instead of rebranding that to make them more palatable for the general voter, he is rebranding boorishness as good and is doing that so successfully.
That feels new and unique and something that could have only worked with gender in a way that I don't think would have worked with racism. I think that might say something about us and how unsettled we were around these ideas, as much as it says anything about how successful he is at political messaging.
Healy: Yeah, I think you see it — and look, a lot of these standup comedians, whether it's Bill Burr —
Clip of Bill Burr: 'And she starts [expletive], going like, 'I don't understand, how come female athletes don't make as much as male professional athletes?' And all of these men had to sit there and act like they didn't know what the answer was.'
— or Dave Chappelle
Clip of Dave Chappelle: 'Sounds to me like you hate women. I said, 'Well, I can tell you as the maker of this art that I don't believe that I feel that way.' And she said, 'Well I think…' And I said, 'Shut up, [expletive]!''
A number of men who have made their stock and trade in kind of being boorish or being crude, it's that kind of entertainment value that I think Trump kind of understands and taps into. It's this gender part that Trump is trying to sell and Elon Musk is trying to sell, and when they go to the U.F.C. or the Super Bowl —
Clip from U.F.C. announcer: ' Ladies and gentlemen, look who is now making his way — soon-to-be 47th, President-elect Donald Trump.'
And I wonder, just taking it back to your work. In a recent column you wrote about Elon as a content creator and this kind of performance of masculinity. Why do you think it's something that they see that they can get mileage out of content? Why is it effective for them?
McMillan Cottom: In two words, I'm going to say it's the economy and it's the internet. The intersection of those two things, as it turned out, created a vacuum for masculinity. At the same time, it created more competition for the wages and the status that men use to define their masculinity.
This, to me, is a crisis of two trains barreling toward each other. And I think Trump and Elon are particularly skilled at manipulating those because they were produced by them. Elon Musk is a production of the internet economy. He understands how affect and outrage drives the algorithm, which in turn drives profit based on attention and our emotions, which we dump into these platforms.
I think Donald Trump brings to this relationship that he understands the sort of panic that can be induced when the economy has been captured by a small group of people, and it can make workers vulnerable to this sort of political messaging. You put those two things together, they in many ways embody two of these massive changes.
I've been reading a lot of macroeconomic work, especially done by feminist economists. Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economist who won the Nobel, has done this work for all of her career. One of the things that strikes me from Claudia's work that I think is really relevant in this moment is that everything that made the economy a little bit more fair, a little bit more accessible for like racial minorities also made it harder along gender lines. It made it harder as women, particularly women and women of color, make these inroads into the economy as they start to make gains in education and in wages. That puts a lot of pressure on men to find some other way to be men.
Healy: Yep, absolutely.
McMillan Cottom: That is happening and that's happening across like the globalized West, which is why I think we see similar political waves happening in other countries as we have happening here.
Then on the other side, the internet comes along and says, 'I can give you an answer for that. I can build a community around that grudge, around that victimhood.' The algorithms love binaries, and so a good binary like male/female, man/woman, good/bad, the algorithm is really set up to juice that, and so it can create this sense that there is a place for you when the economy doesn't have a place for you. And that, as it turned out, is a very strong political message if it means it pushes some women back out of the labor market and back into the home.
That benefits even men who disagree with Trump, frankly. So it creates these alignments between people who may not agree on things culturally, but who have a shared economic interest and that's the vacuum he knows how to exploit.
Healy: I find myself wondering: Why does Trump align himself so much with Elon Musk? Or why does he make the case to help out Andrew Tate? Part of it is selling this version of manhood to millions of men with the assumption baked in that, whether it's women or the government or something, there's this kind of war on men, and that if they're not getting something, it's being taken from them.
I find myself wondering how has what Trump is doing normalized more extreme views around gender and masculinity?
McMillan Cottom: He has absolutely defanged the shame that I think used to constrain some of these more extreme views. It is not that they have ever been eradicated, but they came with a lot of social stigma and potential risk of social status and reputation and prestige if you espouse them. So they flourished on the margins of the discourse. That's where the internet really excels — tapping into those margins, expanding them, sort of shifting what political scientists would call the Overton window, keep shifting it further and further toward more extremism.
Clip of Joe Rogan: 'If I say anything even remotely critical about women, people will get really mad. Watch. 'Ladies, I love you, you're some of my favorite people. But let's be honest, you don't invent a lot of [expletive].' Oh, do you feel that? Yeah, that's some ride home arguments in the air!'
What Donald Trump has been able to do, however, is to mainstream that, to bring it back to the center. And Elon Musk, I think one of the reasons why they were able to kiss and make up — they weren't always big fans of each other — is because they both figured that out at the same time.
I think they figured out the power of that masculinity narrative. They saw how much money and attention it was generating at the margins. It arguably helped make Joe Rogan an economic elite, just sort of like tapping into that energy. And the power of the presidency is that it can reset the bounds of what is acceptable and what is normal. And that is what he has done, he can reset normal. So he has made what was extreme just three years ago really normal, what almost feels like happened overnight. I think that this is also behind the attacks on the government.
One of the things that this strongman politics does — by giving people a scapegoat, giving men a scapegoat — is that it says not only are women the enemy, are people of color and minorities the enemy, but the government is protecting them. So not only do we need to push these people out, but we need to delegitimize and gut the government that made them possible so it doesn't happen again.
It is also, I think, very important to point out it's a really effective political tool. It says that the government is the enemy, not just because it wastes your tax dollars or all of that smoke. What's really working and mobilizing people is that it's been the government that's been shielding the people that are making me lose. So it's super powerful for delegitimizing the government, and that's why I think Donald Trump will continue to double down on it.
Healy: Tressie, how much is Donald Trump leading on gender and masculinity, and how much is he actually following? How much is society actually already there? I'm thinking about the two genders, male and female, executive order that he put out and a lot of what he has been doing on trans athletes and women's sports. It very much can be argued that the majority of society wants these things and that Trump is, in fact, kind of following where the majority is in America as opposed to leading them toward a direction that says there are only two genders, male and female.
McMillan Cottom: Yeah, this is really interesting because I think the gender binary thing and the demonization of trans people is a great case of just how much Donald Trump is going to be able to shift our perception of normal, of what is the majority. I think that's really critical and key because one of the reasons why his powerful manipulation of content and social media and branding has been so politically corrosive is that it shifts the general voters understanding of what the majority believe.
So his ability to pull an audience can convince constituents that: 'Oh, everybody thinks this way. Everybody is upset about trans people.' And what we know from social psychology is that most of us will go along with what we believe is the dominant belief system. The problem is that internet culture in our current media environment can mislead us about what the majority of people believe. It can shape our attitudes in a way that tells us that what we believe is normal by redefining what's normal.
So I actually think he's doing both simultaneously. I think he is following what a minority of people care a lot about, or are outraged about. He is using media, and especially social media, to do this direct appeal to the middle of the populace to say, 'See, this is what everybody believes.' And then people will go, 'Oh, well then I'm outraged too.'
I just find it really hard to believe that most people prior to four years ago were that upset about trans people in bathrooms. We had, in fact, had a decade prior to that where most people thought: 'Oh yeah, that's good. Yeah, that's fine. Let's put the signage up.'
Healy: Even Donald Trump, though. I remember that moment where he was asked, 'Well, how would you feel about Caitlyn Jenner, a trans woman, using a bathroom?' And Donald Trump said, 'Caitlyn Jenner can use whatever bathroom she wants.' I remember hearing from a lot of people after that, when I was a reporter, saying: 'So where is Trump on this? Does Trump have hate in his heart for trans people, for L.G.B.T.Q. people?' Or is it all about that transactional Trump relationship with voters, that when the largest number of voters want a certain policy transaction from him, and it's pretty easy for him to give it to them even if it means throwing trans people under the bus, he'll do it. He'll flip-flop on Caitlin Jenner and hand it over.
McMillan Cottom: Absolutely. I think it is a mistake for us to worry about the extent to which Donald Trump's core beliefs shape his political behavior.He has been very clear that he engages in transactional politics.So on the one hand, I think that can be demoralizing. He's just doing this because it is politically expedient. On the other hand, if we were to look for a little bit of hope, I would point to the fact that with transactions, you can then change people's incentives, and that means that that can happen. It is just that right now, the tools to change them are undemocratically controlled and that control is concentrated with a very small group of people who right now share Donald Trump's political beliefs.
Healy: Yeah. I don't know, Tressie, all those tools feel like they're very much on the right, right now, and there's been a lot of hand wringing about how the left might be able to speak to young men to talk about masculinity, to understand it better.
But what I've heard certainly during the campaign from some of our focus groups, men, women, they point to Trump. Back in July, when that assassination attempt happened in Pennsylvania, and the way that he stood up and he put his fist in the air and he said, 'Fight, fight, fight.' A lot of voters didn't feel that was a performance of masculinity, they felt like that's a moment when your true self appears.
It was a huge moment that was very inspiring to a lot of Americans. I think there were a lot of men who looked at him, who said: 'That's the kind of man that I want to have in charge of America.'
So when I hear the left and Democrats talking about how we need to go on Joe Rogan and we need to go into red areas and we need to show that we're tough and confident enough, sometimes I wonder if that's Democrats performing a certain kind of masculinity and that Trump isn't beatable in this regard. If young men and a lot of men just see him as that, I don't know how the left gets those tools and levers back in the end.
McMillan Cottom: One of the things that you develop a sense for, when you understand the incentives of authenticity online, is that there is no real authenticity online. There is only ever a performance of authenticity, yet people crave it. People crave a sense that they got a glimpse of the real you.
The thing is, Donald Trump is as embedded in that economy and that culture as I am. I think he understood intuitively at a speed that most regular people maybe see as natural, but I just think it was a facility he had for understanding the moment. He gave the image he knew to give because he is a masterful influencer. Let me tell you something: You ask someone like Tom Cruise, who has played this sort of hyper-masculine character for all of his career. You know, any actor who is like the main character they have played — I think something like a Harrison Ford or a John Wayne character, who has played this sort of like iconoclastic, masculine figure in popular culture — what they would tell you is that over time, the distance between the person and the character gets very short.
Healy: Yeah.
McMillan Cottom: I think that if you played that character for as long as Donald Trump has played the character of Donald Trump then yes, your instincts may be shaped by the danger of the moment. But those instincts have also been shaped by how much you feel responsible for creating that image.
To this question of whether or not the left can beat Donald Trump on this, I think the left trying to beat Donald Trump on this issue would possibly be the end of the left. And I will tell you why I don't think not only can they not win, they should not compete in this arena. Donald Trump's vision and version of masculinity depends on the demoralization of the role of government. It is to say that there is no other way to, oh, I don't know, provide child care for families except to send women back into the home.
When, of course, we can fund day cares —
Healy: Yep, there are other ways.
McMillan Cottom: — and then men may not feel nearly as emasculated. But if you can erase the role of the government in making people's lives better, then sure, your only solution is the strongman trope.
The left's politics rely on the fact that there is a role for the government to play in making people's lives better. If you double down on 'the only people who can save you are the cowboys of the internet' and you try to out-cowboy Donald Trump, you are just reinforcing the belief system that the government has no role here. And if you can cede that, then there's no more left.
Healy: No Democrat is going to out-cowboy Donald Trump. That's a losing issue.
At the same time, when you're explaining you're losing Democrats who are trying to explain, 'well, this is the good part of D.E.I., or this is the good part of the federal government' — a lot of these voters and a lot of men in America, they don't want to hear explainers. They don't want to get explanations. They want action. Most Americans aren't thinking about whether this is an authentic masculinity or a performative masculinity. It's just masculinity in their mind, and it's what they ultimately want.
And boy, I mean, when I hear Democrats, and we talk about it in some of the focus groups: 'Can we nominate a woman as the party's nominee in 2028?' or 'When will be the next time?' Or 'How do we win men back?' I find myself thinking, they're too deep in the playbook of strategy and too deep in tactics. Ultimately, you need to find candidates — whether it's a Barack Obama or a Bill Clinton — who have a natural way in the world that enough voters enjoy and want to wake up to every morning. And that can be a woman or a man in the White House.
But someone who has just more of a comfort in their own skin. I think Donald Trump is very comfortable in his own skin being a certain kind of man. And for whatever reason, a majority of Americans like that.
McMillan Cottom: Yes, they do.
There is something to the act of governance, which absolutely requires detailed plans and the communication of strength, collectivity and identity. What we should be learning is that you cannot sacrifice one for the other.
I think we don't like that idea because as you point out, that takes some really hard decisions at the level of party infrastructure: Who do you support? Who do you put forward? How do you build an infrastructure that allows for a Barack Obama or Bill Clinton to emerge? What kind of trade offs are you willing to make as a party to make that possible?
If the Democratic Party doubles down on just being the better explainers of governance to Americans, then we are going into a long, dark political night.
Healy: Tressie, what do you think Donald Trump wants America to look like in the end, whether it's at the end of this term, at the end of whatever Trump era we're in?
McMillan Cottom: I think Trump wants for America what Trump has wanted from any of his other business dealings: He wants them to look like Donald Trump. He wants to brand America in the way that he branded hotels, a fake college and a TV show. I think what that looks like is controlling how he is remembered.
So I'm paying a lot of attention to how much attention he's paying to cultural institutions, archivists, libraries, schools, universities and the arts, because what I think he ultimately wants to do is extract as much from his administration for political and economic gain as he can, and then control the memory of what type of politician and leader he was.
I think he is setting himself up to be remembered and perceived as an inevitable political figure cut from the cloth of Ronald Reagan, but fundamentally bigger than Ronald Reagan. And he wants to make a lot of money while he does it.
Healy: I think that's right. It's going for the United States of Trump.
McMillan Cottom: Yep.
Healy: Tressie, thanks so much for joining me.
McMillan Cottom: It's an absolute pleasure, Patrick. Thank you.