We're living through the last weeks of Trump's bumbling presidency, and for some reason, debating his masculinity.
After four years of scandal, foreign interference, a contested election, a literal attempted coup led by the losing candidate's supporters, and the mass exile of the president himself from multiple social media platforms, Fox News asked the burning question that's obviously haunting all of America: Does Trump feel emasculated?
During a Monday segment on Fox News, anchor Bill Hemmer asked the Trump campaign's national press secretary Hogan Gidley if the president felt "emasculated" following his ban from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, and other social media sites. Gidley assured Hemmer that Trump is in fact the manliest of men to hold office.
"I wouldn't say emasculated," Gidley claimed. "The most masculine person to ever hold the White House is the president of the United States."
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The question was bizarre and seemingly unnecessary given the more pressing matters that mar the last days of the Trump administration, like the rioters who stormed the Capitol last week. But Trump has long fed the toxic masculinity that his extremist supporters embrace. Trump's most loyal supporters are overwhelmingly men, and a 2020 survey by the right-leaning think tank American Enterprise Institute concluded that self-described "completely masculine" men believed Trump had a strategy to deal with COVID-19. The president's blatant misogyny and history of alleged sexual misconduct only fueled the increasingly violent alt-right, which is no surprise given that traditional masculinity is one of the tenets of white nationalism.
That being said, it was still a pretty weird question to ask.
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And Twitter users were quick to point out that while Trump may have support from self-identified manly men, there were multiple past presidents who were more stereotypically masculine.
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Gidly hinted at the president starting "his own entity" to directly compete with the social media platforms that banned him. He did not mention whether it would be a masculine site for masculine men.
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