As much as I’d like to get back to my series on Who Is This Guy Who Owns 3% Of The Giants And Precisely What Real Estate Does He Own, well, there’s politics afoot. This particular situation started when Fox News asked a Trump campaign press secretary a stupid question, but it really got going when he gave a phenomenally stupid answer.
I mean, you can use logic to argue with that if you want. You won’t get anywhere, but it’s pretty easy: Ulysses Grant was the winning general in the Civil War; Dwight Eisenhower was Supreme Allied Commander in Europe for the last two years of World War II, a time period which included, for example, D-Day; Theodore Roosevelt put together a cavalry outfit just so he could fight in the Spanish-American War and a couple decades later, while giving a speech, got shot — with a bullet that came out of a gun — and then finished giving that speech. If manliness has any meaning (debatable!), then Trump, who faked bone spurs to get out of Vietnam, is nowhere near the top of the list.
But Gidley’s point isn’t about logic. It is utterly irrelevant whether what he says is “factually true” or whatever. Because the core of Trump support is that Donald Trump is a lifestyle brand. A person does not support Donald Trump because he says and does good things. The things he says and does are good because it is Donald Trump saying and doing them, and therefore they must be.
So when Hogan Gidley — utility infielder on the Padres-ass name, by the way — states that Trump is the apotheosis of masculinity, understand what he’s actually saying. Masculinity is good, and Trump is all good things; therefore, Trump is the exemplar of masculinity.
Being masculine as a concept has no intrinsic meaning to hardcore Trump supporters in the same way that no word or concept has intrinsic meaning. They will talk on and on about corruption and think the Saudi government buying up blocs of hundreds of rooms in Trump hotels isn’t that. They’ll decry the inherent unfairness of the American electoral system, but only if Trump loses. They’ll call people on the left whony snowflakes who can’t handle the truth, and ignore their whiny President, holed up in a room hiding from the world because he can’t handle the fact that he lost a goddamn election.
And of course, they’ll pretend that Donald Trump didn’t want the riot that happened on Wednesday.
I will acknowledge that we don’t technically know he wanted a riot. What he wanted was for his supporters to do something — he never knows what because that would involve thought or planning — and then he’s still President and no one thinks he was ever not going to still be President. Once the riot started, though, all indications are he wanted it to keep going, and supported the rioters, and only made a half-assed video extremely begrudgingly, hating every second of it because he thought it made him look weak.
The only meaning anything has to Donald Trump — and, once he takes notice, the only meaning anything has to his superfans — is whether it makes him look strong or weak. He can try to turn public opinion on this, like when he had that truly pathetic exchange with Kim Jong-un in 2017, with Kim calling Trump a dotard and Trump calling Kim “Rocket Man.” To Trump, this was strength: someone insults you and you insult them back. To Trump’s fans, it was strength, for exactly the same reason because Trump thought it and therefore so did they. To anyone else, it was childish and absurd, but that was irrelevant to Trump. His definition of strength was all that mattered.
So when Twitter took away one of the few things that Trump cares about — his Twitter account — he had to continue to make himself look strong. Specifically, his campaign spokesman had to, because Trump himself didn’t feel like it. This is the job of Trump’s PR person: just say whatever shit your boss wants you to say in the moment, and don’t worry about tomorrow, because there will be a new thing tomorrow and no one will remember what you said today.
So no more questions about “It was actually Antifa who stormed the Capitol.” No more “How do you still not have proof of this massive voter fraud you keep talking about?” Because Trump’s people are talking to a relatively small percentage of the country, and to those people the fact that these things would be convenient for Trump makes them facts. Then Trump can move on to a new lie that they’ll believe wholeheartedly, because words only have the meaning that Donald Trump ascribes to them.
So is Trump the most masculine President ever? At this point, why not say yes? These people have followed him down rabbit hole after rabbit hole, lie after lie, to the point where they threw him an insurrection. What’s one more? And then what’s the one after that? And the one the next day? They have to believe him, have to support him. He built a lifestyle brand, after all, and he has become their lifestyle.