"The uniformed body crystallizes all these associations we have. It makes your chest look broader, your posture straighter, your shoulders stronger. It becomes shorthand for words like manly, strong, brave, dominant."

Said Paul Achter, "an associate professor of rhetoric at the University of Richmond, who has written on 'military chic,'" quoted in "Why Trump Loves a Man in Uniform/As thousands of soldiers prepare to march in President Trump’s military parade, what exactly will we see?" (NYT).

The article is by Vanessa Friedman, who writes that, in a military parade, "the uniformed body is part of a mass — denatured and subsumed into a whole — and particularly when the parade in question does not signify the end of an actual conflict." "Instead of honoring the sacrifice of individuals... it becomes a moment of sheer pageantry dedicated to the glory of the state or the head of state...."

Quoting Achter again: "It’s difficult to see this and not see Leni Riefenstahl" (that is, Hitler, as presented in "Triumph of the Will").

When it comes to expression about the military, is there some reason to prefer the rhetoric of "sacrifice" over that of "glory"? A parade is a form of expression. It's visual speech, visual propaganda. Can you tell whether the theme is sacrifice or glory? Is it inherent in the nature of a military parade that it will say: glory?

"Errol Musk, the father of Elon, has described the feud between his son and Donald Trump as 'over the top,' likening it to a clash between 'gorillas' fighting for dominance."

"Musk, 79, advised his 'alpha' son, 59, to accept that the president was the more dominant of the two and would 'win this round.' 'In any successful group of animals, whether gorillas, elephants or human beings, the dominant males will always fight for dominance,' Musk said, predicting that an eruption of bitter exchanges between two of the world’s most powerful men 'would now fizzle out.' Musk added: 'The problem you get with really good quality people is that the men all think they should be the general. They will have to sort it out and because Trump is the one who was elected, Elon is going to have to accept he is not going to be the general.... Trump isn’t vengeful. He will win this round with Elon and not hold it against him. A big person can forgive easily, only small people can’t. Things have gone over the top, but this is the situation when alphas fight it out. I’ve told Elon he has said his part, but now he must allow things to calm down — and I hope he will.'"

The London Times reports.

ADDED: Remember this:

"'Duck Dynasty' was a simple entertainment, but it was also a complicated mash-up of several of the most popular TV genres of its time."

"It had some connection to 'hicksploitation' reality shows like 'Here Comes Honey Boo Boo' and to series like 'Deadliest Catch' that celebrated people who worked with their hands. It also had the structure and beats of a mockumentary sitcom. Like 'Modern Family,' it often ended with voice-overs summing up the episode’s themes and lessons.... Like 'The Office,' it structured stories around staffers goofing around the warehouse and cooking up schemes like flooding the loading dock to create a duck pond. But there was a key difference.... It was about work, family and faith — a typical episode would close with a prayer over a meal.... 'Duck Dynasty' was affectionate for backwoods ways and tradition.... It gave the patriarch Phil plenty of airtime to sermonize about manhood and encourage his grandsons to marry 'a meek, gentle, kind-spirited country girl.'.... Phil’s opinions came out more blatantly and less telegenically, however, in a 2013 GQ interview, in which he called gay sex a sin and insisted that southern Black farm laborers were happy in Jim Crow-era Louisiana. ... A&E suspended him from the series.The punishment seemed, at the time, like the affirmation of a new cultural order.... The Trump 2016 campaign was in many ways a successful appeal to voters like Phil Robertson, who believed that their views were being silenced, their icons canceled, their traditions trampled, their beliefs insulted.... [Trump] promised... to restore the rich and meaningful lifestyle of their ancestors...."

From "'Duck Dynasty' Is Coming Back to a Changed America/The family reality comedy, being revived on A&E, was a lighthearted entertainment — that anticipated a decade’s worth of cultural politics." (NYT).

The article is about the revival of the show. Phil Robertson does not appear in it, and, as we talked about here, he died a few days ago. 

Asked the famous question "What is a woman?," Trump does one of his weaves.

Yesterday, in the Oval Office:

"Well, it's sort of easy to answer for me, because a woman is somebody that can have a baby under certain circumstances. She has a quality. A woman is a person who's much smarter than a man, I've always found. A woman is a person that doesn't give a man even a chance of success. And a woman's a person that in many cases has been treated very badly, because I think that, uh, what happens with this crazy, this crazy issue of men being able to play in women's sports is just ridiculous and very unfair to women and very demeaning to women. And that's got to be about a 94% — I read today — it was a 94% issue, and I watched the other day, I watched congressman, Democrat Congressman, fighting for the fact that men should be allowed to compete, essentially, in women's sports, and I say, I hope they keep that going, because they'll never win another election. That's a big deal. But women are basically incredible people do so much for our country, and we love, we love our women, and we're going to take care of our women."

That's a lot of words, but if you had to boil it down to one word, I think you'd have to go with: paternalistic. The first thing he thought of was the capacity to have babies. He veered into abstractly praising women and digging into the transgender question, but he ended with the most basic expression of paternalism: We love our women, and we're going to take care of our women.

Things that get my "Trump's masculinity" tag.

I didn't take this interesting photograph, but the person who did doesn't want to be named. The location is the Galleria in Houston, Texas. Closeup:

The size and positioning of the eagle make me uneasy. Does the eagle have large talons?

"It wasn’t planned. That wasn’t two coaches throwing guys over and saying 'This is happening' — none of that happened. That was as organic as it gets."

Said Jon Cooper, the coach for Canada, quoted in The London Times:

Here's the video at YouTube. Judge for yourself. Political theater? Is this about Trump — Trump and his tariffs and his fifty-oneness?

Meanwhile, Trump himself was at The Daytona 500 and — with his lovely tiny little granddaughter — the sports-related masculine political theater was not brutishly macho but nobly patriarchal:

ADDED: The oversized MAGA hat emphasizes the tininess of the granddaughter, and it made me think of this image of Elon Musk in a giant hat:

pic.twitter.com/nhRCtyA3wj

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 7, 2025

You can see the hat as it is — large — or you can perceive the optical illusion that Musk is a tiny person, a child. Musk famously tweeted: "I love @realDonaldTrump as much as a straight man can love another man." And I've been thinking the love is a boy's love for the father he never had. Musk real father was — as Musk tells it — "a terrible human being" who has done "almost every evil thing you could possibly think of." The giant hat is a bid to be seen as a boy, to be loved by a father.

8 things about this Maureen Dowd column, "Who Will Stand Up to Trump at High Noon?"

Here's the column.

Here are the 8 things I want to say about it:

1. The headline refers to a Western movie where "high noon" is the time for a shooting duel. To say "Who Will Stand Up to Trump at High Noon?" is to generate an image of shooting Trump. Even if Trump had not been shot (and targeted by a second assassination attempt), it is wrong to say something that either is or can be mistaken for an invitation to shoot the President!

2. Under the headline is a photograph from the movie "Shane," and Maureen Dowd discusses the movie "Shane," which she saw when she was quite young. She never mentions "High Noon." I guess Westerns are interchangeable to NYT headline writers. 

3. "High Noon" had a villain and a hero and so did "Shane." Good guys and bad guys. Binary. 

4. I remember when Democrats loved to talk about how nuanced they were in their sophisticated thinking,

"The boys in our liberal school are different now that Trump has won."

This is an article by "Anonymous" in The Guardian, ostensibly written by a girl who is a senior in a high school in New York's Hudson Valley — a "mostly liberal" place, we're told. She purports to be capable of perceiving and reporting how boys have changed since 10 days ago. I have no idea how accurate any of this is, but I'm interested in the text that was published, which says something about The Guardian's attitude, if nothing else:

When we walked into school on the morning of 6 November, we exchanged quick glances with the other girls in our social circle – looks filled with uncertainty and dread about the future.... [A]s we walked to our first period classes... we noticed a very different attitude among our male peers. Subtle high-fives were exchanged and remarks about the impending success of the next four years were whispered around. It didn’t make much sense.... 

"Is this rightward drift among young men simply a short-lived, Trump-inspired episode or a more permanent transformation?"

"The answer lies partly in Ms. Harris’s ability to connect with and motivate young voters as the campaign nears its end.... But to win more votes from young men, Ms. Harris must address their fears head-on and present a bold vision that speaks to their desire for purpose and strength.... Ms. Harris needs to go big.... Ms. Harris should make a sweeping national call to both military and civilian service — name it the Generation Z Compact to Rebuild and Renew America. Such a plan would offer a sense of identity, community and patriotism, while providing economic stability and skill-building — things many young men feel they are missing...."

Writes John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, in "Trump’s Bro-Whispering Could Cost Democrats Too Many Young Men" (NYT).

It's a little late for that sort of thing!

"On one side, there’s the enlightened maleness embodied by Harris’s vice-presidential pick and her husband, Doug Emhoff."

"These are the good progressive dads... the 'nice men of the left' who do guy things like coach football but also manifest liberal and feminist virtues.... Then there is the other model, the dark side of the Y chromosome: the toxic masculinity of Donald Trump, the anti-cat-lady conservatism of JD Vance.... But has liberalism perfected a model of modern masculinity while conservative culture slouches somewhere far behind? I’m skeptical.... First, I would have thought that by now liberals would be hesitant about proclaiming the special personal virtues of the male feminist, the enlightened pro-choice dude. After Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer and Harvey Weinstein, after MeToo case studies too numerous to count, surely we can say that sleaze percolates on the left and right alike....  Second... a strong, religiously motivated commitment to marriage and family — [is] not necessarily... anti-feminist.... [N]eo-traditional households actually show relatively egalitarian patterns of burden-sharing between spouses and strong paternal involvement in child rearing...."

Writes Ross Douthat, in "Masculinity Is on the Ballot" (NYT).

Douthat expresses skepticism about the generalizations and caricatures on both sides. I'll just add that feminism is dysfunctional if it doesn't stand apart from partisan politics. 

ADDED: I interact with Grok again:

 

I laughed a lot, and I'm not exactly sure why, but Meade didn't think it was funny at all, so I tried again:

That's only funny for being a terrible failure at understanding the prompt. Where's the dadness? Where's the feminist virtue? Why is he in a stadium? The first picture was funnier.

"Richard Hofstadter identified a paranoid style of American politics in the 1960s. His student, Christopher Lasch..."

"... called out the narcissism of American society in the 1970s and ’80s that we now know metastasized into Trump. As a card-carrying historian (who studied under Lasch), I am going to give it shot. The contemporary Republican Party acts as if it has a histrionic personality disorder. Their election playbook speaks directly to type: create a straw man/woman of your opponent, throw corrupt corporate and big PAC money to attack it, and then lie, fearmonger and, well, be histrionic to win votes. Nothing about the truth matters. If the opponent has nothing to distort or take out of context, make something up. Act on rash decisions. Rationalize your choices, no matter how mistaken. Above all, play the victim and win at all costs."

Wrote Tracy Mitrano, last July, in "The Republican Party Has a Histrionic Personality Disorder/And the impact on national security is serious" (Inside Higher Ed). Here's Mitrano's Ballotpedia page. She's a Democrat, so she's not explicitly making the larger point like Hofstadter and her mentor Lasch. But it seems obvious to me: We see histrionics across the board in American politics.

I found that year-old piece after wondering why people diagnose Trump with narcissism, when his personality seems much more like what the DSM calls "histrionic personality disorder." 

Here's what the NIH has to say about HPD:

"It is a violent spectacle, blood-spattered, brutish and brawny."

"A fighter from California named Kevin Holland and a fighter from Poland named Michal Oleksiejczuk beat each other to a pulp inches from Mr. Trump’s face. The former president watched with interest as the American got the Pole onto the ground, secured his right arm and appeared to yank it out of its socket. ([Dana White, the chief executive of the U.F.C.] described it as an 'absolutely beautiful' moment in his post-match commentary: 'The arm clearly, at the very least, dislocated and possibly snapped,' he said.) Victorious, Holland emerged from the octagonal ring, walked over to Mr. Trump, bent down and shook hands, leaned in to hear the former president tell him something and clapped his left hand on Mr. Trump’s right shoulder...."

From "After Verdict, Trump Revels in Embrace of His Most Avid Base: Male Fans/The former president’s appearance at a U.F.C. fight in Newark on Saturday night showcased his hypermasculine appeal, and his defiance" (NYT).

This is just a little article about Trump going to the UFC fight right after the 34-felonies conviction. I had to look elsewhere for more on the broader topic of Trump's "hypermasculine appeal." A sprinkling of what my search turned up:

"Young men are not as troubled by the chaotic and divisive style of Trump, while young women want people to be respected including themselves, want stability..."

"... and are very concerned about division and the potential for violence. Young women think Trump’s style is an embarrassment abroad, a poor role model for their children, and dangerous for the country. Younger men especially blue collar have a grudging respect for his strength and 'tell it like it is' attitude."

Wrote the Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, quoted by Thomas B. Edsall, in "A Huge Gender Gap Is Emerging Among Young Voters" (NYT).

"Now, some of Trump’s longtime advisers are even urging him to continuously make reference to the size of DeSantis’ penis..."

"... telling him such insults could stick with GOP primary voters and mess with his rival’s head, two sources with knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone. Trump’s team discussed having Trump refer to the Florida governor as 'Tiny D,' Bloomberg reported in March. While some understood it as a shot at DeSantis’ height, the sobriquet was specifically intended to suggest diminutive genitalia, four people familiar with the topic say. 'He’s also short but … yes of course it’s about his penis, that’s why we’re doing it,' says a source involved in the effort to get the former president to use the line of attack against DeSantis."

From "Oh-So-Mature Trump Aides Want Him to Focus on DeSantis’ Penis/The 2024 GOP primary is headed for the dumbest places imaginable" (Rolling Stone).

Over in New York Magazine, there's an article called "Donald Trump’s Nasty Ron DeSantis Nicknames, Ranked," and "Tiny D" is listed as #3 (after "Meatball Ron" and "Rob"):

"Lindsey Graham, who says that Trump is a 'handful,' a word usually leveled at spirited women, is going to Mar-a-Lago this weekend to golf with his sovereign lord..."

"... and try to explain the importance of the 2022 midterms to Trump’s legacy. But Trump doesn’t give a damn, except how he can use the midterms for revenge or self-promotion.... By coddling Trump on his election fakery, the Republicans gave it so much oxygen, it led to tragedy. Trump, the supreme ingrate, wasn’t grateful for McConnell’s nay vote. He promptly composed a masterpiece of spleen, a statement threatening to primary Mitch’s candidates and calling him 'a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack' who lacks political wisdom, skill and personality.... Ted Cruz’s truckling may be the most jarring, given Trump’s attacks on Cruz’s wife and father in the 2016 campaign. But I’ve always said the story of Washington should be titled 'Smart People Doing Dumb Things.' Cruz wouldn’t even study with people from what he called 'minor Ivies' while at Harvard Law School but didn’t think twice before leaving Texans starving, freezing and dying to go catch some rays in Cancun and then blaming his daughters. We’ll see if Trump can sustain this king-in-exile routine without the infrastructure he once had. Consider his asinine election challenge with all those crazy lawyers. Ever the shrew, all he has left now is his forked tongue."

From "The Tale of the Untamable Shrew/Republicans are still trying to muzzle a smack-talking Trump" by Maureen Dowd (NYT). 

1. Dowd is comparing Trump to Kate, the shrew in Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew." As I've said more than once, there is something womanly about Trump. And there are times when the way people react to Trump is like the way they react to an untamed woman. Dowd talks a lot about "Shrew" but also wanders all over the place and never really explores the hypothesis that Trump's wildness is something like a nasty woman. Why do we feel this deep need to control him? What does it say about those who think that he did not belong in our serious, well-established institutions and that he spoke with shocking directness and exhibited self-dramatizing emotion?

2. Here's a whole Wikipedia article on the "nasty woman" meme that originated in the 2016 campaign.

3. Is it true that the word "handful" is usually leveled at spirited women? I'd guess it's mostly used about children — a nice way to say the kid is hard to manage. If you say it about an adult, you are loading in the concept that you are into manipulation. Both "manage" and "manipulate" are built from the Lain word for "hand" ("manus"). If you think an adult is a "handful," maybe you ought to consider why you're putting your hands on her/him.

4. Let's take a closer look at the last sentence of the column: "Ever the shrew, all he has left now is his forked tongue." I see 2 ways to go with this:

a. Metaphor screw up. A forked tongue is characteristic of some reptiles, notably snakes. A shrew is a small mole-like mammal.  If you don't mean to refer to the animal, but only to the extremely irritating person, then don't bring up an animal characteristic like "forked tongue." Sharp tongue would be fine.

b. Microaggression alert. Are we still using "forked tongue" to refer to lying?! I would have thought it was relegated long ago to the dustbin of potential microaggressions. Background from Wikipedia: "This phrase was... adopted by Americans around the time of the Revolution, and may be found in abundant references from the early 19th century — often reporting on American officers who sought to convince the tribal leaders with whom they negotiated that they 'spoke with a straight and not with a forked tongue' (as for example, President Andrew Jackson told the Creek Nation in 1829). According to one 1859 account, the native proverb that the 'white man spoke with a forked tongue' originated as a result of the French tactic of the 1690s, in their war with the Iroquois, of inviting their enemies to attend a Peace Conference, only to be slaughtered or captured."

"For $150, Brad Holiday’s customers could purchase and download a package of dating tips and tricks he called his 'Attraction Accelerator.' "

"The batch of files featured advice from Mr. Holiday, a self-styled Manhattan dating coach, about things like the best facial serums and pickup lines, and his thoughts on the viciousness of the opposite sex. But tucked between videos denigrating women and reviews of height-boosting shoes were other guides: how to defeat Communists, expose what he claimed were government pedophilia cabals, and properly wield a Glock... [Holiday, whose real name is Samuel Fisher, has a] large online footprint [that] suggests a fierce devotion to a hypermasculine ethos of chauvinism, grievance and misogyny.... Some experts said men like Mr. Fisher were particularly attracted to Mr. Trump because they see him as emblematic of a certain kind of masculinity. 'The men that are in these movements themselves try to enact that kind of masculinity, and because Trump enacts it they are drawn to him,' said Ronald F. Levant, co-author of the book 'The Tough Standard: The Hard Truths About Masculinity and Violence.' 'He models it. He gives them permission.'"

From "The Misogynistic ‘Dating Coach’ Who Was Charged in the Capitol Riot/Samuel Fisher left a long trail of videos and social media posts that reflect the views of a fringe faction of disgruntled men who became fixated on President Donald J. Trump" (NYT).

ADDED: But what is Trump's "certain kind of masculinity"? I have a tag to keep track of that: "Trump's masculinity." Things with that tag in my archive: Trump is mocked for dancing like a woman, Roseanne Barr declares Trump "The First Woman President," Trump was denounced as "the Most Unmanly President," and I opined that "there's something womanly about Trump."

I'm also seeing a post that ends "You may hate Trump, but don't use him as a weapon to attack masculinity. Masculinity doesn't deserve hatred. Find your own mix of masculinity and femininity and respect your own individuality and the individuality of others." There are kinds of masculinity, so let's be specific. 

Is Brad Holiday's pathetic hawking of dating tips the same "certain kind of masculinity" as Trump's? The NYT article doesn't give much detail about Holiday. It's almost all high-level generality like "a hypermasculine ethos of chauvinism, grievance and misogyny." If you hate Trump, his masculinity is easily tossed into the same deplorable basket, but that's sloppy work, as gender analysis goes.

"The great shame is not that Mr. Trump brought an anachronistic masculinity into the Oval Office, but that he used the Oval Office to market a very modern brand of compensatory manhood — with a twist."

"The hallmarks of contemporary ornamental masculinity — being valued as the object of the gaze, playing the perpetual child, pedestal-perching and mirror-gazing — are the very ones that women have, for half a century, struggled to dismantle as belittling, misogynist characterizations of femininity. The preoccupation with popularity, glamour, celebrity, appearance — what are these qualities but the old consumer face of the Girl? If Mr. Trump is reclaiming a traditional stereotypical sex role, it’s one that long belonged to women. Why have so many of the modern-day grunts who mourn the loss of 'old-fashioned' manhood hitched their wagon to a silk-suited flyboy? Since at least the 1990s, and at full tilt in the era of social media, men have been faced with a quandary: how to define their sex in a culture where visibility, performance and marketability are the currency. You could say that Mr. Trump has, if nothing else, found a way. But he’s done so not by defending the Greatest Generation man, but by abandoning him."

From "Trump’s Thoroughly Modern Masculinity/The president isn’t a throwback to old-school masculinity. He’s a he-man specifically engineered for our image-based, sensation-saturated times" by Susan Faludi (NYT).

"Flyboy" is explained elsewhere in the column. It's a WWII epithet for aviators who posed in silk scarves, Faludi explains, and were disparaged as not showing true manliness.

By the way is Trump "silk-suited"? I presume his suits are wool, not silk. I looked it up and found a lot of articles about how cheap Trump's suits look! Here's an example of such an article from right before he won the 2016 election. We were told it matters because "you can tell a lot about someone by the way they dress," and Trump's baggy clothes show that "he isn't detail-oriented." The article ends: "Next Tuesday, vote with your sartorial conscience."

Obama twirling and skittering in Lititz... Trump in Lititz...

On April 2, 2008, I blogged about Maureen Dowd's assertion that "Hillary has clearly raised Obama’s consciousness about the importance of courting the ladies." She fleshed out the theory like this: 

Touring a manufacturing plant in Allentown, Pa., Tuesday, he was flirtatious, winking and grinning at the women working there, calling one “Sweetie,” telling another she was “beautiful,” and imitating his daughters’ dance moves by twirling around 

Later, at a Scranton town hall, he went up to Denise Mercuri, a pharmacist from Dunmore wearing a Hillary button. “What do I need to do? Do you want me on my knees?” he charmed, before promising: “I’ll give you a kiss.”... 

At the Wilbur chocolate shop in Lititz Monday, he spent most of his time skittering away from chocolate goodies, as though he were a starlet obsessing on a svelte waistline. 

“Oh, now,” the woman managing the shop told him with a frown, “you don’t worry about calories in a chocolate factory.”

At the time, I said: "Wait, is [Hillary] toughening him up or feminizing him? And is the feminine stuff nauseatingly stereotyped?" Look at all the stereotypically feminine things pasted on Obama: He was "flirtatious." He was "twirling." His dance was an imitation of his daughters' dancing. He "charmed." He "skittered." He acted like " starlet obsessing on a svelte waistline." He was chided by another woman for worrying about calories. 

There's less shaming of Trump for seeming feminine, but it happens. He was mocked just 2 days ago for dancing like a woman.

But the reason I'm going back to that post is that it's about Lititz and Trump gave a rally in Lititz. My paternal grandparents are from Lititz. They are buried in the Lititz Moravian Cemetery. 

Lititz was founded by members of the Moravian Church in 1756 and was named after a castle in Bohemia near the village of Kunvald where the ancient Bohemian Brethren's Church had been founded in 1457.... For a century, only Moravians were permitted to live in Lititz....

Here's Trump in Lititz: 

I'm so pleased to see him in the home of my ancestors. From the transcript:

The age-old shaming of men by likening them to women... and I know the built-in out is that the negativity is only in the reader's mind.

This is how my mom dances. pic.twitter.com/tI1c25OXoE

— andrew kaczynski🤔 (@KFILE) October 25, 2020

"Trump is a more caricatured version of masculinity — aggressive, physically tough, physically strong, never back down."

"What Biden is offering is a more complex 21st-century version of masculinity. It’s compassion and empathy and care and a personal narrative of loss ."

Said Jackson Katz, who's made a documentary called "The Man Card: Presidential Masculinity from Nixon to Trump," quoted in "Trump, Biden and masculinity in the age of coronavirus" by Matt Viser (WaPo). 

Both Biden and Trump are targeting a swath of White working-class voters in the industrial Midwest... 

At an anti-sexual-assault rally in 2018, Biden told a crowd at the University of Miami, “If we were in high school, I’d take [Trump] behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.” He later expressed modest regret for the comment. “I’ve been in a lot of locker rooms my whole life,” Biden added. “I’m a pretty damn good athlete. Any guy that talked [the way Trump does] was usually the fattest, ugliest SOB in the room.” 

At the time, Trump had a rejoinder. “He is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “He doesn’t know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Don’t threaten people Joe!”