The Trump-Vance-Musk-Putin manosphere

Friends,

Did anyone else see the horrific display in the Oval Office last Friday as a ritual exercise in male domination? I don’t want to insult great apes, but I’ve seen similar performances at the zoo. Trump and Vance sought to humiliate Zelensky, treating him with the same disrespect they treat … well, women.

Trump, Vance, and Musk inhabit what’s been termed the “manosphere” — a place where the main events are dominance and submission. The whole point is to humiliate weaker men — and to subjugate women.

Women — especially women of color — have distinguished themselves in standing up to Trump, maybe because they’re less intimidated by him than are many men, and because Trump has shown himself particularly fearful of strong women.

Which if any Republicans have been strong opponents of Trump. Answer: In the Senate, Republicans Lisa Murkowski and (barely) Susan Collins. In the House, the prize still goes to Liz Cheney.

Who has looked Trump in the eye and told him to show mercy for LGBTQ+ and undocumented people in America? Mariann Edgar Budde, the Bishop of Washington, at the National Prayer Service in January.

Who repeatedly took Trump to court on defamation charges, and repeatedly won? E. Jean Carroll.

Which prosecutors and judges were toughest in trying to hold Trump legally accountable? New York Attorney General Letitia James, Atlanta-based District Attorney Fani Willis, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, and U.S. District Judge Lauren King.

Who most successfully pummeled Trump in a presidential debate? Kamala Harris.

Which journalists have been most aggressive in questioning Trump? Megyn Kelly, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor, CNN’s Abby Phillip, The Grio’s April Ryan, NBC’s Savannah Guthrie, The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman, CBS’s Weijia Jiang, and New York Magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi.

I could go on, but you get the point.

If there was ever a president who represented unfettered male domination, it’s Trump. An implicit promise of the 2024 Trump campaign was to restore patriarchy to America. Trump voters were overwhelmingly male.

As you recall, Trump was found liable for sexual abuse; he famously told “Access Hollywood” that if you’re a famous man “you can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy”; he asserted during the recent campaign that he’d “protect” women “whether the women like it or not”; and he was instrumental in ending abortion rights nationwide.

After Trump’s reelection, sexist and abusive attacks on women — such as “your body, my choice” and “get back to the kitchen” — surged across social media, according to an analysis from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

A remarkable number of Trump’s cronies are sexual harassers and predators. Trump was introduced at the Republican National Convention by Dana White, chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, who was once caught on tape slapping his wife in a nightclub.

Trump’s pick for vice president, JD Vance, has said professional women “choose a path to misery” when they prioritize careers over having children. He has claimed men in America were “suppressed” in their masculinity. Vance has characterized Democratic leaders as “childless cat ladies.”

At a gathering of conservatives last month, Vance told young men: “Don’t allow this broken culture to send you a message that you’re a bad person because you’re a man, because you like to tell a joke, because you like to have a beer with your friends or because you’re competitive.”

Trump’s pick for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, paid off a woman who accused him of sexual assault (Hegseth’s own mother accused him of abusing women, though she later disavowed her words).

Trump’s HHS secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was accused of sexually harassing his family’s nanny and at one point kept a diary of his conquests, which his wife at the time found.

Elon Musk’s “bros” are notoriously misogynistic, as is Musk. One of Musk’s companies, SpaceX, reportedly paid $250,000 to a flight attendant who said Musk exposed himself to her. In a lawsuit filed last year, former employees accused him of “treating women as sexual objects to be evaluated on their bra size.”

One of the most pathetic symbols of the new manosphere is Mark Zuckerberg. After kissing Trump’s derriere, the third-richest man in America called for more “masculine energy” because the corporate world was becoming “culturally neutered.” He told Joe Rogan that “having a culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive.”

Last Thursday, the Trump regime celebrated toxic masculinity by smoothing the way for Andrew and Tristan Tate to be extradited from Romania to the United States. The Tate bros had been accused of luring women to Romania and then forcing them to work as pornographic webcam performers. Britain is also investigating the Tate brothers for rape and human trafficking in Britain.

As The New York Times’s Michelle Goldberg reports, Andrew Tate, a self-described misogynist, has regularly boasted about abusing and pimping women, offering to teach his technique to other men in online courses where students could earn “pimping hoes degrees.” Women who live in his compound, he said in one video, aren’t allowed to go out without him. Some are tattooed “owned by Tate.” He left a voice note for a British woman who accused him of rape saying, “The more you didn’t like it, the more I enjoyed it.”

Tate is a big fan of Trump, championing him to his millions of mostly young male followers on social media. “I’m a Trump fan because I’m a man,” Tate said in October. “You have to support Trump if you’re a man.” He’s also a longtime friend of Donald Trump Jr., who called his detention in Romania “absolute insanity.” One of Tate’s former lawyers, Paul Ingrassia, is now the White House liaison for the Department of Justice. In January, when Tate announced plans to form a British political party and run for prime minister, Musk endorsed his analysis of British politics, writing, “He’s not wrong.”

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I relate all this to you because it’s important to understand the centrality of male dominance and misogyny to Trump’s world — and to connect this to what other authoritarians and neofascists are doing around the globe.

The authoritarian manosphere is organized around a hierarchy topped by heroic male warriors. Winning is all about getting other males to submit to the dominant male. Women are relegated to subservient roles.

Anything that challenges the traditional heroic male roles of protector, provider, and controller of the family is considered a threat to the social order. LGBTQ+ people are believed to weaken the heroic male.

Trump recently issued an executive order declaring that the U.S. government will recognize only a person’s sex assigned at birth, limit the definition of a “male” or “female” to their reproductive cells, and potentially withhold federal funding from programs that acknowledge transgender people or “gender ideology.”

Anti-transgender themes were central to Trump’s 2024 campaign. He spent millions on anti-trans television ads and promised to restrict access to gender-affirming care and trans participation in sports.

Trump has made the traditional nuclear family a touchstone of domestic policy. In 2023, he pledged to “promote positive education about the nuclear family, the roles of mothers and fathers and celebrating, rather than erasing, the things that make men and women different.”

Connect this to Putin.

Russia’s crackdown on LGBTQ+ people started a decade ago when Putin first proclaimed a focus on “traditional family values.” In 2013, the Kremlin adopted legislation that banned any public endorsement of “nontraditional sexual relations” among minors.

In 2020, Putin pushed through a “constitutional reform” that outlawed same-sex marriage. Last year, he signed a law banning “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations” among adults.

More recently, Putin signed legislation that bans people from officially or medically changing their gender, banning any “medical interventions aimed at changing the sex of a person,” as well as banning changing a person’s gender in official documents or public records. It also annuls marriages in which one person has “changed gender,” and bars trans people from becoming foster or adoptive parents.

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I don’t want to oversimplify a complex social phenomenon or engage in the same kind of gender stereotypes that the manosphere promotes. Male domination is hardly the only characteristic that unites the Trump-Vance-Musk-Putin axis. Plenty of men have stood up to Trump. Misogyny is not unique to authoritarian men.

But as America slides toward neofascism, I think it important to understand that its roots draw from a deep distrust, bordering on hate, of people who seem weak or feminine — people who were born as, or have become, women.