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Trump’s testosterone-poisoned picks
Toxic masculinity is all about male dominance and female subservience. It is closely allied to fascism.
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Friends,
Connect these dots:
Trump initially nominated Matt Gaetz for attorney general despite charges that Gaetz paid for drug-filled orgies with underage girls.
Former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, Trump’s choice for secretary of defense, is alleged to have raped a woman. In a newly released police report, the woman said Hegseth took her phone, blocked his hotel room door when she tried to leave, and sexually assaulted her. Hegseth has admitted paying the woman hush money because, he says, he was afraid he’d lose his job at Fox News if the allegation became public.
Hegseth’s nomination had already generated concern because of his opposition to women serving in combat.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for secretary of health and human services, is alleged to have groped a family babysitter. She went public with her allegation in July.
Kennedy allegedly had an affair with reporter Olivia Nuzzi, whose former fiance said in a court filing that she told him Kennedy wanted to “possess,” “control,” and “impregnate” her.
Elon Musk is being sued by several former employees for “treating women as sexual objects to be evaluated on their bra size,” “bombarding the workplace with lewd sexual banter,” and creating a sexually charged workplace that treats women as objects.
Trump himself was found in civil trial to have sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll, and she won two civil court judgments against him for $83.3 million.
Trump says that the more than two dozen other women who have accused him of sexual misconduct were lying.
And, of course, Trump is heard on the “Access Hollywood” tape saying, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Trump’s Republican National Convention was an exercise in hyper-masculinity, including Hulk Hogan roaring and ripping off his shirt.
During the 2024 election, Trump surrogates mocked Democrats for not being able to define a “woman.”
In the election, more than 40 percent of the advertisements aired by Trump's campaign and pro-Trump groups focused on Harris’s support for transgender people: The ads claimed Harris “supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners” and “even supports letting biological men compete against our girls in their sports.”
Trump said he would protect women “whether the women like it or not.”
During the campaign, JD Vance said that declining rates of birth in the U.S. constituted a “civilizational crisis” and proposed that adults without children should pay higher taxes and have fewer voting rights.
In a 2021 interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, then-Senate-candidate Vance complained that the U.S. was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” Vance continued: “It’s just a basic fact — you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”
Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade.
Among them was Brett Kavanaugh, whose confirmation was dominated by allegations that he sexually assaulted a young woman.
In recent court filings, the attorneys general of Idaho, Kansas, and Missouri claim that expanded access to abortion pills is “causing a loss in potential population or potential population increase” and that “decreased births” were inflicting “a sovereign injury to the state itself.”
What’s the connection?
Disdain of women, a belief that they exist for male pleasure and reproduction, and fear of non-standard forms of gender identity and sexual orientation.
All are deeply embedded in Trumpism.
Zoom out and we can see that neofascism (as exemplified by Trump, Viktor Orbán, and Vladimir Putin) is organized around male dominance. Women are relegated to subservient roles.
Under neofascism, anything that challenges the traditional heroic male roles of protector, provider, and controller of the family is considered a threat to the social order. Anything that challenges the traditional female role as reproducer of the male bloodline is viewed as a danger to society.
Neofascism targets gay and transgender people because they are thought to challenge or weaken the heroic male warrior.
Seen through this prism, Trump’s appointment of many men charged with sexual harassment, men who believe women should not be in combat and should be mothers, and men who oppose abortion and believe women should be forced to have babies even if they don’t want them, forms a coherent neofascist belief system.
The basic tenet is male dominance and female subservience.
What do you think?
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