GENDER INSECURITIES BECOME POLICY

I think Jamelle Bouie is right to argue that Trumpism is very much about gender.

I've done a few videos at this point on a particular theme, and that theme is that everything is gender. What this means is that so much of what is driving our politics today is an acute form of gender anxiety, expressed by those who believe in a kind of hierarchical gender universe in which men are at the top, in which a particular kind an expression of masculinity is deemed to be dominant, in which femininity is disparaged, in which women are disparaged, in which anything that threatens this particular vision of domineering hierarchical masculinity is something to be undermined, if not destroyed outright.

Bouie sees this in the context of President Trump's mad plan to spend a billion dollars to bribe renewal energy companies so they won't build wind farms, at a time when the supply of fossil fuels is threatened by Trump's Iran war. Why the obsession with fossil fuels? Bouie says (at approximately 2:26 in the video):

... clean energy, renewable energy, energy that you produce not through extraction, right? Not through the violent extraction, through literally abusing the land, through literally penetrating the land, right? That's what an oil drill does: it penetrates the land....

For the people in this administration, I believe, I think that they view clean energy and renewable energy as a fundamental threat to their vision of a hierarchical world, to their vision of a hypermasculine, hierarchical world in which the only real law is the law of the strong dominating the weak, and they see renewables, green energy, as representing weakness, as representing femininity, which they equate with weakness.

I agree that masculinity is important to them -- but (and I think Bouie would agree) it's not just male vs. female. It's also macho male vs. non-macho male. I'm seeing this in right-wing memes, like these two:

Liberalism is embodied in a foul-smelling, pot-bellied brony who's clearly inferior to the ripped, iron-pumping Christian embodiment of the Trump zeitgeist. The message is not just that men are better than women, but that right-wing men are better than left-wing men, who are flabby pseudo-men.

But much of this posturing is right-wing men trying to persuade themselves that they're the guy on the right and not the guy on the left.

Here's a thread from Derek Guy. The first post features a clip of the Daily Wire's Michael Knowles talking to a manosphere influencer named Justin Waller (the clip appears in Louis Theroux's documentary Inside the Manosphere). The second post shows the Daily Wire's Matt Walsh:

It's interesting how The Daily Wire attacks the idea that gender is a performance when their sets are all about gender performance. Look at the aesthetics here — the cigars and crystal decanter with Japanese whiskey, the black dress shirt, the tight suit with two-toned double monks and tie bar ...

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— derek guy (@dieworkwear.bsky.social) March 21, 2026 at 3:43 AM

... the Arne Jacobsen egg chair teamed with leather couch and a studio backdrop feat. a Lambo inexplicably inside the room. And where Knowles's set is filled with masculine urban cliches, Walsh's set is the rustic counterpart: the fish, stone fireplace, and boat-shaped shelf with tiny old books.

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— derek guy (@dieworkwear.bsky.social) March 21, 2026 at 3:43 AM

Just feels like every material representation of masculinity for 12 year old boys, all crammed into a tiny digital space that will fit your screen. So farcical that I don't know how anyone working on or watching this production doesn't feel like their intelligence is being insulted.

— derek guy (@dieworkwear.bsky.social) March 21, 2026 at 3:43 AM

Guy says that what we're seeing "feels like every material representation of masculinity for 12 year old boys," but I don't think it's that. I think these are symbols associated with masculinity that allegedly elevate men above women (and above weak men) and allegedly make women flock to men, but they mostly appeal to other men. They're ways men tell one another that they're alpha males.

Waller makes a living selling this image to fans. He's buff and cocksure, so the act is convincing. Knowles and Walsh, on the other hand, don't come off as macho men at all. Nor does Trump, at the age of 79, especially carrying around a body that looks like the brony's body in the memes above.

I suspect that Trump's embrace of fossil fuels is, like so much else in his life, a form of self-soothing -- he embraces energy drilled from ground by burly men and he feels more manly, at a time when, I'm sure, his days as a headline-grabbing ladies' man are in the distant past. I also see self-soothing when Knowles puffs on that cigar and Walsh makes sure the camera angle includes that fish -- yeah, we're real men, and so are you guys if you're watching this.

This is what the dominant political party in America produces as "culture." And this is how policy gets made. It's tests of manhood that men impose on themselves to impress their fellow men. And I guess Trump thinks the war is the ultimate macho flex.