What explains the election and remaining support for Trump? Many things, but I think there is an underlying energy that helps understand the rest.
Too much of the support for Trump comes from those who want authoritarian leadership, or who are overtly or covertly racist, or who are desperately trying to preserve white supremacy and preserve white rule in the country. But….
All that is true, but I think there is something underneath that which gets more to the heart of it – a twisted idea of manhood – domination, crushing your opponents, making people afraid of you, macho man, chauvinism. (Not everyone, of course, many just want tax cuts, or deregulation of business and industry, or want Christian judges to promote their version of family values, but here I am thinking of the underpinning of the Trump Cult which leans pretty hard toward fascism)
I point to football as an expression and promotion of this misunderstanding of manhood. Red Sanders and Vince Lombardi said “Winning isn’t the most important thing, it is the ONLY thing.” The despicable Al Davis said “Just win, baby”. Football - Throw the bomb, blitz, ground attack, aerial assault. A big man on the line when I was in high school was 250 pounds, now they are 320 – a caricature of a big man. Football has affected the way men see themselves and we have a nation of obese men who measure themselves against the super-sized football players. And, of course, tragically, football itself damages the brains of the players, many of whom end their lives in a nightmare of the brain damage of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). Steroids in baseball and football, blood doping in cycling, anything to win. Anything, including cheating. Cheating to win for some is a sign of manhood. Tragic.
We have come a long way from the Grantland Rice quote about the aesthetic and purpose of sports about 100 years ago – “It is not whether you win or lose but how you play the game that counts.” Sport is supposed to build men of character, and it has been twisted into encouraging men of corruption.
So, we have a president who is a caricature of this twisted cartoonish version of chauvinist fear inducing masculinity. A “man” who is an overgrown child who thinks being a man is scaring people and dominating them. And he is a pitiable.
Time to move out of this old, obsolete and dysfunctional version of manhood. Being a man is not about dominating. Leading is very different. Humaneness is as much a part of manhood as it is a part of womanhood. Manliness is not about frightening and destroying, but about caring and building.
