Portside

The problem with Joe Biden, sometimes, is that you can’t hear him. The problem with Donald Trump is that you can.

The facade of a disciplined appeal to the better angels of our nature that Republican convention planners worked so assiduously to convey this week (interrupted only sporadically by Big Lies) was shattered last night by its standard-bearer’s acceptance speech. It’s not just that Donald Trump’s normal mode of discourse is a stream of consciousness; it’s that the consciousness he streams is a mental trash heap consisting of the lashings-out of a wounded ego, the defensive self-love of a furious narcissist, the concocted lies of a serial fabulist, and the random droppings of the tabloid far-right.

But give Trump credit where credit is due. His interminable speech—which played like 40 years in an oratorical desert—managed to bring down a convention poised to explode in joy at his appearance and anticipation of an easy victory.

The Democrats, of course, have their own problem with their leader’s public performances. But at least they have the good sense to be on the verge of yanking the nomination from their sadly enfeebled president. No such sentiment is apparent in Republican ranks, though you have to wonder what the new breed of MAGA policy wonks and the venture capitalists of Silicon Valley now funding Trump’s campaign were thinking as Trump wandered endlessly through the clotted cesspools of his mind. Or imagine what Usha Vance might have said to her husband J.D. once they left the arena: “You’re going to be vice president to that moron?!” (Those are my imagined words, to be clear, but does anyone want to bet she didn’t say something like that?)

Trump’s speech was so appalling that it totally eclipsed its bizarre lead-up. He was preceded to the podium by an aging Hulk Hogan, who visibly struggled to rip off his T-shirt to reveal the Trump shirt beneath, brought on by a performance by Kid Rock, and actually introduced by Dana White, the man who brought cage fighting into the American home. Both Hogan and White said that Trump was the toughest man they’d ever met, though after the 92 minutes of mental flabbiness that Trump then unleashed, one was forced to conclude that both White and the Hulkster had lived lives of complete solitude.

It was actually with Trump’s ad-libbed expressions of gratitude to these worthies, and admiration for their prowess, that his speech began to go off the rails. He paused to note how good White’s introduction had been, then rhapsodized about how Hogan had once lifted a 350-pound ring opponent over his head and slammed him to the canvas. Only then did he remember to acknowledge his pick for vice president, pointing to Vance sitting with his dumbstruck wife in the Trump family’s box.

Then he was off to the free-association races, recounting the subpoenas his sons had received and linking them, through some indecipherable flowchart, to “Crazy Nancy Pelosi.”

Eventually, Trump got around to praising strongmen a lot more dangerous than Hogan and White. He proudly cited the praise that Hungary’s Victor Orbán, “a very tough man,” had showered on him when he said of Trump that “everybody was afraid of him.” After basking in that validation of his own presumed toughness, Trump spoke fondly of North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, next to whom Orbán is a Jeffersonian democrat.

Convention planners had featured images and stories of Trump’s softer side—the family man, the doting grandpa—to win over women voters who wanted to vote for him but found him crass, boorish, and inclined to violence. At the same time, though, they doubled down on targeting largely working-class men who feared and hated the feminization of social life and the niceties of bourgeois propriety and hypocrisy. These guys were either already in Trump’s corner or just too alienated to bother to vote. These guys were also a disproportionate slice of the electorate in the crucial swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, so the planners particularly emphasized what has always been Trump’s fundamental appeal: He’s “one tough SOB,” as Teamsters President Sean O’Brien called him on the convention’s opening night, and just as pissed at the decline in status of blue-collar masculinity as they were. Hence the trotting out of icons of hypermasculinity to bring Trump onto the stage.

Last month, I devoted an article to a study that had been published in 2020 in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, to which my attention had been drawn by one of Tom Edsall’s New York Times columns. The authors, I wrote

sought out the Google Trends search data for the 12 months immediately preceding the 2016 election for erectile dysfunction, penis size, penis enlargement, hair loss, hair plugs, testosterone, and Viagra—gender-affirming care, of a sort—and labeled them as indices of Precarious Manhood. They produced a map of the United States showing where those Google searches were most common (Appalachia and the Deep South). And by running the standard statistical regression analyses, they found a strong predictive correlation between the rates of those Google searches and the votes for Donald Trump in 2016 (though, of course, those were also votes against Hillary Clinton).

They found the same correlation between those “precarious manhood” findings and votes for Republican House candidates in 2018, but no such correlations in the two preceding presidential elections (2008 and 2012), in which the Republicans nominated John McCain and then Mitt Romney. It was only once the party had become Donald Trump’s that this correlation appeared.

But there are other indices of “precarious manhood” that don’t relate to sexual potency—most importantly, I think, the increasing disappearance of jobs requiring work with one’s hands in construction, transportation, and manufacturing that were sufficiently remunerative and steady that they could support a family. As such work became more mechanized and as unionization declined, such jobs became scarce. In the late 1980s, the great sociologist William Julius Wilson documented the decline of such jobs among Black men, and the corresponding rise of children raised by single mothers due to the disappearance of what he termed “marriageable men.” Since then, that decline has spread to the white working class as well, leading to the significant reduction in the rate of working-class marriages documented by Andrew Cherlin in his important study Labor’s Love Lost.

Democrats and Republicans have both responded to these changes, but in crucially different ways. The idea of reviving American manufacturing is common to both parties, with the signal difference that in the Trump presidency, it took the form of talk and in the Biden presidency, it took the form of action. For all of Trump’s blather about getting America to build again, he never got an infrastructure bill through Congress even when Republicans controlled both houses. The investments he proposed were so piddling that the legislation never even took shape. By contrast, two of Biden’s signature achievements—the infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act (which chiefly consisted of billions in tax credits for new factories making electric vehicles and other green products)—have led to the first major increase in factory construction in several decades. In 2023, spending on building new factories increased by 73 percent over spending the previous year. Moreover, the Biden administration has favored projects that pay their workers union-scale wages or commit to not opposing workers’ efforts to unionize—conditions that never even crossed the minds of officials in Trump’s administration, much less Trump himself.

That’s all the more reason why the MAGA movement is so reliant on the cult of toughness and hypermasculinity: Delivering nothing that’s tangible, it compensates with violent rhetoric. That’s a task that’s made easy, as violent rhetoric is Trump’s mother tongue. The plan was for him to keep that under wraps last night, to stick to the denunciation of divisive politics and the pledge to seek unity that was inscribed on the teleprompter. Trump hewed to that for the first 20 minutes, but he couldn’t sustain it. Boys will be boys and Trump will be Trump—a malevolent deranged geezer for all to see.