Illustration: Jim Cooke/GMG
In early 2018, during a rare interview with Trump Senior Policy Adviser Stephen Miller, CNN host Jake Tapper was disgusted enough to cut the mic. Miller had accused CNN of airing “24 hours of negative, anti-Trump, hysterical coverage” which he said led to “some embarrassing false reporting.” Miller was vehement and clearly angry at Tapper, who had redirected what was meant to be an interview about Steve Bannon to an indictment of Trump’s anti-immigrant policies.
As Miller ranted, Tapper interjected, “I think the viewers right now can ascertain who’s hysterical,” before repeatedly asking Miller to “calm down” and to “settle down.” In the remaining several minutes, Miller continued his offensive, attempting to paint the administration as an innocent victim of false reports and network bias, invoking the “hysterical” characterization one more time. Finally, Tapper had enough. “I think I have wasted enough of my viewers’ time,” he said, before turning to the camera and delivering a brief about the call for then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ resignation.
I have watched this video several times in the nearly three years since it’s aired. Not just because it gives me pleasure to see the architect of the administration’s most hateful policies receive a deserved verbal smackdown from a CNN anchor, but because I find it instructive. Miller’s anger is, as Tapper notes, orchestrated. It’s designed to deflect and to please the president and projects particularly male posturing that bluster equates to power. He invokes that age-old, highly gendered threat—“hysterical”—as a means of painting Tapper’s reasonable questions as unhinged and untrustworthy. He taps into a distinctly gendered view that may seem new in its ubiquity, as deployed by his boss and acolytes, but it is so recognizable—on television, on Twitter, on Reddit, and via Trump’s campaign—because it is incredibly archaic.
Feminists have observed for half a century that Americans are living under patriarchy, a system baked into the foundation of the country by a collection of men whose very conception of freedom was exclusionary and oppressive of women and people of color by its very nature. As the Marxist feminist Kate Millett wrote of race and gender in her seminal 1970 text Sexual Politics, “The subordinated group has inadequate redress through existing political institutions, and is deterred thereby from organizing into conventional political struggle and opposition.”
But it’s painfully clear that in the last several years, the contours of patriarchy have shifted into an ominous mass retrograde, most obviously represented by the man currently enjoying the spoils of the presidency. Trump’s vision of manhood—hetero-supremacist and rigidly cis male—is most dangerous to everyone unlike him (which is to say, women and people of color). His interpretation of what it is to be a strong man manifests itself in terrifying and, frankly, pathetic impulses to rage. Bluster, vengefulness, cruelty, and forcible dominance, with a hefty dollop of pettiness, heighten the danger he invokes. His speech delivery is congruous with how he enacts his power—bullying, abusive, and preying on what he perceives as weakness. The hate he projects in his speeches—as when he famously mocked the disability of a New York Times reporter—is exactly how he administers the cruelty of his policies.
This performance of masculinity has emboldened its most decaying practitioners to emerge from the shadows. Trump’s brand of masculinity is the barm scum flavoring the tenor of all that bears down upon America—pandemic, climate change, dreadfully encroaching election—and it has poisoned the most extremist elements of society. It has enabled and encouraged the angry young white men who have learned their hateful values from echo-chamber websites to terrorize the streets as armed vigilantes, some driven to kill like many of their predecessors so threatened by the specter of women and those to which they feel entitled but are unable to attain. And so Trump’s performance of blustery power, a facade built entirely to distract from the fact that he is a man of neither substance nor character, resonates with these men across the country, ensuring that his interpretation of masculinity bears down on every aspect of public life. And it asserts its cultural dominance as a kind of collective blow every time Trump hits send on a hateful tweet or appears on television to sputter through his endless vitriol.
The positive element of the Trumpist iteration of masculinity is that it is narrow and lacking imagination; it is a blunt-force-trauma existence, where physical might and intimidation substitutes for an actualized sense of self. But this limitedness is also what makes it so dangerous, not just because it displays an innate disdain for women and nonbinary people but because it rejects broader renditions of masculine expressions by men themselves—the line is clear from the petty slurs (“cuck,” “Chad”) of incel culture to the self-styled alphaness of hate groups like the Proud Boys, their physical assertion of might and brolicness manifesting a violent, masturbatory fever dream for the hordes of woman-hating nerds who have been radicalized by the internet.
But Trump is not the genesis of this revitalized genre of cruel masculinity—he is simply its loudest avatar. The backlash against feminist gains and, more generally, Barack Obama’s presidency, has been brewing on the internet and social media for more than a decade. Trump is the highest-profile man to seize onto the internet as a way to organize this modern, violent masculinity, but this movement was coalescing long before his presidency. Its recent history can be neatly traced back to the 2014 origins of Gamergate, loosely defined as a sexist, targeted attack on prominent women in tech and journalism, sparked by a sexist, targeted attack on a woman, Zoe Quinn (which, circuitously, led back to Jezebel’s sister site Kotaku). This anger snowballed to the point that women journalists—including here at Jezebel—faced reasonable and life-upending doxing and swatting, alongside credible threats of rape and murder, by an anonymous, amorphous army of misogynists. This was the publicized manifestation of what Black women, like the writer and media critic Sydette Harry, had been subjected to on the internet, and had been warning about, for years.
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