“This is a guy that was all man,” Donald Trump said of Arnold Palmer at a rally last week. “This man was strong and tough, and … when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there and they said, ‘Oh, my God, that’s unbelievable.’”
Just another instance of Trump's weirdness? Definitely, and talking about such things diverts attention from his open declarations that he will end democracy and freedom in the United States and set up a fascist regime. But, at a deeper level, it points towards the key to understanding how millions of Americans have been attracted to an anti-American authoritarian movement.
Trump has often asserted that his own male member is, as he says in other contexts, “yuuge.” In 2016, to cite one of the many examples, he boasted, “I don’t need Viagra; I need a pill to make my erection go down.”
A man feeling the need to brag about the size of his penis and allege that other men’s organs are small, as Trump often does, constitutes a prima facie case that he is insecure about his own manhood. Men who fear that they are fake men accuse other men of being fake men.
A man who presents himself as “cocksure” is highly likely to be cock unsure.
Two nights before he delivered his treatise on naked golfers, at the Al Smith Dinner, with a beaming Cardinal Dolan looking on approvingly, Trump said of white men who support Kamala Harris, “their wives and their wives’ lovers are all voting for me,” meaning that men who would vote for a woman are not “real men,” so their wives cuckold them.
The Republican nominee’s latest, richest, and highest leaping cheerleader shares his view that real men have large sexual organs and must dominate women. In July 2023, Elon Musk called Mark Zuckerberg a “cuck” and challenged him to a “literal dick measuring contest,” adding a measuring tape emoji.
Trump’s fixations on penis size and “scoring” with numerous women are among the many symptoms indicating that he is afflicted with a psychological disorder that is not listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders but should be. It is essential to understanding the nature of Trump’s madness . . . and much of the worst in human history. I call it Acute Masculine Insecurity Disorder (AMID). Despicable self-aggrandizement is one of the symptoms with which a man affected by this disorder most frequently presents. And it is the principal energy source for the current growth of fascism.
To paraphrase Theodore Roosevelt (also a classic case of AMID), Trump’s life can be summed up as: “I Speak Loudly Because I’m Terrified that My Stick Isn’t Big.”
Eruptions of hypermasculinity—which is to say, faux masculinity—are reactions against perceived threats to the vertical binary of ♂ > ♀ and produce a rise in the popularity of authoritarianism. As women—and other categories assigned to the female position in power relationships—have moved towards equality, those who have counted on an impenetrable floor beneath them (which is also the ceiling above women and others designated as inferior) have become hyper-anxious.
“Build the Wall!” really means “Rebuild the Floor!”
Feminism is not about women dominating men; it is about equality between the sexes. Simple as that sounds, it is the most radical concept in the recorded history of our species:
The “opposite sex” is not opposite: Male and female are closer to synonyms than antonyms.
Accepting that fact would take us a long way toward solving many of our problems.
Insecure men see sexual equality as taking something away from them. That something is the Kevlar covering of unquestioned—unquestionable—male superiority. Without it, they feel exposed, defenseless against all their internal fears of inadequacy. In their minds, equality with women is indistinguishable from dominance by women. It terrifies them, and in the United States, since 2016, they have flocked to the standard of a person whose whole life has been driven by that terror.
A “strongman” is invariably a weak man. Far from a self-made man, he is a self-made-up man. As he play-acts at being a “Real Man,” his masculine-insecure followers pretend to be him.
Psychologist Mary Trump, the former President’s niece, rightly says that many people who follow him do not identify with his “‘strength,’ his ‘macho’ … Rather, “they identify with his weakness, with the fact that this guy’s a loser … and they identify with the fact that he gets away with everything. … They love who he hates.”
It is ironic in the extreme that the followers in these movements seek a Leader who will provide for them and protect them, tell them what to think (like Ilsa in Casablanca saying to Rick, “You’ll have to think for both of us, for all of us”), what is true and what is false, who is the cause of their problems, and so on. In seeking to be subordinated to a man, they put themselves in the traditional position of a woman. They fancy that the “masculine” glow of the Leader will transform them into “real men” — manhood by association. These followers identify as men, but in their own binary worldview, the appropriate pronouns for them to place below their names are “(she/her/hers).”
In their desperate quest to “get some balls,” these insecure males symbolically self-castrate, place their severed testicles on a gold platter, drop to their knees, and present them to their unquestioned Supreme Leader.
The “strongman” looks at men eager to submit to him as willingly taking on what he and they assume to be the role of women. He has utter contempt for them.
In an authoritarian regime, there is only one “Man” — the Leader. Everyone else is placed in the subservient position traditionally seen as the place of women.
We must renovate our social dwelling. What those who are concerned that they will lose the floor on which they and people in similar circumstances have for so long depended for support need to realize is that there are only two building plans, neither of which will have the floor/ceiling where they want it:
Choose an authoritarian as the contractor to rebuild the cracking floor that has kept you above other categories of people, and you will find that when he has finished the job, he has built a very sturdy floor but has raised it so high that he is the only one above it and it is now a ceiling for you as well as those you sought to keep below you.
Choose a lower-case-d democrat as the contractor to make your renovations and you will find that when s/he has finished the job, s/he has lowered the floor to the point that it is beneath everyone and there is no ceiling above anyone.
