![]() They, too, could engage in cruelty and rebrand it as a proud stance against political correctness. They, too, could be free to indulge their wants with impunity. They, too, might be spared the inconvenience of obligation to other people. Part of Trump’s promise to voters, in 2016 and again in 2020, was that they might be liberated not by his virtues, but by his vices. And he turned his own entitlements into a gaudy sales pitch. Trump used his maleness in roughly the same way that he used his whiteness: as permission. And it assumed, furthermore, that grabbing was its right: You can do anything. The masculinity that he embodied through his presidency was entirely self-referential. Trump’s sense of manliness has excised the element of duty. That is one more norm Trump has trampled during his years as president. When manliness is summoned as a claim to authority, it typically involves an acknowledgment of obligation: a with-great-power-comes-great-responsibility idea that is there for the benefit, ostensibly, of those who have not had the good fortune to have been born male. Read: How Americans became part of the Trump family “You can do anything.” He turned that brag into a core principle of his political movement. “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” Trump informed Billy Bush in the video. And it foreshadowed what it would feel like for a country-and a planet-to live at the mercy of one man’s whims. The tape’s revelations led directly to the events that followed Trump’s inauguration: the marches, populated by people wearing “pussy hats,” protesting the new president. The video captured not only Trump’s misogyny, but also the mechanics of his mind: its abiding self-interest, its drive for dominance, its assumption that politics, like life, is little more than a string of arid transactions. The Access Hollywood tape, in retrospect, was an omen. With pussy it began to pussy it has returned. ![]() Trump’s invocations of pussy-the one a boast, the other a threat-make fitting bookends to a presidency shaped by malignant masculinity. And “patriot or pussy,” with its tragicomic essentialism, now puts that era in stark relief. The line rivals “Make America great again” as the defining motto of the Trump era. “Grab ’em by the pussy,” Trump had bragged of his treatment of women, in a recording made public just before the 2016 presidential election. The ultimatum was, like so many aspects of Trumpism, simultaneously cartoonish and dangerous. ![]() Here is how the president, The New York Times reported this week, tried to persuade his vice president to submit to his preferred reality: “You can either go down in history as a patriot, or you can go down in history as a pussy.” And he has resorted to bullying in his effort to force others to join his war on the electorate. He has tried, most recently, to steal back the presidential election he lost (democracy, which acknowledges the feelings of other people, is unfortunately feminine). Donald Trump is a man, and he has gone to great lengths to prove it. ![]()
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