Admittedly, the latest iteration of our phallocentric presidential politics began with Barack Obama mocking Donald Trump’s frail masculinity during the Democratic National Convention last summer.
In one deft move, Obama combined a witty observation about Trump’s preoccupation with the size of his rallies with hand gestures that the raucous crowd interpreted as a reference to the former president’s bragging about the size of his penis during the 2016 Republican primary.
In an exchange with then-rival Sen. Marco Rubio, Trump denied that the size of his hands indicated any sexual inadequacy on his part. “Look at these hands, are they little hands?” Trump said to a stunned but thoroughly excited nation watching the debate on television. “And he referred to my hands: ‘If they are small, something else must be small.’ I assure you there is no problem. I guarantee it.”
It was a childish insult that a bigger man – and certainly any woman – would have dismissed as too stupid and degrading to engage in, but not Trump.
The Republican Party leader was more than eager to become the first presidential candidate in history to feel insecure enough to assure voters that he had enough “big penis energy” to lead America into any post-coital future he could imagine imagine.
Of course, trash talk on this raunchy and epic level became the most memorable exchange of the Republican primary. It cemented Trump’s reputation as an unabashedly vulgar and brazen destroyer of political and cultural taboos, willing to say and do anything to prove he was “a man’s man in a man’s world.”
Months after winning the Republican nomination, an Access Hollywood tape of Trump casually bragging about grabbing women’s genitals without a formal invitation was leaked, almost dooming his presidential bid before the end.
For the first time, Trump’s Houdini-like ability to talk his way out of trouble became obvious to all. His absurd claim that the decade-old tape was “locker room banter” cemented his reputation as “the guy” without threatening the votes of his most moralistic supporters, white evangelicals.
During Trump’s presidency, news came to lithe of his affair with Stormy Daniels, an adult film star to whom he had secretly paid money years earlier. The most inappropriate details – including breaking news about the shape and size of his manhood – have turned Trump into fodder for late-night comedians.
But Trump’s humiliation did not lead to a period of self-reflection and withdrawal from reality. The rhetoric of domination and policies reflecting the president’s own brutal masculinity became the basis of his presidential and legislative agenda.
While his three Supreme Court nominees are currently contributing to a majority that routinely torches civil liberties, minority rights, and women’s rights, Trump is most himself, beating his chest over the presence of both undocumented and documented migrants in the country. He convinced millions of his MAGA cohorts to believe that there was nothing more manly than oppressing those weaker than himself.
Trump systematically taught them to believe a provable lie – that he won the 2020 presidential election. Their fury at Trump’s fraudulent second term was inconsolable. Trump’s cynicism and disregard for the truth, even as his lies threatened the country he swore to protect, was unprecedented.
On January 6, 2021, Trump convinced thousands of his supporters to oppose the peaceful transfer of power by throwing their own bodies to protest the marble pillars of the only democracy most of them have ever known. They gladly obeyed his command. Once again, he was their alpha male hero in a country without constitutional power.
Trump made them love authoritarianism and even make them question whether their grandparents and great-grandparents fought on the right side during World War II. “What’s wrong with fascism if it has a familiar face?” the most intellectually astute among them began to ask for thanks for Trump’s mutilation of history.
He convinced them once again that he was a “man’s man” – an apex predator who, if given a second term, would become dictator for a day; he could then rid the country of his favorite made-up bogeymen: the Biden crime family, Nancy Pelosi, the Obamas, the enemy within, radical leftist lunatics, the liberal media, transsexual surgeries performed during recess, mandatory tampons in men’s prisons, legal immigration, dogs and cats living together, and abortion until the first day of primary school.
In recent weeks, mockery of his fascination with Hannibal Lecter has forced Trump to become nostalgic for more sympathetic cultural figures during the final stretch of the 2024 campaign, especially in Pennsylvania, where the election could be won or lost.
At a rally in Latrobe, Trump told a long and nonsensical story that went on and on for 11 minutes about the region’s favorite son, the overdue golfing great Arnold Palmer. Feeling he was losing the audience with his less than gripping tale of Palmer’s greatness, Trump decided it was time to drag the golfer out of the grave by his genitals and turn him into a MAGA prop.
“He’s a guy who was all human,” Trump said with a giddy, voyeuristic laugh that was both complementary and somehow menacing. “When I was in the shower with the other pros, they came out and said, ‘Oh my God, this is unbelievable.’”
This was the signal for laughter for the men on the platform, the men behind it, and the men throughout the rally site. It took 12 dismal minutes to get to this point. Trump once again spoke about “manliness” in his distinctive penis-sized language. It wasn’t coded. It was an interpersonal language. It was like the Village People song “YMCA” that Trump loves – an uncompromising anthem of masculinity without any gay overtones.
When it comes to Trump, character content boils down to one measure – whether someone has a penis or not – the bigger the better and none of this “all penises are created equal” nonsense.
Trump could revel in his “manliness” in Latrobe again because no one at his rallies remembers what Stormy Daniels said about his manhood. Even if they remembered her lively description and the late-night laughter that accompanied it, they don’t believe it. Little Marco’s petty taunts also make no sense to them
Trump fans not impressed by ‘false masculinity’ They laugh at Vice President Kamala Harris’s promise to shoot anyone who breaks into her home using a Glock she has owned for years. According to them, she is just a hypocritical Democrat. Maybe he’s even “overcompensating” for not being the guy to deal with a would-be intruder with or without a gun.
They also didn’t miss the fact that he was making fun of the scale of Trump’s rallies. They see themselves as the vanguard of a growing movement, not a shrinking one.
In this phallocentric period of American history, when truth is routinely turned upside down, nothing makes more sense than being continually fascinated by the energy of Donald J. Trump’s petite penis. What could be more macho than being a sore loser, bent on insurrection?
