“Pull the pin on me and throw me into the U.S. “I’m a grenade,” Lucas Kunce told an audience not long ago. House race, trundled a wheelbarrow full of paper into the forest, then shot at it as viewers realized he was turning “Nancy Pelosi’s Plan for America” into a cloud of confetti and smoke. In Georgia, Mike Collins, a Republican in a U.S.
During the Super Bowl, Senate candidate Jim Lamon of Arizona ran an ad that was styled to look like an old western movie and starred himself as a gun-twirling sheriff firing at a sheepish actor dressed to resemble Joe Biden. In political races nationwide this year, Republicans are clamoring to get the snarl and the swagger just right as they seek to out-Trump one another. Trump’s case, a pantomime of aggrieved aggression: the curled lip, the exaggerated snarl.”
… Contemporary manliness is increasingly defined by display - in Mr. Many have posited that Trump was old-school, taking us back to the days of John Wayne and guys-only steak dinners, but cultural critic Susan Faludi - author of “ Stiffed,” “ Backlash” and other books on gender - argued persuasively in a 2020 New York Times opinion piece that, no, Trump introduced us to a new, Internet-age masculinity, a “Potemkin patriarchy” specially tailored for “an image-based, sensation-saturated and very modern entertainment economy. Trump said of the Islamic State, “I’m gonna bomb the s- out of them,” and when football player Colin Kaepernick took a knee, Trump pronounced, “Wouldn’t you like to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a b- off the field right now, out? He’s fired.’ ”Īmerican politicians have almost always been obliged to display manliness to win elections, but our 45th president heightened masculinity to absurd, comic-book levels. Greitens is, of course, taking cues from the elder Donald Trump, who gave us all a master class in unbridled machismo.
This Rural Liberal Set Out to Talk to His Pro-Trump Neighbors