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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Sam Wolfson

Trump and Hegseth want men to take risky testosterone boosters. It’s all based on shoddy science

A bald eagle behind a cutout of a flexing bodybuilder against a red background
Despite several studies around testosterone being debunked as non-scientific, one Columbia University researcher, Louis Berman, claimed in 1921 that ‘we are justified in putting down the white man’s predominance on the planet to a greater all-around concentration in his blood of the omnipotent hormones’. Illustration: Matt Chase/The Guardian

Two years after Donald Trump decisively won the vote of the American man, polls say male voters are increasingly disillusioned with an administration that has waged wars and enriched itself.

Ahead of the midterms, Trump’s strategy seems to be to find a way to get that masculine animus back, so the male populace will vote not with their heads or their hearts, but with their hogs. At least, that’s one way of understanding why, this summer, Trump’s secretaries of health and defense announced plans that could increase levels of testosterone, or simply “T”, in the civilian and military population.

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