The Self-Made-Up Man: What Motivates Strongmen

It's an old story: Pathetically insecure and cowardly men like Donald Trump are the ones who pretend to be tough guys.

Illustration by Riley Levine

When I saw Donald Trump hanging a medal on Sylvester Stallone as a Kennedy Center honoree, another image immediately came to mind. In November 2019, Trump tweeted an image of his head Photoshopped on the body of Stallone as Rocky Balboa.

A major component of the made-up ideal of masculinity in America came to revolve around being self-sufficient: a “self-made man.” But those who pose as strongmen are self-made-up men.

The fake image of Trump with Stallone’s body is a picture-imperfect example of the self-made-up man that Trump, Pete Hegseth, and so many other pathetic fake men are.

Throughout history, men who are afflicted with serious masculine insecurity have boasted about their “manliness” and how they are bigger and better than other men. Bigger in their sexual organs, of course, but also in other ways. And those are constant refrains of Donald Trump and his “angry white man” followers:

“It’s just unbelievably frustrating when you’re continuously told it’s not big enough,” press secretary Sean Spicer said on the second day of Trump’s presidency in 2017. It was simultaneously a perfect example of a Freudian slip and a revealing window into both the twisted mind of Trump and what has twisted the history of the world.

Psychologist Mary L. Trump, Donald’s niece, said in 2023 that many people who follow him don’t identify with his “‘strength,’ his ‘macho’—that’s a ridiculous word to use in his context.” Rather, “they identify with his weakness, with the fact that this guy’s a loser … and they identify with the fact that he gets away with everything. … They love who he hates.”

Pointing to her uncle’s deep insecurity, she says, “This is a man who knows, on an unconscious level, that he is absolutely nothing of what he claims to be. He knows—and feels this very deeply, that he’s unworthy, that he’s unaccomplished, and he’s terrible.”

Here is a portion of one of Trump’s rants on “Truth Social” earlier this month. I have placed in bold the key words in this tossed salad:

I go out of my way to do long, thorough, and very boring Medical Examinations at the Great Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, seen and supervised by top doctors, all of whom have given me PERFECT Marks — Some have even said they have never seen such Strong Results. I do these Tests because I owe it to our Country. In addition to the Medical, I have done something that no other President has done, on three separate occasions, the last one being recently, by taking what is known as a Cognitive Examination, something which few people would be able to do very well, including those working at The New York Times, and I ACED all three of them in front of large numbers of doctors and experts, most of whom I do not know. I have been told that few people have been able to “ace” this Examination and, in fact, most do very poorly, which is why many other Presidents have decided not to take it at all. Despite all of this, the time and work involved, The New York Times, and some others, like to pretend that I am “slowing up,” am maybe not as sharp as I once was, or am in poor physical health, knowing that it is not true, and knowing that I work very hard, probably harder than I have ever worked before. I will know when I am “slowing up,” but it’s not now! After all of the work I have done with Medical Exams, Cognitive Exams, and everything else, I actually believe it’s seditious, perhaps even treasonous, for The New York Times, and others, to consistently do FAKE reports in order to libel and demean “THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.” They are true Enemies of the People, and we should do something about it.

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Now I happen to know from unpleasant personal experience what it means when multiple physicians are called in to see what is happening with a patient. During my long history of eye problems, I was being examined in 2005 at the Jules Stein Eye Institute at UCLA. The doctor discovered a rare condition in one of my eyes he described as “epithelial ingrowth through the incompetent superior limbal incision.” It was so unusual that he called in all the other physicians and interns to look at it., saying, “You may never see this again.”

THAT is what having “large numbers of doctors and experts called in to observe Trump’s cognitive examination indicates. Esteemed ladies and gentlemen, you may never see another cognitive test like this one!

Or, as Trump puts it, “they have never seen such Strong Results. He is, as always, using assertions of strength to cover what he knows to be his pathetic weakness.

Everything Trump says is what I term “Mirrorspeak.” But should he charge me, as he does the New York Times, with sedition and treason for speaking the truth about and demeaning “THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES” [it’s wonderful that he places those words about himself in quotation marks; I usually do the same], I will repeat the 1765 words of Patrick Henry, “If this be treason, make the most of it!”

Thank you for your attention to this matter. MAKE AMERICA AMERICA AGAIN!

Author and historian Robert S. McElvaine writes the Musings & Amusings Substack. Read the original column here.

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