The Man Behind the Curtain
MAGA’s version of masculinity is all about domination and grievance. The man marketing it can barely keep his eyes open.
Susan J. Demas is Lincoln Square’s Executive Editor and a 25-year journalism veteran. Subscribe to her Substack.
America has a masculinity problem, and it’s not the one Donald Trump is selling.
For decades, the definition of manly fitness for public office was fairly simple: military service. George H.W. Bush flew 58 combat missions in World War II. John McCain endured five years of torture in a North Vietnamese prison and refused early release. Even George W. Bush, who used his family connections to join the Texas National Guard, understood that military service was a baseline expectation if you wanted to be taken seriously as a commander-in-chief.
Bill Clinton got battered for avoiding the draft. Barack Obama never served. The cultural expectation was so entrenched that Democrats spent years on the defensive about it.
And then along came Donald Trump and his five draft deferments. He mocked POWs, reportedly called fallen soldiers “suckers and losers,” and has a profound contempt for anyone in uniform who doesn’t flatter him. And suddenly, the Republican Party decided that none of that mattered anymore. What mattered was bravado, dominance, and rage. What mattered was the performance.
That’s the tell. What Trump sells isn’t masculinity. It’s the performance of masculinity. And there’s a crucial difference.
The MAGA version of manhood isn’t defined by what you are. It’s defined by what you’re not. You’re not a woman. You’re not trans. You’re not an immigrant. You’re not Black or brown or woke or weak. Masculinity, under this framework, is an act of exclusion dressed up as identity — a zero-sum game where your worth as a man goes up precisely as someone else’s humanity goes down.
This is why they attack trans people, even children, with such unrelenting ferocity. This is why Roe had to fall. This is why their immigration raids are performed for cameras (sometimes with Dr. Phil embedded, for some reason).
It’s not governance. It’s theater designed to give a lot of men — those who aren’t billionaires, who didn’t get Trump’s tax cuts, who are now watching their grocery bills climb and their job prospects narrow — a false sense of power and belonging in a world that increasingly feels like it’s slipping away from them.
Back in the early 2000s and 2010s, there was the Judd Apatow era of buddy comedies with relatable guys like Paul Rudd, Will Ferrell, and Jonah Hill. Sure, the movies were criticized, often fairly, for casting women as an afterthought — almost always as archetypes like unattainable hotties or nagging wives. They weren’t perfect and could be (lovably) dumb. But embedded in them was something genuine: the idea that male friendship had value, that men could be vulnerable, funny, and a little bit lost. Whether they were playing video games or road tripping, guys were able to talk and have a real connection. That wasn’t toxic — it was human.
What’s replaced it is the UFC cage on the White House lawn, courtesy of a man who two dozen women have accused of being a sexual predator and whose name is all over the Epstein files.
That’s not about connection. That’s about men dominating other men while an 80-year-old president watches from a throne he built on the taxpayers’ dime. The homoerotic subtext of all this is so thick you could cut it — Trump rhapsodizes about how handsome other men are, talks about his cabinet members being “from central casting,” and has a soft spot for Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals. Just this week, he weirdly reminisced about his first meeting with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi: “He was in a hotel and I met him. We fell in love, deeply in love ... we didn’t know each other before that. We had great chemistry, and I stayed twice as long as I was supposed to.”
His allies would savage Democrats for far less — just look at what they’re doing to Democratic Texas U.S. Senate nominee James Talarico. The seminary student has a girlfriend, but Republicans are calling him gay anyway since apparently that’s the worst thing they can fathom in the year 2026.
Ken Paxton’s election night speech was essentially a recitation of gay jokes and references to Talarico’s supposed effeminacy. Fox News creeper Jesse Watters slammed him as a “gay vegan” (and then added he was “not gay and not vegan, for the record.”) Stephen Miller falsely posted that Democrats had “nominated their first transgender Senate candidate” (and then got his feefees hurt and sent his wife out to defend him when Democrats fired back on social media with: “shut up you ugly fuck.”)
That’s the state of MAGA discourse in 2026.
Now let’s talk about what the man actually marketing all this looks like.
Trump’s speeches are decidedly low energy these days. He disappears from public without explanation for a week at a time. He’s now made three trips to Walter Reed in 13 months — which has raised serious questions from medical experts.
The White House revealed last year that Trump had been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency after photos of his swollen ankles at the FIFA World Club Cup made the rounds. His right hand shows persistent bruising, often covered with thick makeup or a bandage, which the White House attributed to frequent handshaking and aspirin use (sure, Jan.) He’s appeared to fall asleep during any number of public events, which he irascibly denies, insisting at one point that he just closed his eyes because the meeting “got pretty boring.“ “I didn’t sleep,” he said. “I just closed them because I wanted to get the hell outta here.”
When you’re explaining, you’re losing.
This year, Trump had 22 medical specialists assess him for a single physical — nearly double the number from his previous checkup, and more than any president on record. The White House said they had “nothing to hide.” They also declined to name which physicians saw him, initially said he’d received an MRI and then walked it back to a CT scan, and couldn’t explain why he needed a second full physical within 13 months.
This is the man selling you the UFC cage. This is the man whose bravado is so thunderous, whose anger is so operatic, that the press corps spends its time chasing his tweets popping the Pope rather than asking who exactly were those 22 doctors and what were they looking for.
The brazenness, as I’ve written before, is the point. The noise is the strategy. If you’re loud enough, if you’re angry enough, if you put a fighting cage on the White House lawn and invite cameras and make everyone argue about Joe Rogan’s stubby tie, nobody looks at the swollen ankles. Nobody asks why the man who spent years calling Joe Biden “Sleepy Joe” keeps having to explain why his eyes were shut.
Consider what happened in March, when six service members killed in Trump’s Iran war came home in flag-draped coffins at Dover Air Force Base. Trump stood there wearing a $55 branded “USA” cap — his own merchandise — and didn’t remove it. No American president has ever worn a baseball cap at a dignified transfer. The man who told us he was a warrior president, who mocked McCain for being captured, stood at Dover in a campaign hat while six families buried their children, and signed an unconditional surrender to Iran this week at Versailles.
That’s the masculinity being sold.
Here’s what the men drawn to this performance actually get out of it.
Not lower prices at the pump — inflation is at 4.2% and rising. Not job security — Trump’s tariffs are hammering the industries that employ them. Not dignity — they’re being asked to cheer for a man whose entire theory of masculinity is that their worth depends on someone else having less.
What they get is the feeling of being in the club. The sense that they belong to something bigger than themselves. The dopamine hit of shared contempt for the right enemies.
That’s real, and Democrats who dismiss it are making a mistake.
But here’s what’s also real: the club doesn’t pay out. The billionaires got the tax cuts. Trump and his family got the crypto deals, the ballroom and the arch and the birthday party on the South Lawn. The men who showed up to the UFC fight in their MAGA hats got to watch other men bloody each other while soldiers stood at attention in the heat.
The man at the top of this pyramid is 80 years old. Physicians are flagging behavioral red flags they consider more troubling than the physical ones. He sleeps in meetings and then tells you he didn’t. He needs 22 doctors to examine him and tells you everything is perfect. He has his signature put on money and only followed a court order to pry his name off the Kennedy Center in the dead of night when no one could see.
Masculinity, the real kind, has never been about domination. Ask George H.W. Bush, who bailed out of a burning plane over the Pacific at 20 years old. Ask John McCain, who refused his own freedom if it meant abandoning his fellow prisoners of war. Ask Joe Schwarz, a Michigan Republican congressman who voted against the gay marriage ban because it was wrong, knowing it would cost him his seat, and didn’t blink.
That’s what it looks like when a man understands that there’s something greater than himself.
What Trump has built is something else entirely — a funhouse mirror that makes working-class men feel powerful while making billionaires rich, built on the bones of every institution he’s broken, and held up by a performance so loud and so ubiquitous that nobody notices the man behind the curtain can barely stay awake.
Democrats are going to have to reckon with why the performance worked on a key bloc of voters they used to win. That’s a real and necessary conversation. But it starts with being honest about what’s actually being sold — and who’s actually paying for it.
The Tradwife Trap: Sourdough, Silicon Valley, and the Far-Right War on Women's Independence
The Turning Point USA Women’s Leadership Summit this month featured selfie stations, magenta smoke machines, and free Pilates classes. A hype squad waved signs in the aisles to get the young female crowd pumped before speakers hit the stage. Vendors sold Christian lip tints and bracelet stacks. Between breakout sessions, attendees posed for photos against backdrops designed to make the whole thing look like a Coachella fever dream.
Yeah, the Great and Powerful OZ. I often find myself thinking about how our notions of power are, like those projected by the Kansas con man, more or less all hat and no wizard, like all the autocratic know-it-all and warrior tropes we've dragged forward from the time when making war was the major concern of our rulers. That was a world when the male members of that caste spent their boyhoods learning to wield deadly weapons because kill or be killed was the rule. The movies and video games we make now have carried along these stereotypes: a battle between hulks is just so much more 'cinematic' than watching a guy bent over a microscope trying to unfurl the mysteries of the human genome.
Then there is all the flash associated with hitting, kicking, tossing and catching balls in pro sports. Plus the punching and body-slamming extravaganza we're live-streaming now. My not quite six year old grandson knows all the pro wrestlers by name, heaven help us. And his parents are both educated professionals. At least some sports have moved us further away from the conflation of muscular strength and brutality.
But what Trump and his enablers have done is to amplify and weaponize our outdated notions of manhood by adding virulent strains of misogyny into the mix. Not that equating of 'girly' with wimpy hasn't been with us for an equally long time, but there seems to be a darker, more violent and demeaning edge to that now. As well as a glorification of sadism.
What you note about the anxiety many men feel about role loss and economic insecurity surely contributes, too, but doesn't it seem to you that sadistic and demeaning acts toward women and 'weaker' men are prominent aspects of Trump's character? OMG we see and hear about him 24/7/365. So maybe he's like a one of those dire talismans from Tolkien World. And if our POTUS is Sauron, maybe we need to elect a president and vice-president who're a lot more like Frodo and Samwise.
Great write up. There is the essence of the problem. We have voted in someone who sees everything done in life as a performance. He decides on what each character should look like and then gets the trappings. For instance a president has gold in his imperial palace. However, he is so poorly educated he does not know the difference between a democracy and a dictatorship. All he knows is that the bad boys have really cool things and get big tanks. He cannot understand what quiet diplomacy is or what allies are. They are not performing loudly so he does not know what they do. We have to start educating voters about these differences so they can tell the difference between reality tv and real governance and they stop voting in a spectacle instead of a democratic government.