Maga men love Trump and his war against the age of wokeness
One of the reasons that I was always wary of going to “college” in America was the spectre of the thousands of baying bros reigning over social life.
Frat culture has a mystical name and may evoke for Britons a kind of American dreamland of beefcakes, beer and babes, but it is in reality a deranged tradition that eggs on the most intimidating, boorish, and physically disgusting male behaviour. Hazing rituals sometimes leave recruits dead. Allegations of serious sexual assault are routine and shocking.
Now this culture, in all its primitive energy, has come to the White House, turning America into what increasingly feels like one big frat house. Intensified country-wide by Donald Trump’s decade-long global influence, his second term has already been marked by cartoonishly male optics of power and camaraderie.
With the Musk-Trump-RFK bromance dominating the new administration, the images are coming thick and fast: the guys at the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fight in Madison Square Gardens, the guys on their way back from the fight on a jet eating McDonald’s.
The Trump campaign seems to be just as much about Making Guys Great Again as America. If the odious misogynist Andrew Tate remains something of a peripheral figure politically, his steroidal brand of anti-woman man-boosterism sprawling into the feeds of young men the world over via TikTok, then The Donald has consolidated the wishful gun-toting, fight-loving, fist-pumping, “men are men” online crowds and swept them from TikTok into the ballot box.
Trump managed to open a 16-point gender gap between young men and women, with 56 per cent of men between 18 and 29 voting for Trump as opposed to just 40 per cent of their female peers. The Trump-ward swing among young men has been attributed to a decade of wokeness, which placed them at the bottom of the progressive pecking order. Harris showed no signs of dismantling this unhappy status quo, while Trump proudly wore his anti-woke credentials on his sleeve.
As a result, half a century on from the Women’s Liberation Movement, a huge swell of American men reacted against progressives who, where identity was concerned, sorely misused their power. This revolt has put the prospect of any real return to centre-ground normality to bed, and sent feminism’s worst nightmare into the White House for a second time. It is hard to imagine a movement more different aesthetically from the Biden or even Obama years than the Trump campaign.
Dropping in to watch a testosterone-fuelled UFC fight, we see Trump and Musk gripping the arm of an enormous boxer beaded with sweat after a victorious bout, thousands of mostly male faces in the background. Trump had walked into the arena to the fist-punchy sounds of Kid Rock’s American Bad Ass. He is friendly with Dana White, the CEO of the UFC, a figure of mass influence credited with mobilising young men to vote for Trump.
Having felt insulted for years by the diktats of the progressive great and good, the anger of men fuelled the rise of alternative media ecosystems – some of which are known as the ‘manosphere’. The manosphere’s most popular platforms are those of YouTube bros like Logan Paul and Theo Von, and wildly beloved podcasters like Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman.
It should come as no surprise that each man chummily bantered with the president-elect during his campaign, sometimes in three-hour sessions. There was very little editing, and hardly a hard-ball question to speak of. The relationship was mutually beneficial, after all. “These guys have an influence on us young guys – we want to be like them when we grow up,” said one 22-year-old fan of Paul and Von. “They’re dominating right now.”
Back to that picture on the jet: four men, all grinning goonishly over their burger boxes and fries, Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson hovering nearly out of frame. Sure, Kamala Harris was disappointing, fluffy, unconvincing and too woke. But it was nice to see a woman in the ring, which felt like progress for America. Do women exist in the top rungs of the Maga world? There are, of course, exceptions, like the appointment of veteran Tulsi Gabbard as head of the intelligence services, or the “ice maiden” Susie Wiles having been appointed as the first female chief of staff.
The relative obscurity of female leaders makes you feel as if they’ve simply been Photoshopped out, not just of Trump’s inner circles but, with Harris’s implosion, out of the American moment itself. Was this what voters wanted?
After all, the Democrats neither scooped up quite enough women, nor appealed to any male base. Harris haemorrhaged the male support the Biden administration had built a few years prior. Richard Reeves, a masculinity researcher, observed that “even my progressive feminist friends were watching the Democratic National Convention and saying: ‘Is there going to be anything for men?’ The Republican National Convention, in contrast, was a carnival of masculinity. The Republicans put out a welcome mat there for men and said: ‘We’re cool with you being guys’.”
Whether directed at women or men, this is an unfortunate message to have to rely on. Demonising men for being men, or white men for being white men, is morally unacceptable, but that doesn’t make me any calmer about extreme machismo dictating the national politics of America.
As Britain powers ahead with yet another female leader of the Conservative Party, who’s sex is hardly commented upon, the view of Trump’s frat-boy America is strange and upsetting. America is both the most advanced and important country on earth, and, by European standards, one of the most backward, too.