MILWAUKEE — On the third night of the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump's WWE-inspired entrance came complete with a trollish musical cue, James Brown's infamous ode to traditional gender hierarchies, "It's A Man's Man's Man's World."
Earlier that day, Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., learned the song's lesson the hard way. The once-soaring MAGA star was facing down a painfully small crowd at the signing of her book "MTG." Just before the trollish congresswoman was scheduled to arrive, a group of red-clad workers busied themselves with building big stacks of Greene's hardcover, published in November 2023. But only a few American flag-festooned folks had lined up. An hour later, Greene still hadn't arrived, but the crowd hadn't gotten much bigger, with fewer than 20 people waiting. When she finally rolled in at 3 PM, Greene took one look at the underwhelming crowd, muttered something to her entourage and then quickly hid in a nearby room.
Some people were milling around, but they were mostly journalists and photographers. After all, Greene is still an attraction for mainstream and liberal media outlets, whose readers enjoy hating her. The weak turnout of actual conservative consumers, however, suggests Greene's purported fan base has cooled its ardor.
After four days at the RNC, I suspect a major source of her woes was something darker. The GOP, already the party of sexism, is getting more gratuitous with its toxic masculinity. Everywhere one looked at the convention, Republicans were exalting maleness with an ardor that reads as "defensive" to outsiders but appears to be a convincing display to those inside the MAGA cult. The overcompensation led to a grand finale featuring both pro wrestler Hulk Hogan and Ultimate Fighting Championship president Dana White, rather than the traditional activists and politicians one hears at a convention. Hogan declared Trump a "gladiator," which should be funny applied to a doughy senior citizen caked in make-up, but appears to have been taken at face value by the RNC crowd. Along with the James Brown song, Trump used "Macho Man" by the Village People as intro music, still indifferent to the irony of the song.
The boys club vibe spread throughout the convention. Women were welcome, but only as support staff. A few years ago, female provocateurs like Greene were riding high, feeling like they could troll their way into MAGA stardom like their male counterparts. The message being sent at the GOP's 2024 convention: It's time for the gals to take a back seat.
Kari Lake, the current GOP senate candidate for Arizona and failed gubernatorial candidate, did not have a good convention. Her speech was early in the evening on Tuesday, and poorly attended. Lake, a former newscaster, is not getting the juice she seemed to think would be hers if she rebranded as a MAGA loudmouth. She did her best, dropping the Sarah Palin-associated phrase "mama bear" liberally throughout her speech. She even tried to rile up the crowd by yelling "fake news" at the media section. The two-minute hate fell flat. There were only a handful of reporters even sitting in the press section. Even Fox News declined to air her speech.
On Thursday, Lake had her book signing next to ones held by Donald Trump Jr. and former Trump aide Peter Navarro, recently released from prison. The two men were greeted like rock stars, with attendees happily waiting over an hour to meet their MAGA heroes. A few people did buy books from Lake, but her paltry line stood out even more next to those of her male counterparts.
"The Republican convention is just making it totally explicit that the project of Trumpism is centrally about masculinity,” Jackson Katz, who researches the tropes of masculinity, told 19th News. As Mel Leonor Barclay writes, it's "key to a Trump victory," because "Trump has a significant advantage among men — 27 points in a New York Times/Siena College survey of registered voters — that surpasses Biden’s advantage among women."
The crowd at the RNC certainly reflected this. While attendance was far lower than in the past — 27,000 people came this year, compared to the reported 45,000 in 2016. The convention also appeared to have more young people than eight years ago. But it was mostly young men, not women. Everywhere one looked at the Milwaukee RNC, packs of men in their 20s and 30s roamed around, often in tailored suits instead of the khakis and polo shirts preferred by their older brethren. But the dandified fashion of the young would-be fascist should not fool anyone. The key to attracting all these young men is a deeply misogynist message: Feminists deprived them of their "right" to dominate, and only through Trump can they regain the glorious patriarchal past.
The ironic result is that the avowedly anti-feminist would-be female leaders of the GOP now go ignored. Concerned Women for America has long been a Republican powerhouse, central to organizing the Christian right. But no matter how loud their microphones were, they couldn't attract attendees for public prayer sessions. The only people watching as the "concerned women" prayed were journalists.
Harold Meyerson of the American Prospect recently wrote about the research showing that the vibe isn't just try-hard. Hard evidence shows this chest-beating MAGA display is driven by what he deems "precarious manhood." I simply call it "insecurity." Citing a 2020 study by psychology researchers that found a correlation between Google searches for "erectile dysfunction, penis size, penis enlargement, hair loss, hair plugs, testosterone, and Viagra" and voting Republican, Meyerson writes that precarious manhood turns some men into "putty for a demagogue who blames your plight on MAGA’s usual suspects." However the young men in expensive suits talking about how they want a "tradwife" are not motivated by economic anxiety, as Meyerson assumes. Still he's not wrong that everything from Hogan ripping off his shirt to Trump pretending he's a general egging on troops is a collective overcompensation by a whole lot of men.
In this mass psychodrama, there isn't a place for female leaders.
For a few minutes during the Trump administration, there did seem to be a path to power for women like Greene or Lake or their Colorado counterpart, Rep. Lauren Boebert. Most of the early enthusiasm appears due to the novelty of seeing right-wing women who could hold their own in the competition to be the loudest bully in the room. Such women were especially good at triggering liberals, who may not be as misogynist as Republicans but still have sexist expectations that it's especially unbecoming for women to act this way. But in the past year or so, dating at least back to when Boebert got caught groping her date at "Beetlejuice: The Musical," the shine has come off. Liberals no longer react to female MAGA's provocations with outrage, but with eye-rolling. Without the trigger-the-liberals effect, it appears lady trolls have little to offer the Republican base. They certainly aren't valued as leaders in a party where men live in a constant state of paranoia about being emasculated.
