The president in 1977. (Photo via Daily Mail)
After four years in the wilderness, the #NeverTrump Republicans are making a comeback in 2020. If you don’t know who they are, you can often find them in the replies to Trump’s tweets, wielding some impotent prose such as “sir, this is not who a president is.”
They take many names. George Conway, Jen Rubin, John Weaver, Bill Kristol, Rick Wilson. These people, despite being bog-standard Republicans in policy — and, up until about 2017, in rhetoric — have made a grand show of being the resistance to Trump, despite not really doing anything to disrupt his agenda. They even have their own PAC now, named the Lincoln Project, which aims to “[hold] accountable those who would violate their oaths to the Constitution and would put others before Americans.” Neat!
One of the more prominent #NeverTrumpers is Tom Nichols, an academic who happens to be a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project. In 2017, Nichols wrote in the Washington Post that America needed to “chill” about Trump installing loyalists into political positions, among other things. I’m sure that turned out to bea non-issue.
So how do you resist Trump, as Nichols and his friends do, without compromising your political beliefs? Simple. You try to roast him and his base, as Nichols did in The Atlantic this week, with his article “Donald Trump, the Most Unmanly President.”
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?
This is the question Nichols attempts to answer throughout the piece. The answer is quite simple: because they’re Republicans. Because they support policies like tax cuts, persecuting the undocumented, and — for those who are well-off enough where politics is more a spectator sport than life or death, which is most of Trump’s base — owning the libs.
To quote the Washington Post during the impeachment trial earlier this year (crazy, right?): “at least around half of GOP-leaning voters and Republicans who think Trump has broken the law still don’t disapprove of him.” If that wasn’t a dealbreaker for Trump’s base, then why would his demeanor be?
The men I grew up with think of themselves as pretty tough guys, and most of them are. They are not the products of elite universities and cosmopolitan living. These are men whose fathers and grandfathers came from a culture that looks down upon lying, cheating, and bragging, especially about sex or courage...They admire and value the understated swagger, the rock-solid confidence, and the quiet reserve of such cultural heroes as John Wayne’s Green Beret Colonel Mike Kirby and Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo (also, as it turns out, a former Green Beret.)
Well, if they voted for Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, or either Bush, then they’ve voted for a president with an Ivy League degree. The last president to not have graduated an Ivy for either undergrad or law school was Ronald Reagan, a former member of the Hollywood elite. And being dishonest about love and war is a bridge too far, well, I have bad news about both Bushes.
Nichols must know this deep down, because he cites two fictional characters as his role models. His platonic ideal of manliness never really existed, both in the Oval Office or in the minds of voters.
Fortunately, he gives us a definition of the concept later on.
They are, as an American Psychological Association feature describes them, men who adhere to norms such as “toughness, dominance, self-reliance, heterosexual behaviors, restriction of emotional expression and the avoidance of traditionally feminine attitudes and behaviors.”
The “heterosexual behaviors” part is particularly insidious here, given that Nichols was a Republican in 2004, when the party attempted to juice turnout for Bush’s reelection by putting amendments to ban gay marriage on the ballot in several states.
Nichols then spends a few paragraphs comparing Trump unfavorably to Howard Stern (okay, sure) before, some thousand words in, he gets to his thesis statement.
Trump’s lack of masculinity is about maturity. He is not manly because he is not a man. He is a boy.
To be a man is to be an adult, to willingly decide, as St. Paul wrote, to “put away childish things.” There’s a reason that Peter Pan is a story about a boy, and the syndrome named after it is about men. Not everyone grows up as they age.
“To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence.” -C.S. Lewis. See? Two can play at that game.
The problem that Nichols — and the rest of his movement — runs into is that he can’t attempt to unpack why Trump voters vote for Trump, because there isn’t much daylight between those two groups. So, they turn to metrics like “manliness,” that have different meanings for different people, and do not have any observable relation with voter behavior, to explain why Trump is an anomaly among presidents.
I was, in every way, an immature cad as a younger man. In late middle age, I still struggle with the eternal issues of manhood, including what it means to be a good father and husband—especially the second time around after failing at marriage once already. And truth be told, I am not particularly “manly.” I wear Italian shoes with little buckles. I schedule my haircuts on Boston’s Newbury Street weeks in advance. My shower is full of soaps and shampoos claiming scents like “tobacco and caramel,” and my shaving cream has bergamot in it, whatever that is. And I talk too much.
Nearly 100,000 people are dead nationwide from a preventable crisis, and I’m reading what appears to be the diary of an NYU econ professor in The Atlantic. By comparison, Nichols only mentions the coronavirus — a genuine failure born from Trump’s inability to be a leader — once in this piece. You could write this whole piece about Trump saying he doesn’t “take responsibility at all” for the crisis, and it’d be more compelling. Nichols only mentions that quote in passing. Gotta hand it to Tom, he really has fingers on the pulse of American discourse.
And when Trump talks too much, he ends up saying things that more stereotypically masculine men wouldn’t, like that he fell in love with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. “He wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters,” Trump told a rally in West Virginia. “We fell in love.” One can only imagine the reaction among working-class white men if Barack Obama, or any other U.S. president, had talked about falling in love with a foreign leader. (George W. Bush once said he saw into Putin’s soul, and he has never lived it down among his critics.)
Bush was reelected after saying that. It didn’t matter.
These op-eds, heavy on style and self-insertion and low on substance, are only going to increase in number and tenor as we approach November. If you find yourself reading something like this in the future — and I guarantee The Atlantic alone will publish about a dozen of these pieces in the coming months — and wondering why the hell former conservatives are preaching to the liberal choir now, I want you to keep this quote in mind:
My own theory is that intellectuals hated Bush not for what he did, but for who he was. Specifically, they hated him because he didn’t care about them. It’s important to remember that many people espouse politics as a form of self-actualization: they choose political positions based on what they think those positions say about themselves to others[.]
That was Nichols in 2013. Hey, gotta hand it to him. In my book, self-awareness is pretty manly.
Politics and Prozac is a sporadically-updated blog about journalism, elections, and their consequences. The author, Arya Hodjat, graduated from the University of Maryland in 2020 with degrees in journalism and political science. You can send him compliments/death threats at aryahodjat11@gmail.com, or on Twitter at @arya_kidding_me. Until next time!