The most pissy, you mean
Oh he’s so BUTCH.
First of all Hogan Gidley looks exactly like Alfred E. Newman, but more to the point – Trump, masculine??? The goldy hair dye? The ridiculous fluffy ferfy flippy wavey twirly hair arrangement? The heavy makeup? The whining? The pouting? The inability to walk a tenth of a mile?
The fear of cats? The endless bullying? The tiny fingers on the tiny hands? The stupid little mincey gestures?
There’s a confusion here. Trump is mean, and rude, and piggy, and a bully, but that doesn’t make him masculine…or feminine, either – it makes him an asshole.
So more masculine than, say, Teddy Roosevelt?
Yah, I don’t think so. I think Trump may be the least masculine president ever. Hogan Gidley has been huffing farts too long.
Tom Nichols had a good piece in The Atlantic a while ago on Trump’s supposed masculinity.
Well Trump loves superlatives so who knows – maybe he’ll like being thought of as the world’s biggest asshole
Fear of cats?
Screechy:
Excellent piece by Tom Nichols in the Atlantic (to which I also have a subscription):
Trump was no Rambo. He was Captain Bonespurs: ever eager for others to go fight in a rotten war and for a rotten cause that he preferred to stay out of. Perhaps virtue can be somehow found in that. Perhaps his supporters could not see through Trump. Then again, perhaps they could, but didn’t want to.
Yeah, wait, scared of cats? I just quickly looked online and found lots of videos of cats hissing at Trump on the TV.
@Omar – that piece described people like the men I knew in rural New Zealand, including my father, and they were pretty much like that. It’s not the Guardianasta in me that’s disgusted by Trump, it’s the upbringing where to skite (boast) was ridiculed. “Skite, skite, your pants [i.e. underpants, Americans] are white.” we’d should at anyone showing off. Also whingeing. Also cowardice – “you sook”. The boys could be obnoxious to girls, but the grown up men were polite to women, though unable to speak to them. Also being law-abiding and fair-minded. Also being honest. It was a narrow society and not well-educated but well-behaved and hard-working.
I think it’s a bit exaggerated to say that the working man knows what kind of man Trump is; some of them almost certainly do, but where I live, almost none of them do. They think he is Rambo, Dirty Harry, John Wayne, and Douglas MacArthur all rolled into one. And they love all of those much more than I do; I wouldn’t want to claim to be like any of them, other than enjoying the recipe I have for John Wayne’s favorite souffle.
I suspect part of it is the desire to still see something redeemable in the “working man” and not recognize the deplorable nature of many of the Trump supporters, still trying to hang on to the idea that there is good in all men. Some of the Trump supporters I know are very nice people in many ways, until you get them started on immigration, abortion, global warming, women’s rights, religion…etc etc etc. But that doesn’t mean they see through Trump. They revere him.
Others, like my dad (not working class but with a lot in common with them, the history of an old farmer before he got educated) do see through him, but love “sticking it to the libs” or think he will fix it so that religion isn’t being ‘oppressed’ anymore. And put those pesky women back in the kitchen where they belong.
But to claim that the working man knows Trump and tolerates him? I don’t buy that for a minute, because I live, work, shop, and play in the midst of the Trump working man. I live in Trump Central, and that just doesn’t fit more than one person I know, which is my dad.
Haha, “most masculine”. What sort of insecure man says something that absurd about another man? Also, if we’re going to talk about tired old gender stereotypes, I can think of several that fit the stereotype better than Trump. What about Teddy Roosevelt, as Papito@1 said, for example? I mean, he hunted bears on horseback, slept on a bedroll next to camp fires, and founded the “Bull Moose Party”, politically. What could be more laughably/stereotypically “masculine” than that, compared to an obese orange city man who can’t even walk up a slight incline but rather has to follow in an electric cart?
There needs to be a restaurant chain called John Wayne’s Favorite Soufflé.
On the “blue collar” thing, I think there’s another aspect to Trump supporters identifying with Trump, and that’s that Trump has never “fit in” with the elite (despite desperately wanting to). I suspect for the most part it’s because Trump is a crude creep, but I’m sure many Trump supporters think it’s one of those “he uses the wrong fork at dinner” situations that are so beloved in popular culture. In other words, they see Trump as like the Beverly Hillbillies, or King Ralph, or the Delta Chis in Animal House, or one of the countless other examples of “Slobs vs. Snobs” stories.
There is a kernel of truth there, in that Trump really is a slob, and elite circles have never really wholly embraced him, but there are non-snobbish reasons for that, and of course Trump himself grew up in elite circles, he’s hardly an outsider.
He didn’t really grow up in elite circles though. Rich, for sure, but elite, no.
He’s always confused the two, as in that eyeball-searing solid gold Trump Tower apartment. He thinks the expensiveness makes it elite. Dear god no, you silly little man, not even close.
The Kennedys did a VASTLY better job of translating rich to elite over the generations, but Don is stuck. Princess Ivanka kind of managed to fake it for a few years, before the president mistake, but that’s blown to smithereens now.
I had kind of a ringside seat for viewing the elite when I was growing up, because of that tiny girls’ school I went to that I’ve mentioned a few times. My family was (or had been) upwardly mobile and also mobile from small town Iowa to New York/Princeton, but there was some rock solid elite at that school. There was a DuPont, there was a cousin of Nelson Rockefeller’s, there was an Oppenheimer (different kind of elite, but still), there was a connection to the Roosevelts. Bob Mueller went to the boys’ school on the other side of town. I know some elite and Solid Gold Don is not of them.
KBP @#7:
Precisely the sort of family I had (on my mother’s side). Captain Bonespurs-Pussygrabber would have had nothing but their contempt and derision.
iknklast @#8:
Well, they’ve been suckered and they don’t know it; or suckered, know it, but don’t want to admit it – even to themselves. Then along came Hilllary Clinton calling them ‘deplorables’, and they had no trouble finding reasons to vote for Trump. As someone in the media asked re Nixon – as depicted rather bleary in a photo with 5-o’clock shadow all over his face: “Would you buy a used car from this man?”
Getting the best of any car dealer, new or used, is important in most male circles that I know anything about. They dumped Nixon and pulled the chain on him; no worries.
Actually, Omar, the ones Clinton called deplorables had no trouble finding reasons to vote for Trump long before that. They are the true believers, the ones that trashed the capital. Though I imagine there are some who just love the idea of breaking things.
James, #9:
What kind of monster shoots bears that have learnt to ride horses?