WASHINGTON: He courted young, angry men during his presidential campaign. Now Donald Trump is back in the White House, where he and his acolytes are applying what they see as a decidedly masculine stamp on all they do.
Seeking a return to traditional gender norms, the new administration is making a big show of centering men — from Elon Musk declaring that “testosterone rocks!” to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth doing push-ups to redefining government acronyms from a male perspective.
And the push goes well beyond the performative, with the fist-pumping Trump moving to sign executive orders eroding health care access for transgender people and declaring the country will recognize only two genders — men and women — in his first days in office.
Musk, Trump’s top donor and most powerful ally, whom the president has tapped to lead government cuts and, specifically, to slash programs targeting racism and inequality, has repeatedly been at the vanguard of the push to make America manly again.
The billionaire Tesla and SpaceX boss on Wednesday warned of what he said were risks facing men from policies that seek to combat discrimination.
In a videoconference, he offered the bizarre-sounding suggestion that an artificial intelligence-based program designed to promote “diversity at all costs” could even “decide that there were too many men in power and execute them. So problem solved.”
The world’s richest person, Musk also posted a message on his X platform saying “Testosterone rocks.”
New Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, who has criticized the presence of women in combat roles and vowed to bring “warrior culture” back, on Friday shared photos of himself jogging and exercising with US troops on a snowy path in Poland.
Hegseth, a military veteran, said he had done five series of 47 pushups — a reference to Trump as the 47th American president.
The Trump administration has even imposed a male-centric stamp on some government acronyms.
A warning system for pilots known as NOTAM, for “Notice to Air Missions” has been changed officially to the “Notice to Airmen.”
Method in maleness
There is a method to all this maleness, experts say.
“The emphasis on a rigid gender binary is an outgrowth of a nostalgic patriarchy that wants to return to a mid-20th century understanding of gender relations, with white, heterosexual men at the pinnacle of a hierarchical identity pyramid,” said Karrin Anderson, a communications professor at Colorado State University.
Trump, of course, is at the heart of the movement.
Shortly after his return to power on January 20, the president ordered an end to passports with a gender-neutral “X” option and moved to restrict gender transition procedures for people under the age of 19.
The 78-year-old billionaire, who has promised to “protect” women “whether the women like it or not,” also signed an order banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports events.
At the signing event, he surrounded himself with women and young girls.
His administration even went so far as to scrub all references to transgender and queer people from the National Park Service-administered website for a monument to the 1969 Stonewall riots, a foundational moment in the struggle for LGBTQ rights.
The approach can take on a religious hue, with Trump not averse to presenting himself as a providential emissary from God. Newly confirmed health minister Robert F. Kennedy Jr. compared the president on Thursday to “a man on a white horse” arriving at a gallop to save America.
‘Promoting healthy masculinity’
“The revitalization of American masculinity is our nation’s most pressing need,” Jim Daly of the conservative evangelical group Focus on the Family said last month.
Writing in the Washington Examiner, he said that Trump, like conservative US president Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, was promoting what he called “healthy masculinity.”
With Reagan’s portrait hanging in the Oval Office, it has been under the gaze of the former Western movie actor that Trump deploys his thick black marker to sign orders that, Anderson says, confirm his muscular approach to power.
“By bypassing Congress and flouting Constitutional checks and balances,” she said, “Trump demonstrates his might by exercising masculinized, autocratic authority rather than engaging in collaborative, democratic decision-making.”
Trump 2.0 is not entirely an old boys club, however.
While the Republican president has named a male-dominated cabinet, he has brought in more women than during his first term, some in strategic positions.
His new chief of staff Susie Wiles — whom Trump calls “the ice maiden” for her coolness under fire — is the first woman in that influential post.
