Around the time of President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, many conservative voices — and also Mark Zuckerberg, who is apparently trying to win a seat at the conservative cool kids’ lunch table — cheered a return to masculinity. Even The New York Times, in the weeks after the election, announced that this government would be “by bro.”
I don’t believe that masculinity should be policed, just as I don’t believe that femininity should be policed. But turnabout is fair play.
This surprised me. If drag is the exaggerated performance of gender, then Trump’s over-the-top macho business jerk schtick would likely count as a form of “drag.” But I had no idea that Trump’s carnival mirror masculinity represented real masculinity, and that whatever had existed for the previous 248 years of male presidents had faded into something that was not masculinity. Frankly, as a feminist, I’m upset that I missed it.
But given our nation’s much-touted return to real masculinity, I’ve been a little confused by some of the behavior that’s been on display lately. Is this how men were supposed to be acting all along?
For example: Is it manly to become poor?
The reason I ask is because Fox News has tried to spin the president’s reckless attempt to crash the economy like a pre-Wright Brothers air contraption as something that Americans should embrace because it’s an opportunity for men to assert their manliness. Make America Great Depression Again, if you will.
On “The Five,” the show’s besweatered co-host Greg Gutfeld wondered aloud if the now-paused tariffs would offer the economy “the ultimate testosterone boost.” Co-host Jesse Watters cheered the possibility of a return of widespread factory jobs — that may or may not actually happen, years or decades in the future — by declaring that studies have shown working at a computer turns you into a woman.
Is it manly to be bad at math?
I’m curious because after the Trump administration tariffs were announced, many economists were quick to point out that in addition to the fact that “tariffs = bad” is one of the only principles Paul Krugman and the late Milton Friedman would agree on, the formula used to determine individual countries’ tariff rates was seemingly based on a child’s misunderstanding of economics.
The White House released what it claimed was the slightly more complicated formula it had used to determine the rates. But this also revealed a couple of major problems. First, the formula wasn’t even reduced all the way. Second, as the free market and limited-government supporting American Enterprise Institute pointed out, one of the constants in the formula represented the wrong value. Which meant that the numbers spit out by the formula were about four times higher than they should have been, which is a move that manly MAGA men might expect from a DEI hire woman or an eighth grader in remedial algebra, but not from the allegedly meritocracy-based hires in Trump’s circle.
Is it manly to cheat?
Trump and many of his most prominent ride-or-dies are a veritable Mount Rushmore of philanderers. Many well-placed sources have claimed Trump cheats at golf. And now there are suspicions over Trump’s social media message on Wednesday, which said it’s a good time to purchase stocks, and which was followed a short time later by the announcement that Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs would be paused (sorta), leading directly to a stock market surges. If anything nefarious about this chain of events is proved true, this would be a “Scooby-Doo” villain-level insider trading scheme. Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., has called for an investigation into the whole affair, but — no offense to Mr. Schiff — if Jan. 6 wasn’t enough to convince enough Americans that Trump is a crook, I doubt stock market manipulation would.
Is it manly to be thin-skinned?
Is this what supporters meant when they celebrated a return to masculinity? First buddy Elon Musk has crowed that comedy is now legal, but also famously hated Mike Myers’ twitchy “Saturday Night Live” impersonation of him, and also infamously banned people from the website formerly known as Twitter for making jokes about him. And it’s been widely speculated that Barack Obama’s roasting of Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner at least partially inspired the glowering Trump to run for president. (I thought one of the main problems with feminists, according to people who don’t like feminists, is that feminists can’t take a joke at our own expense. Were we the real men all along?) Is it masculine to be vain? Earlier this year, Trump was so offended by a portrait of himself in the Colorado state Capitol that he demanded it be taken down. When Trump was booked in Fulton County, Georgia, in 2023, he listed his height and weight as 6-foot-3 and 215 pounds, about the size of Muhammad Ali in his prime. This was a strange lie to tell, because earlier in his life, Trump listed his height as 6-foot-2 and a simple glance at his then-77-year-old body in golf clothes would indicate that said body is not heavyweight champion-shaped. I don’t believe that masculinity should be policed, just as I don’t believe that femininity should be policed. But turnabout is fair play, and the Republican Party has long been obsessed with gender. They made it a major part of both of Trump’s successful campaigns for president which — lucky for them! — both happened to be against women. If you asked them, Republicans were the party of preserving the gender binary, which called upon men to be providers and protectors and women to be provided for and protected. Well — not all women. Childless cat ladies, gay women, trans women, Black women, immigrant women, unmarried women and poor women were worthy of ire, not protection. What remained in the “worthy women” category were females with political persuasions deemed politically correct by MAGA standards. Trump’s winning campaigns also emphasized that, unlike certain women he was running against, he represented a sort of bygone masculinity that would be resurrected and exalted if only he were to be elected. Men would be back. But, two and a half months of chaos later, maybe we should ask ourselves: Is this what supporters meant when they celebrated a return to masculinity? Is impulsive, poorly thought-out chaos the measure of a man? Is betraying allies to appease imperialist dictators the alphaest of alpha moves? Is forcing women to carry dead fetuses the most effective way of “defending” them? Personally, I’d take whatever the old thing was — and Make Men Act Normal Again.
Erin Gloria Ryan
Erin Ryan is a writer and podcaster. She's the creator, co-host and executive producer of Crooked Media's "Hysteria" podcast and a frequent contributor to other Crooked Media podcasts and video series. She's written for "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," The Daily Beast, Jezebel and other TV shows and publications. 
