What kind of man is President Donald Trump?
Ask any heterosexual woman and she’ll tell you she has dated at least one loser at some point. If we’re paying attention, we learn to pick up on cues that help us avoid making the same mistake again, like the guy who yells at Uber drivers or the one who asks if “you really need that” second donut.
And though we may have broken away from out-ofdate definitions of traditional masculinity, evolution is a fairly powerful force that even the most progressive among us can’t totally avoid.
Long-held evolutionary theory on the so-called “laws of attraction” among heterosexuals suggest that women select their male mates based on fairly prosaic biological and situational needs — among other things, the desire to be protected, both from predators and environmental dangers.
One hundred millennia ago, those dangers might have included an ice storm, or a pack of saber-toothed cats.
Today, those dangers include a deadly pandemic that has taken the lives of more than 210,000 Americans and over a million around the globe.
Which forces us to ask the question, what kind of man is Donald J. Trump?
For a guy whose appeal has been predicated on a cartoonish narrative of toughguy machismo — laughable considering his well-documented aversion to icky things like germs and sacrifice — it’s hard to imagine a more ill-suited protector of the women, children and men of 2020 America.
Such is his cultivated, well-worn, crackling patina of manliness that Trump attracts the types of far-right groups, like the Proud Boys, who explicitly identify as “Western chauvinists.” His sycophants often refer to him unironically as “manly,” while maligning his detractors — even if they’re United States generals — as “snowflakes.” One early alt-right supporter even liked to refer to Trump as “daddy.”
Of course, the well-known things that make Trump the worst kind of man — bragging about grabbing women’s genitals, multiple allegations of sexual assault and rape, sexist views of gender roles, attacks on women’s appearance — simply bolster the caricature of his bloated masculinity.
That, along with his super-manly and not at all pathologically insecure demand for adoration, is why seemingly grown men like Rep. Matt Gaetz post emasculated tweets like this in the wake of Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis: “President Trump won’t have to recover from COVID. COVID will have to recover from President Trump.”
That’s right: Real men don’t eat quiche or feel pain, they suck up to other men for their approval on Twitter.
The sad, self-promotional branding is, like everything else in Trump-world, a fakeout, a distraction, a sleight of hand. It’s designed to make you judge his so-called “manliness” on his coarsened image, a staged WWE smack-down, his petty insults and his followers’ unironic projections.
And it’s designed to obscure Trump’s obvious evolutionary defects. Because, in truth, whether in the Paleolithic period or America circa now, he is terrible at being a man.
What kind of man, for example, puts his own family at risk during a global pandemic, endangering his wife, kids and grandkids by flouting mask rules and social distancing requirements?
What kind of man puts his co-workers and friends at risk, failing to tell them that he’s been diagnosed with a deadly infectious disease?
What kind of man refuses help from the Centers for Disease Control to conduct contract tracing in the White House, to protect the people he works with?
What kind of man puts the Secret Service at risk by demanding they drive him around, while infected with COVID-19, so he can wave to supporters?
What kind of man belittles the deaths of 210,000 Americans by telling the rest of us not to be afraid of it, insisting he feels better than he has in 20 years?
What kind of man arrives back home, still infected, and proudly takes off his mask for the cameras?
This “man” is no protector. He didn’t protect those closest to him. He didn’t even protect himself. He certainly can’t protect the rest of us.
The version of masculinity he and his supporters like to project is not only an outdated affront to society, it’s also, most notably, a facade. It masks a dangerous truth, which is that Trump is feckless, cowardly and utterly unevolved. As men go, he might be a hero to the Proud Boys and the boys with daddy issues, but to the rest of us, he fails at the most basic level.