Modesty, self-effacement, loyalty to team used to be classic American male virtues. Then came Donald Trump.
The House impeachment and Senate trial of Donald Trump have offered good occasion to listen to and understand the minds of his defenders. Even people who dislike parts of his character or record invoke certain words again and again to describe the parts they do like.
In interviews and emails, these backers tell me they regard Trump as “strong.” His battles with adversaries reveal him as “tough.” What in a conventional light looks outrageous—the bragging, the insults, the defiance, the rule-skirting, the shredding of familiar standards of how a president should act—in this more sympathetic light looks like charisma. It gives him the aura of “a winner.”
To put a fine point on it, his backers regard him as a real man—possessed of a virility that flows not in spite of his excesses but because of them. In these minds, Trump represents a certain ideal of male power in exaggerated form.
To a skeptic, this realization—that partisans behold Trump as a symbol of masculine virtue—is a curiosity, to put it mildly. To put it less mildly: the notion of Trump as the ideal of American manhood is radically disorienting.
Never mind what one thinks of trade wars, or immigration, or whether his Ukraine intervention meets the criminal standard of a quid pro quo. Simply on stylistic grounds, Trump represents the opposite of the traditional 20th century masculine ideal, as mythologized on movie screens, on battlefields, in athletic stadiums. So the transformation in the American mind—or at least in the conservative mind--of what it means to be a strong leader and a strong man counts as one of the more profound cultural and political shifts of the past generation. The impeachment battle puts this underappreciated shift in an especially sharp light.
In the 20th century tradition, strong men were supposed to be laconic, stoical, self-effacing. They might secretly enjoy publicity but the standard pose was to feign indifference or even disdain. Trump, by contrast, is flamboyant, boastful, desperate for acclaim, loud in protest when he doesn’t get it.
In the 20th century tradition, strong men didn’t complain about their circumstances. Trump is relentless in whining about his burdens, including the claim that he has been treated more unfairly than any president in history.
In the 20th century tradition, strong men were supposed to elevate team and cause above self. Trump’s presidency has been consistent with the cult-of-personality pledge he made in his 2016 GOP acceptance speech, “I alone can fix it.” Strong men, likewise, are supposed to show self-discipline in all aspects of life. Trump celebrates impulsiveness and free-roaming appetites in every arena, from his tweetstorms that often come at a hundred bursts or more a day, to his abundant record of extramarital affairs, to his expanding physical girth.
Above all, the American Man of myth, in years past, had a complex relationship with violence. He was ready to use it, as in countless war movies and Westerns—but usually with an air of last-resort reluctance.
Trump, by contrast, has made rhetorical celebration of violence one of his signatures. To the cheers of supporters, he has urged security goons to get rough with protesters at rallies. In taunting schoolyard language, he has bragged about the power of U.S. nuclear arsenal and his readiness to use it in confrontations with North Korea.
Most breathtakingly, Trump weighed in on behalf of court-martialed Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, who was accused of killing a prisoner of war with a hunting knife and then posing for a photo with the body. “We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill,” Trump tweeted in October about Gallagher, who he invited and met with over New Year’s at Mar-a-Lago.
What to make of this all? One obvious point to note about Trump repudiating the 20th century ideal of American manhood is that it is no longer the 20th century. But there is a paradox: Trump’s movement draws on nostalgia for a lost era, even as he personally represents a highly distorted version of the old virtues.
For insight, I checked in this week with three well-known authors who in different ways have made themselves authorities on these old virtues. I worked with all three in my years at the Washington Post. All three have won the Pulitzer Prize.
David Maraniss wrote a best-selling biography of legendary football coach Vince Lombardi. Rick Atkinson has written histories of World War II and the Revolutionary War, with special emphasis on illuminating the characters of generals and average soldiers alike. Glenn Frankel has written histories of two classic Westerns—“The Searchers” and “High Noon”—and their iconic male stars, John Wayne and Gary Cooper.
Their subjects might be quite different but one theme is the same. All three wrote about notions of virtue, leadership, and success as it exists in American history and in American myth.
“The contradiction,” Maraniss told me, “is that the people who are so adoring of Trump’s breaking of every norm and code of honor will still uphold and believe in that model of a better and innocent past.”
That includes Trump himself. In the 2016 campaign he gave an interview to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of the Washington Post in which he talked at length about supposedly seeing Lombardi in action personally as a young man. As recounted by Trump, Lombardi came in a room and gained the loyalty of much larger and more powerful players by terrorizing them with anger.
“He came in, screaming, into this place,” Trump said. “And screaming at one of these guys who was three times bigger than him, literally. And very physical, grabbing him by the shirt.
“And I said, ‘wow,’” Trump added. “And I realized the only way Vince Lombardi got away with that was because he won. This was after he had won so much, OK?”
Lombardi died in 1970 when Trump was 23, and Maraniss is skeptical the encounter ever happened—“another Trump fable,” he said.
He is even more certain that Trump and Lombardi have nothing in common. “He wouldn’t have lasted a day with Lombardi,” Maraniss said of the president. “He was obsessed with winning but he was even more obsessed with excellence.”
Lombardi punished players for cheating even if referees didn’t see it. He loathed people who placed personal ego over team. Above all, he revered tradition and respect for institutions—quite different than a politician whose rise has been fueled by popular mistrust and contempt for institutions.
The theme of this column in one sense is uncomfortable. The traits all three writers extol—a willingness to stand firm for right over wrong, selfless struggle, physical and moral courage—are universal virtues, not masculine ones. We would wish them for daughters no less than sons.
In the context of politics, however, the element of gender can’t be ignored. Starting 50 years ago, the conservative movement was powered in part by backlash against cultural changes that included the empowerment of women. In the 1970s, conservatives campaigned against bra-burners and the Equal Rights Amendment. In the 1990s, they recoiled at the unelected power of first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. In 2016, Trump won an Electoral College victory against her in a race that showed that gender—no less than race and class—remains a central fact of American politics.
Those fault lines in American culture, in addition to making politics more divisive, have shredded what once were almost universal understandings of what constituted strength and virtue.
World War II leaders like Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall, Atkinson said, in their core values were linear descendants of George Washington and other founders. They all believed (even if they didn’t always live up to) a similar moral code: “belief in an ideal greater than self,” responsibility to others, as well as “a becoming modesty” in self and a “tendency to deplore braggadocio” in others.
In Trump, by contrast, Atkinson sees a “physical coward” who avoided Vietnam-era military service through a dubious claim of bone spurs, yet has no compunction toward undermining the military code of honor in the Gallagher case and “disparaging people who served honorably.”
That some solid base of Trump supporters finds his example appealing, Atkinson said, reflects “some erosion of our common standard of the beau ideal of American manhood.”
Frankel notes that the screen heroes he wrote about were different than Trump in a key sense. They are usually “reluctant heroes,” who find themselves in danger not by choice but by circumstance and “intuitively know the difference between right and wrong.”
“For Trump,” Frankel asserted, “There is no right and wrong,” only a transactional code that always leaves room to maneuver for advantage.
But he added that the Trump mythology is not entirely different than Hollywood’s Western mythology, featuring solitary figures who refuse to bend to conventional mores.
Beyond myth, he notes, is reality; the real-life John Wayne looked with disapproval at the rapid changes in American culture, and likely would have felt at home in the Trump movement. Little wonder that in 2016, Trump made an appearance at Wayne’s Iowa birthplace, and won the endorsement of his daughter.
“Wayne,” Frankel said, “had contempt for his enemies, too.”
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