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A PARTY OF PRECARIOUS MANHOOD, LED BY A BLITHERING IDIOT  
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Harold Meyerson
July 19, 2024
The American Prospect
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_ Trump’s acceptance speech was a mishmash of self-love,
protestations of toughness, and prefabricated lies. _

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The problem with Joe Biden, sometimes, is that you can’t hear him.
The problem with Donald Trump is that you can.

The facade of a disciplined appeal to the better angels of our nature
that Republican convention planners worked so assiduously to convey
this week (interrupted only sporadically by Big Lies) was shattered
last night by its standard-bearer’s acceptance speech. It’s not
just that Donald Trump’s normal mode of discourse is a stream of
consciousness; it’s that the consciousness he streams is a mental
trash heap consisting of the lashings-out of a wounded ego, the
defensive self-love of a furious narcissist, the concocted lies of a
serial fabulist, and the random droppings of the tabloid far-right.

But give Trump credit where credit is due. His interminable
speech—which played like 40 years in an oratorical desert—managed
to bring down a convention poised to explode in joy at his appearance
and anticipation of an easy victory.

The Democrats, of course, have their own problem with their leader’s
public performances. But at least they have the good sense to be on
the verge of yanking the nomination from their sadly enfeebled
president. No such sentiment is apparent in Republican ranks, though
you have to wonder what the new breed of MAGA policy wonks and the
venture capitalists of Silicon Valley now funding Trump’s campaign
were thinking as Trump wandered endlessly through the clotted
cesspools of his mind. Or imagine what Usha Vance might have said to
her husband J.D. once they left the arena: “You’re going to be
vice president to _that _moron?!” (Those are my imagined words, to
be clear, but does anyone want to bet she didn’t say something like
that?)

Trump’s speech was so appalling that it totally eclipsed its bizarre
lead-up. He was preceded to the podium by an aging Hulk Hogan, who
visibly struggled to rip off his T-shirt to reveal the Trump shirt
beneath, brought on by a performance by Kid Rock, and actually
introduced by Dana White, the man who brought cage fighting into the
American home. Both Hogan and White said that Trump was the toughest
man they’d ever met, though after the 92 minutes of mental
flabbiness that Trump then unleashed, one was forced to conclude that
both White and the Hulkster had lived lives of complete solitude.

It was actually with Trump’s ad-libbed expressions of gratitude to
these worthies, and admiration for their prowess, that his speech
began to go off the rails. He paused to note how good White’s
introduction had been, then rhapsodized about how Hogan had once
lifted a 350-pound ring opponent over his head and slammed him to the
canvas. Only then did he remember to acknowledge his pick for vice
president, pointing to Vance sitting with his dumbstruck wife in the
Trump family’s box.

Then he was off to the free-association races, recounting the
subpoenas his sons had received and linking them, through some
indecipherable flowchart, to “Crazy Nancy Pelosi.”

Eventually, Trump got around to praising strongmen a lot more
dangerous than Hogan and White. He proudly cited the praise that
Hungary’s Victor Orbán, “a very tough man,” had showered on him
when he said of Trump that “everybody was afraid of him.” After
basking in that validation of his own presumed toughness, Trump spoke
fondly of North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, next to whom Orbán is a
Jeffersonian democrat.

Convention planners had featured images and stories of Trump’s
softer side—the family man, the doting grandpa—to win over women
voters who wanted to vote for him but found him crass, boorish, and
inclined to violence. At the same time, though, they doubled down on
targeting largely working-class men who feared and hated the
feminization of social life and the niceties of bourgeois propriety
and hypocrisy. These guys were either already in Trump’s corner or
just too alienated to bother to vote. These guys were also a
disproportionate slice of the electorate in the crucial swing states
of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, so the planners particularly
emphasized what has always been Trump’s fundamental appeal: He’s
“one tough SOB,” as Teamsters President Sean O’Brien called him
on the convention’s opening night, and just as pissed at the decline
in status of blue-collar masculinity as they were. Hence the trotting
out of icons of hypermasculinity to bring Trump onto the stage.

Last month, I devoted an article
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a study that had been published in 2020 in the _Personality and
Social Psychology Bulletin_, to which my attention had been drawn by
one of Tom Edsall’s _New York Times _columns. The authors, I wrote

sought out the Google Trends search data for the 12 months immediately
preceding the 2016 election for erectile dysfunction, penis size,
penis enlargement, hair loss, hair plugs, testosterone, and
Viagra—gender-affirming care, of a sort—and labeled them as
indices of Precarious Manhood. They produced a map of the United
States showing where those Google searches were most common
(Appalachia and the Deep South). And by running the standard
statistical regression analyses, they found a strong predictive
correlation between the rates of those Google searches and the votes
for Donald Trump in 2016 (though, of course, those were also votes
against Hillary Clinton).

They found the same correlation between those “precarious manhood”
findings and votes for Republican House candidates in 2018, but no
such correlations in the two preceding presidential elections (2008
and 2012), in which the Republicans nominated John McCain and then
Mitt Romney. It was only once the party had become Donald Trump’s
that this correlation appeared.

But there are other indices of “precarious manhood” that don’t
relate to sexual potency—most importantly, I think, the increasing
disappearance of jobs requiring work with one’s hands in
construction, transportation, and manufacturing that were sufficiently
remunerative and steady that they could support a family. As such work
became more mechanized and as unionization declined, such jobs became
scarce. In the late 1980s, the great sociologist William Julius Wilson
documented the decline of such jobs among Black men, and the
corresponding rise of children raised by single mothers due to the
disappearance of what he termed “marriageable men.” Since then,
that decline has spread to the white working class as well, leading to
the significant reduction in the rate of working-class marriages
documented by Andrew Cherlin in his important study _Labor’s Love
Lost_.

Democrats and Republicans have both responded to these changes, but in
crucially different ways. The idea of reviving American manufacturing
is common to both parties, with the signal difference that in the
Trump presidency, it took the form of talk and in the Biden
presidency, it took the form of action. For all of Trump’s blather
about getting America to build again, he never got an infrastructure
bill through Congress even when Republicans controlled both houses.
The investments he proposed were so piddling that the legislation
never even took shape. By contrast, two of Biden’s signature
achievements—the infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act
(which chiefly consisted of billions in tax credits for new factories
making electric vehicles and other green products)—have led to
the first major increase
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factory construction in several decades. In 2023, spending on building
new factories increased by 73 percent over spending the previous year.
Moreover, the Biden administration has favored projects that pay their
workers union-scale wages or commit to not opposing workers’ efforts
to unionize—conditions that never even crossed the minds of
officials in Trump’s administration, much less Trump himself.

That’s all the more reason why the MAGA movement is so reliant on
the cult of toughness and hypermasculinity: Delivering nothing
that’s tangible, it compensates with violent rhetoric. That’s a
task that’s made easy, as violent rhetoric is Trump’s mother
tongue. The plan was for him to keep that under wraps last night, to
stick to the denunciation of divisive politics and the pledge to seek
unity that was inscribed on the teleprompter. Trump hewed to that for
the first 20 minutes, but he couldn’t sustain it. Boys will be boys
and Trump will be Trump—a malevolent deranged geezer for all to see.

Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect.

Used with the permission. The American Prospect, Prospect.org, 2024.
All rights reserved. Click here
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