As an electoral blue wave for the Democratic Party is predicted by many to arrive on shore in this week’s US midterm elections, one of the things Donald Trump is continuing to do is obsess over how men look. It is a persistent trait of his slobbering form of leadership: he loves men’s bodies and is endlessly impressed by them, while also presenting himself, a weak fool, as strongman-in-chief.
The most recent example of this was his drooling description of Republican senator Jon Husted’s body parts. “I examined his ass,” he told a Kentucky rally. “I then patted him on the shoulder, and it was like a piece of steel. I’m still recovering.” Last week, The New York Times reported that the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Bill Pulte – likened by an administration official to a “court jester” – made a poster of Husted for Trump to display on Air Force One.
Trump likes dancing bizarrely to YMCA, a song seen as the epitome of faux-macho camp. He comments on the appearance of men as “beautiful”, “handsome” and “studs”. Of the golfer Arnold Palmer, he honed in on genitalia: “When he took the showers with other pros, they came out of there. They said, ‘Oh my God. That’s unbelievable.’” Palmer was, in Trump’s words, “all man”. This is deeply creepy, but it is also typical of Trump’s preoccupation with the male physique.
Trump is of course unhinged, and a man with a long list of accusations against him regarding disgusting behaviour towards women, including sexual assault. But why does he drool over men’s bodies in such a manner?
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For authoritarian leaders, performing a brand of masculinity that is intensely heteronormative is sometimes combined with fetishising male strength to the point of homoeroticism. This is a paradox, not a conflict, within authoritarianism.
It is also not unique to Trump in the Magaverse. Pete Hegseth, his “secretary of war”, comes across as obsessed with the gendered performance of machismo. “No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps,” he said of his vision for how members of the military – or to use his term, “warriors” – should present. Over the summer, Hegseth announced a programme for screening troops for “testosterone deficiency”.
Earlier this year US health secretary Robert F Kennedy featured in an extremely strange workout video with has-been rapper Kid Rock, where they exercised in a sauna together before soaking in a grotto-style pool.
JD Vance recently made a homophobic jibe about the leading Texan candidate for the Senate. When a man at a rally shouted his admiration from the crowd, Vance responded, “I love you too, sir. In a totally platonic way, to be clear. I’m the vice-president, not James Talarico.” Vance is also concerned with how men should behave and look, saying last year, “Our culture sends a message to young men that you should suppress every masculine urge.” Vance’s views on masculinity and its “urges” are clearly narrow.
An obsession with how men look and act within specific and strict gender roles is a long-standing aspect of authoritarianism and fascism. It is a form of social control but it is also about projecting an ideal. An authoritarian’s fixation on male virility, muscularity, perceived strength, attractiveness and capacity for brutality is about elevating and imposing a fantasy of masculinity fundamental to authoritarianism’s primary expression: violent domination.
Through this lens we can understand Vladimir Putin’s high-camp, ‘topless on a horse’ image from 2009 not in contradiction with his homophobia, but in fact part of it.
We can understand Hitler’s obsession with male beauty and strength, alongside the Nazi’s persecution of gay men.
We can understand Viktor Orbán’s homophobia and transphobia through the lens of what political scientist Cara Daggett characterises as “petro-masculinity” – the combination of racism, misogyny and climate denial which are not separate resentments but interlinked, with the environment and “softer” or “different” attributes framed as things to dominate or even eradicate.
We can understand Jair Bolsonaro as a performative macho man but a perpetuator of “catastrophic” masculinity, as the Brazilian film-maker Fernando Grostein Andrade put it, in tandem with Bolsonaro’s own self-described pride in his homophobia.
All of this is an expression of fragility wrapped in pretend-strength, hidden vulnerabilities, and in some cases sexual repression and shame. That is not to say the Maga folks and authoritarians cited above are – to use the blunt old vernacular – closet cases, such as Lindsey Graham, the South Carolinian Republican senator who died last July and supported anti-LGBTQ+ policies, while several male and trans sex workers claim he hired them.
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The truth is less neat. As Susan Sontag wrote in her 1975 essay, Fascinating Fascism, “A clue lies in the predilections of the fascist leaders themselves for sexual metaphors. Like Nietzsche and Wagner, Hitler regarded leadership as sexual mastery of the ‘feminine’ masses, as rape ... Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface.”
Trump and his lackeys will continue to fetishise the male body. Even those utterly opposed to Trump’s politics are subjected to his fawning if they are objectively good-looking, such as Zohran Mamdani – or as Trump likes to put it, anyone out of “central casting”. All of this is odd, but it is about a pathetic gaze towards the strongest of the herd and craving the potential for domination. Wanting control is so often a shadow desire to be controlled.
