Trump Triples Down on "Bro" Culture
Between women under-30 and young men there is a 51-percentage gender gap
The summer is unofficially over and with Labor Day in the rear-view mirror, we are now, without exaggeration, in the thick of the 2024 Presidential campaign. Though Vice President Harris is slightly leading in national polls (which is a nice change), there remain some demographic anomalies. One thing about the Trump campaign that particularly confounds me is his quixotic — though not entirely surprising — fixation on weaponizing masculinity. And beyond that the continued success he has been having in this project. Young Gen Z men are veering towards Trump and have not switched course even after the Harris succession. Between women under 30 and young men in the most recent New York Times/Siena poll, there is a 51-point percentage gender gap.
Despite the fact that the Harris/Walz campaign has offered more substantive policy prescriptions for young men to afford a house and college, to get good health care and to support a family, these Gen Z dudes cannot get enough of Trump’s locker room talk, which is naught else but confounding. What more can the Democrats do, aside from sinking into the mud with him? Further, at 78 and morbidly obese, this sexual abusing, flatulent real estate marketer still claims, implausibly, that he is “hot.” In what multiverse? Why don’t the Gen Z dudes see past this illusion of virility? For three election cycles now, the Trump campaign has singled, doubled and is now tripling-down on appealing to preserving the cultural pre-eminence of the locker room talk.
The Trump campaign remains haloed by a pungent testosteronal quality that all but cripples it among suburban women. But does they even care, at this point? Doesn’t this prove the masculinist point? In Trump’s mind hasn’t he already won? Isn’t he already putting together the framework to challenge and defeat any outcome that does not conform to his fevered, hyper-masculine imaginings? Do his misogynies and bigotries, accumulated through a life lived poorly and now crystallized by his advanced age, completely obstruct his judgement? This man should not be anywhere near the White House!
But there are, unfortunately, reasons why he does the things that he does. Because it bears positive results. Rewards. Trump has, it should be noted, won the male vote against Hillary in ‘16 and against Biden in ‘20 and barring some cosmic-geological space-time continuum abnormality, he will probably win it again against Kamala Harris in ‘24. The question is just the margin. But, why, with that demographic so firmly already among his caravan does he continue to exhibit his “game” on men? Why go back for a third time to a well that is all but dry? How many more male votes does he expect to draw out of Pennsylvania? Or Wisconsin? Or, for that matter, Georgia?
Clearly, Trump has certain advantages in that demographic category. Finance bros dig him for The Apprentice; working class dudes grew up on him sticking it to his buddy Vince McMahon in the WWE. These pivotal moments in the lives of men in which he was a reality-based part drew great dividends for Trump politically. In 2016, the Trump campaign surprised Hillary Clinton with the breadth of his overperformance among men. “Women were 13 percentage points more likely than men to have voted for Clinton (54% among women, 41% among men),” the Pew Research center noted. “The gender gap was particularly large among validated voters younger than 50. In this group, 63% of women said they voted for Clinton, compared with just 43% of men. Among voters ages 50 and older, the gender gap in support for Clinton was much narrower (48% vs. 40%).”
In 2020, the gender gap was a bit closer with men (roughly 53-45, Trump), which is probably one of the reasons why the Trump campaign is doubling down on testosterone once more. “In 2020, men were almost evenly divided between Trump and Biden, unlike in 2016 when Trump won men by 11 points,” Pew observed, years later. “Trump won a slightly larger share of women’s votes in 2020 than in 2016 (44% vs. 39%), while Biden’s share among women was nearly identical to Clinton’s (55% vs. 54%).” This is why Trump is running around to any unapologetic, male-oriented podcasts — Theo Von! Joe Rogan! — like a chicken with its head cut off. He sees Kamala as another Hillary, another electoral man-grab; another chance to peel off some of the men that had migrated to Biden in 2020.
Not to give TrumpWorld free advice — but why not put in the work at “softening,” somewhat? Isn’t there a richer source of potential untapped voters among women? Wait? What’s what low, whistling sound? “Naive,” you whisper? Alright, yes, I know we are dealing with Trump here. Dear reader, I’ve made a study of the man for decades and am familiar with his disgusting velocity. Donald J Trump does not believe in the intellectual or social equality of women or people of color in the least, which is why it is so karmically fascinating that his late life legal problems and now the primary obstacle to the thing he wants most in this world are and is a woman of color. But — believe it or not — between the assassination attempt, the remarkable debate and the Convention, when Trump was on a glide path to an easy victory, his campaign was not only disciplined, but it had softened. Trump was going after the black vote in early July, the Latino vote and, believe it or not, the suburban women’s vote. For a brief time at least in July, he was so (over)confident of his victory over “sleepy” Joe Biden that he had the leisure and the appetite to go in for a landslide. On July 16 I described it thus:
“As a Trumpologist of two decades in good standing, the thing that is most curious to me about this campaign is Trump’s discipline. From whence did it come? Because it has been largely absent from his climb. The word “discipline” does not readily come to mind when discussing Donald. The old Trump, to be sure, would have done a victory lap around the country after witnessing up close the President’s feeble debate performance last month. The old, thumotically-excessive Trump would have been throwing haymakers into the summer wind, braggadocios in pivotal swing states about how he laid the President low with his wicked right cross and hideous vigor. Instead, Trump had been relatively silent, almost humble, but relentlessly on-message, allowing the Democrats ample wiggle room to implode.”
Days later, President Biden dropped out of the race, throwing TrumpWorld into a disarray from which it has not as of yet recovered. Campaign advisor and hyper-masculinist Chris LaCivita seemed utterly unequipped to deal with the new political reality in which he has to campaign against a younger and more vital opponent than his principal. Also — Vice President Harris is a new candidate that happens to energize the African-American and women’s vote. One can see how that would present a conundrum to a masculinist white supremacist …
Which brings me back at last to the point of this post. Trump has abandoned his light attempt at “softening” and has decided to go all “bro.” The new NYTimes/Siena poll, which has new salience because it comes at crunch time for both campaigns, when all the Labor Day picnic leftovers have been packed into the car and made it home to the refrigerator. Summer is unofficially over and schools and conferences start up again at full schedule. This curious poll at present has been thrown into the gladiatorial fundament and demands some analysis. Steven Greenhouse, it should be said, has done a wonderful job today in The Guardian illuminating the dim prospects of young men in a Trump 2.0 administration, despite the locker room talk. He writes:
Regardless of how you feel about Harris, the truth is that her policies will do far more for young men than Trump’s policies will. It’s not even close. She is serious about lifting up young men and young women, and she has plans to do so.
Unlike Trump, Harris will help with soaring rents and home prices. She has pledged to build 3m new homes to help drive down housing prices. In another big step to make housing more affordable, she plans to give a $25,000 subsidy to first-time home buyers. Unlike Trump, Harris is also attacking the problem of high grocery prices – she has promised to crack down on price-gouging at the supermarket.
For many young men, health coverage and high health costs are a problem. On those matters, Trump will only make things worse. He has repeatedly promised to repeal Obamacare. That would be a disaster for millions of young men and women because they would no longer be able to be on their parents’ health plan until age 26. What’s more, repealing Obamacare will push up healthcare prices.
Many young people complain about their mountains of student debt. Trump won’t help on that; he has condemned the idea of forgiving student loans. In contrast, Harris wants to expand Biden’s debt cancellation program, which is hugely popular with young Americans. What’s more, Trump backed huge cuts in student aid – a move that would make it harder for young people to afford college.
The full article by Greenhouse is here and really well argued. While Harris/Walz has bounced back with women, Latino and African-American voters, young men are still listening to Trump, according to this — and other — polls.
Is this an historical moment? It certainly feels, imho, as if this is some sort of last, dying gasp of the old wolves moment occurring, or, should Trump pull it off, a new and even more virulent form of toxic masculinity. Even RFK, Jr’s quixotic, testosterone-fueled, shirtless campaign has moved into confluence with Trump’s suggests that something bigger than the alignment of the “Mommy” and the “Daddy” party is at play here.
Of course, Masculinity itself is not going to die out any more than its equal —the feminine spiritual force — will. But that won’t stop Trump and the global far-rightists — or, rather, the hyper-masculinists — from distorting the natural alignment of those twin forces, leaving us to deal with the untold human misery as a consequence of their own unaddressed psychological imbalances.
““We’re all waiting with bated breath. This is a fateful election,’ a friend from Leipzig told me on Sunday. It was polling day in her state of Saxony and in neighbouring Thuringia. The atmosphere was tense, even fearful. Much more was at stake than just a reshuffle of seats in two of Germany’s regional parliaments. As expected, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won in Thuringia with nearly 33% of the vote, and came second in Saxony with almost 31%. For the first time since the second world war, a far-right party has become a significant political force in Germany. If there was shock, it wasn’t immediately obvious … Disgruntlement with mainstream politics was long treated as a peculiarity of the former East Germany, which included Saxony and Thuringia. The vice-president of the Bundestag, Katrin Göring-Eckardt of the Green party, herself a native Thuringian, was not alone in claiming that some east Germans are ‘stuck in dictatorship glorification’. Now Göring-Eckardt’s Greens have been kicked out of the Thuringian parliament and are polling at 11% nationally. Telling voters that their concerns aren’t real, it turns out, is not an election-winning strategy. But easterners are far from anti-democratic. There were lively public debates everywhere in the buildup to the elections. People discussed politics at workplaces and at the kitchen table. Turnout was at a record high, with three-quarters of people casting their vote. East Germans are neither fed up with politics nor with democracy. They are fed up with not being taken seriously. The same applies to other demographics. A staggering 37% of young voters in Thuringia have voted for AfD. In Saxony it was 31%. Though higher than the national average, this is still in line with what we saw in the European parliamentary elections in June when the AfD beat all three parties of Scholz’s coalition in the 16-24 vote, coming second with 16% – just one percentage point behind the conservatives. The AfD also won the working-class vote by some margin in the European elections, but this fact gained little media attention and seems to have raised no eyebrows in the other political parties. The working class used to be the SPD’s core base, giving it more than 30% of the vote in every election between the late 1950s and 2005. That this has since plummeted to a historic low is not because east Germans don’t understand democracy. Ask Germans what their main concerns are. Immigration tops the list, followed by energy prices, war and the economy.” (Katja Hoyer/The Guardian)
”’Bring Hersh home now,’ say big white letters on a red banner, hanging on a building on my Jerusalem street. It’s one of many banners in my neighborhood, where Hersh Goldberg-Polin grew up.I walk down the street two hours after the early morning news flash that Hersh and five other Israeli hostages were murdered by their Hamas captors in a tunnel under Gaza. I am trying to remember how to breathe, and how to weep, how not to be numb. Hersh has come home. In a body bag. It’s 9:00 in the morning on Sunday. Joe Biden has issued a statement of condemnation and consolation, focused on Hersh, who was a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen. Kamala Harris has issued a statement. By 9:15 Benjamin Netanyahu’s office’s only statement is that he has cancelled his ceremonial appearance at a classroom to mark the start of the school year. Frankly, this is not a good morning for the prime minister to fake his love for the children of Israel. (It will take nearly two hours more for Netanyahu to produce words about the hostages’ deaths. His statement will be militant. As usual, it will include no acknowledgment of error or responsibility on his part.)” (Gershom Gorenberg/TNR)