Are they gender-shaming Trump at The Atlantic? I'm reading "Donald Trump, the Most Unmanly President."

By Tom Nichols. Subtitle: "Why don’t the president’s supporters hold him to their own standard of masculinity?"

I haven't read this yet, but from the title and subtitle, I'm guessing that The Atlantic thinks it's okay to do this because it's not judging Trump by its own "standard of masculinity." It's fine with all sorts of gender expression and fluidity and all that complex stuff that elite folk believe or pretend to believe in.  But it conjures up an idea of the Trump supporters, attributes troglodyte gender attitudes toward them, and then tsks over their hypocrisy? Why aren't THEY living up to their own standards?

Okay, let's read:

Why do working-class white men—the most reliable component of Donald Trump’s base—support someone who is, by their own standards, the least masculine man ever to hold the modern presidency?...

Well, I was sort of right. The author, Tom Nichols, tells us he knows these people he is stereotyping because he grew up around men like that — "men whose fathers and grandfathers came from a culture that looks down upon lying, cheating, and bragging, especially about sex or courage." But it's not just those gender-neutral virtues:

"There has never been an American president as spiritually impoverished as Donald Trump...."

"... Trump is a spiritual black hole. He has no ability to transcend himself by so much as an emotional nanometer.... He represents the ultimate triumph of a materialist mindset. He has no ability to understand anything that is not an immediate tactile or visual experience, no sense of continuity with other human beings, and no imperatives more important than soothing the barrage of signals emanating from his constantly panicked and confused autonomic system.... In his daily coronavirus briefings, Trump lumbers to the podium and pulls us into his world: detached from reality, unable to feel any emotions but anger and paranoia. Each time we watch, Trump’s spiritual poverty increases our own, because for the duration of these performances, we are forced to live in the same agitated, immediate state that envelops him.... Each of these presidential therapy sessions corrodes us until the moment when the president finally shambles away in a fog of muttered slogans and paranoid sentence fragments.... We are all living with him in the moment and neglecting the thing that makes us human beings instead of mindless fish swimming in circles."

Such are the entirely subjective ruminations of Tom Nichols (author of "The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters")(in The Atlantic).

I watch the briefings every day, and my subjective experience is nothing like that. I don't feel myself dragged into soullessness or losing touch with reality.

So who's crazy here?

Trump, Nichols, and Althouse

Trump and Althouse

Trump and Nichols

Just Nichols

None of them. All 3 are sane humans, expressing themselves in their own way.

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AND: The poll results are very clear: