“Fight! Fight!” Donald Trump shouted to his followers. He stood up straight, blood on his cheek, pumping his fist in the air, rising after having been bundled to the ground by Secret Service agents when shots rang out at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Such displays of bravura can’t be faked. Trump’s courage under actual fire helps to explain his appeal to men, especially young men.
Trump received decisive support from male voters in last week’s presidential election. He won 55 percent of the male vote compared with just 45 percent of the female vote. While he performed better among both men and women relative to 2020, Trump saw a particularly dramatic rise in support among young men, who swung 13 percentage points in his direction, per CNN’s exit polling.
Gender-based polarization is a global phenomenon, affecting countries as diverse as South Korea and Germany. This can’t be blamed on Trump, who reflects more than creates this divide. But he uses the polarization to his benefit.
Something about Trump appeals to young men. This is a group with many widely reported pathologies: they are falling behind young women in collegiate attendance, and increasingly struggling economically, as documented by scholars such as Richard Reeves in his book Of Boys and Men. What is it that these men see in Trump?
Most of the president-elect’s critics focus on the ways in which he is not a “good man.” They say that he is crude and gratuitously offensive, selfish and egotistic, that he lies and is disloyal. His gaudy consumption style, braggadocio, and love of celebrity, they suggest, are an affront to traditional WASP values. Undoubtedly, Trump is no Teddy Roosevelt or Ward Cleaver. But his critics fail to see the ways in which he embodies a real archetype of masculinity.
In his 1990 book, Manhood in the Making, anthropologist David D. Gilmore surveyed cultures from across the world, ranging from primitive to modern, looking for commonalities in what it meant to be a man. While there were few universal attributes, he found that cultures generally define manhood as an earned status. A boy does not simply become a man automatically by physically maturing. He must train himself to meet a standard, often going against his natural inclinations toward laziness and avoiding danger. He must publicly demonstrate his capacity as a protector of and provider for family and tribe and must successfully mate with a woman. This involves a willingness to embrace risk, possibly sacrificing himself for others, and “ceaseless enterprise.”
While not entirely amoral, these masculine traits can be expressed in ways that would not exactly please a Sunday school teacher. Indeed, men often feel a primal attraction to the outlaw, the rebel, or the mob boss, the same as they do to the war hero, the entrepreneur, or the fireman rushing into a burning building.
Seen through Gilmore’s lens, Trump, for all his flaws, models many traditional masculine attributes that young men would do well to adopt. He is high-energy—he famously derided Jeb Bush for being “low energy”—and competitive. He is “in the arena,” taking public and substantial risks on the nation’s biggest stage (and, before that, in running his businesses). He is autonomous, capable of what Gilmore called “absolute freedom of movement.” He presses on despite overwhelming opposition, media pressure, lawfare, and even assassination attempts. He even went back to hold another rally at the place where he was shot. And, in an era of increasing drug legalization and normalization, he famously doesn’t smoke, drink, or do drugs.
It’s not hard to see why these behaviors appeal to young men. Trump exhibits traits that many of them lack but dream of having. They appreciate that he seems actually to care about them, something that was also key to Jordan Peterson’s early draw. Unlike feminists complaining about “toxic masculinity” or conservatives delivering hectoring lectures, Trump doesn’t denigrate them or their manhood. They enjoy his telling these people to take a hike, as they wish they could do.
While these aspects of Trump’s appeal were electorally successful, they also pose risks to his followers. He tells his supporters, including young men, that they are victims. This does not encourage them to mature, improve themselves, or rise to the challenge of manhood, but instead passively to cheer Trump on, as they would their favorite sports team. Trump’s success might encourage young men to imitate his defiant, norm-rejecting, disruptive style when most would be better off following the traditional script of excelling in school and working hard in their career.
To avoid those pitfalls, young men must wed Trump’s masculine attributes to greater moral integrity and a mature style. Despite popular suggestions to the contrary, assertive manhood is not inherently toxic. Even conservatives have too often equated being a good man with being a dutiful doormat. Healthy masculinity is agentic, aggressive, competitive, courageous, and generous, productive, moral, and dignified. Men need not consider these values to be in conflict.
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