Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday was alarming for many reasons, not least for its overt fascism and racism, but it was also, as The New York Times accurately reported, a “carnival” of “misogyny”—one directed at Kamala Harris in particular.
Grant Cardone, a self-styled business guru, likened the Democratic nominee for president to a prostitute, saying that “her pimp handlers will destroy our country.” Another speaker called Harris “the devil” and “the Antichrist.” And Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, mocked her racial identity and repeated Trump’s insult that Harris, a former district attorney, state attorney general, senator, and now a vice president, was “low IQ.”
The overt sexism throughout the night, even by the standards of Trump’s nearly decade-long political career, was astonishing. Less surprising, given the campaign he’s run this year, was the figurative crotch-grabbing on display. When Trump running mate JD Vance mentioned Tim Walz, his Democratic counterpart, the crowd erupted into “tampon Tim” chants—to which Vance laughed. (Explainer here, if you need one.) And the “comedian” who opened the rally, Tony Hinchcliffe, said that Latinos “love making babies. There’s no pulling out. They come inside, just like they do to our country.”
These were not simply off-the-cuff remarks; they were very deliberate. It’s all part of Trump’s electoral strategy to Make America Masculine Again. He knows he’s losing women by massive margins, so he’s going after the men—especially, but not exclusively, aggrieved young men who feel they’ve been robbed of their male birthright to power. Trump is giving them license to say whatever they want about women, and his campaign is an implicit promise to give them control over women, including their bodies.
This is the pop-culture definition of toxic masculinity, and the crudest, most aggressive misogyny we’ve seen from Trump—which is truly saying something, given that he’s an adjudicated rapist who was caught on tape bragging that he can grab women’s vaginas without consequence. But this, perhaps even more than his reprehensible immigrant bashing and fascist overtones, is Trump’s closing argument: to put women back in their place and restore men to total supremacy in America.
It already feels like ages ago now, but at this time last week we were all talking about how Trump complained that convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein was “schlonged” and riffed weirdly about the size of a late, great golfer’s genitalia. “Arnold Palmer was all man, and I say that in all due respect to women, I love women,” Trump had said at a rally in Pennsylvania, leeringly drawing out the word “looooooove” as MAGA-hatted men standing behind him guffawed. “This man was strong and tough, and I refused to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh, my God. That’s unbelievable.’” He then welcomed two former NFL players to the stage: Le’Veon Bell, who recently posted a photo of himself on social media in a T-shirt that said “Trump or the Tramp,” and Antonio Brown, who in 2021 settled a sexual assault lawsuit brought by his former trainer.
At that rally, Trump also call Harris a “shit” vice president, and he continued the denigration last weekend on The Joe Rogan Experience—a podcast with a heavily male listenership—where Trump called Harris “a very low-IQ person” and dismissed his female critics. “Some of these women, they’re so stupid,” he said. (It wasn’t clear if he was talking about hosts of The View or a broader group.) And on Sunday, Elon Musk’s political action committee released a new ad that says America can’t afford a “C word” in the White House—then says (guffaw, guffaw) that the C stands for “communist.”
Trump’s former adviser in the White House, Stephen Miller, has also gotten in on the alpha-male act. On Jesse Watters’s Fox News show earlier this month, Miller had some dating advice for young men, saying that embracing misogyny is irresistible to women who really, down deep, want the man to run the show: “Show that you are a real man. Show that you are not a beta. Be a proud and loud Trump supporter, and your dating life will be fantastic.”
Not to be upstaged, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson recently described Trump as a father to a nation that’s “very disappointed” in his children—and that he would punish them if he returns to the White House. “When Dad gets home,” he said, “you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this.’”
Little wonder that Carlson, at Trump’s Sunday rally at MSG, spoke about how “Trump has empowered the rest of us … the right to call B.S. on the charade.” After a truly Trumpian weave of grievances and lies, he arrived at this point: “That is liberation: It’s the freedom to say what’s obviously true as a free man and not a slave.”
When I present some of the examples above to experts on gender dynamics, suffice it to say they are shocked but not surprised—and they understand why this macho message resonates. Young men are struggling with fast-changing gender roles and what it means to be masculine, they say.
A mid-October poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University found that Trump’s appeal is rooted in voters’ perceptions of his masculinity. While Harris leads Trump by three points in the national survey, 41 percent of likely voters say that Trump is “completely masculine,” a view Daniel Cassino, the executive director of the poll, said is central to Trump’s support. Notably, 68 percent of Republicans describe Trump that way, but just 14 percent of Democrats do.
That doesn’t mean Harris can’t compete: Women can assume “masculine” traits along with “feminine” ones, Cassino notes. But it gives Trump an opening.
“This is either a brilliant move, or this is a ridiculous move that was always doomed to fail,” Cassino said. “With young men, we see a real disillusionment with gender and masculinity. Trump is giving them a solution. It’s not a solution that’s going to work, but he’s giving them someone to blame.”
This theme has been deepening even since Trump walked onto the Republican National Convention stage to the James Brown song “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.” He has been oddly consumed with non-cis people, calling openly gay CNN anchor Anderson Cooper “Allison Cooper,” falsely claiming kids come back home from school as a different gender, and complaining again on Rogan’s show (whose listenership is 81 percent male and 56 percent 18–34-year-olds) about “men playing in women’s sports.”
This touches a nerve in young men who are wondering what it means to be a man. Harvard’s Institute of Politics, in its youth poll released October 25, found Harris with a 47-point lead among women age 18–29 but just a 17-point lead among men that age.
“He brings the ‘locker room’ talk into the public sphere,” said psychologist Randy Flood, co-founder and director of the Men’s Resource Center of West Michigan and co-author of Mascupathy: Understanding and Healing the Malaise of American Manhood. “This appeals to young men, [who think] he’s really strong, he’s really courageous to say things off the cuff and not worrying about people getting their feelings hurt over it.”
Ironically, Flood says, Trump embodies the very “feminine” qualities he disparages: He’s highly emotional, throws tantrums, and gets his feelings hurt easily. As retired pro wrestler Dave Bautista said recently in a brutal takedown for Jimmy Kimmel’s show, “Look at him: He wears more makeup than Dolly Parton.… The guy’s afraid of birds.… The guy’s barely strong enough to hold an umbrella.… He’s got jugs—big ones, like Dolly Parton.… You know that dance he does? He looks like he’s jacking off a pair of giraffes.”
OK, I’ll stop here. Though funny, the video is almost Trumpian in its macho crudeness—I don’t love that it uses Parton in service of a punch line (twice). But maybe this is the kind of message needed to break through to the young men who, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, look up to Trump as a paragon of masculinity.
