Trump Has Weaponized Masculinity As President. Here's Why It Matters
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
All U.S. presidents have been men. Only one major party presidential nominee hasn't been a man. And as NPR's Danielle Kurtzleben reports, Donald Trump has taken the image of the president as a manly man to new heights with effects that go beyond just trying to appeal to voters.
DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, BYLINE: When President Trump was released from the hospital after being treated for COVID-19, he had a prescription for how Americans could handle coronavirus.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Don't let it dominate you. Don't be afraid of it.
KURTZLEBEN: The way Trump has sold strength as a key part of fighting the virus seems to have rubbed off on supporters. Garland Thompson was in the crowd outside Walter Reed Medical Center when Trump left the hospital. I asked him.
How worried are you about his health right now?
GARLAND THOMPSON: I just told you. He's a vibrant man. He's strong. This man - he looks stronger than Biden. Let's admit it.
KURTZLEBEN: Joe Biden, for his part, isn't as aggressive in his posturing, but he wields and benefits from masculinity in his own way. In a campaign video from this year, he waxed poetic about a classic Corvette.
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JOE BIDEN: God, can my dad drive a car.
KURTZLEBEN: He's done the aggressive macho act as well. He talked on the trail about wanting to fight Trump and also challenged a voter to a push-up contest. But then he has examples of himself as an empathetic caregiver, an image the Biden campaign has worked hard to emphasize. In a video of Biden comforting the family members of mass shooting victims, the son of one victim ran up and hugged him.
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BIDEN: Thank you for hugging me. You OK? You OK? You'll be OK. We're going to be OK.
KURTZLEBEN: They're both men of similar ages, but there's a sharp contrast here. Trump has made overt shows of machismo a central part of his political style. Here he was in the primary debates in 2016.
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TRUMP: He referred to my hands. If they're small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there's no problem. I guarantee you.
KURTZLEBEN: But it's not just about appealing to voters. Once you start looking, the potential effects of this macho posturing are everywhere, not only in rhetoric but in policy and even in reshaping the Republican Party. Race is inseparable from this masculine posturing, according to Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of "Jesus And John Wayne," a book about masculinity and white evangelicals. She pointed to the violent suppression of Black Lives Matter protesters, as well as the defense of Confederate monuments.
KRISTIN KOBES DU MEZ: These heroes that are celebrated tend to be white military heroes that enforced this myth of white masculine power as really being the center of American history, the center of the American story.
KURTZLEBEN: Masculinity is also reflected in foreign affairs, as when Trump tweeted that he had a, quote, "much bigger and more powerful" nuclear button than North Korea's Kim Jong Un or praised other strongmen and authoritarian rulers. And arguably, it's reflected in Trump's economic priorities, with the president's insistent focus on male-dominated, blue-collar professions that involve physical labor, like manufacturing, mining and farming as opposed to female-dominated, pink-collar, care-oriented jobs like home health aides.
CHRISTINE MATTHEWS: I think Trump's exaggerated hypermasculinity has - if it's done anything, it's driven women away from the party.
KURTZLEBEN: Christine Matthews is a Republican pollster who has been critical of Trump. She points out that women have increasingly been filtering over to the Democratic Party and men to the Republican Party. There are signs that Trump's crude macho rhetoric is filtering down to other party members, as when Senator Ted Cruz tweeted that liberal men, quote, "never grow balls," or when Senator Kelly Loeffler tweeted a video depicting Trump body-slamming coronavirus.
Overt masculinity may also be shaping how women run within the party. Matthews said she noticed something when she was looking at ads for Republican women candidates this year.
MATTHEWS: How many of them seem to be presenting themselves as not only Second Amendment supporters but pictures of themselves with guns, large guns?
KURTZLEBEN: Mathew's found that more than one-third of nonincumbent Republican women running for Congress had campaign materials prominently featuring them with guns. In a party that has struggled to elect women, where men are the majority of voters and where the head of the party encourages hypermasculinity, the kind of women candidates who can break through may just be the ones who can speak that language. Danielle Kurtzleben, NPR News.
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