Former President Donald Trump's recent forays into contemplating Arnold Palmer's genitals and racist joke promotion represent dueling anxieties about manhood and his campaign's chances of victory, according to an expert on masculinity.
Jackson Katz — a scholar and activist who focuses on masculinity, politics and violence — spoke with Salon about male voters that Trump courted at a Madison Square Garden rally that featured Puerto Rico "garbage" jokes and the suggestion that Vice President Kamala Harris has pimps.
"The entire vibe of the event was a mix of right-wing triumphalism — hopefully premature! — and relentless chest-beating, male-centric aggression, and rhetorical violence," said Katz.
"It’s an embarrassingly cartoonish tactic, but I’m afraid it can work with some male voters."
Trump's need to draw under-informed white men to his campaign suggests the former president is manipulating those men's fears of being emasculated to shorten the odds he'll be defeated by a woman, Katz argued.
Katz cited Trump's lengthy anecdote about Palmer's ability to impress in the locker room — and the lack of backlash among his base — as a case in point.
"I’m interested in the ways in which so many men continue to take Trump seriously as an 'alpha male' when he says such obviously juvenile things like that," said Katz.
"Then again, it’s not lost on anybody that Trump is obsessed with matters of size, so if we want to psychoanalyze him, it’s pretty easy to see there is deep anxiety bubbling underneath the joking exterior."
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Katz pointed a litany of misogynistic comments coming from Trump and his supporters who have characterized Harris as a "low-IQ" prostitute who has a "pimp handler."
Tucker Carlson's casting Trump as an "angry daddy," and Democrats as naughty girls whom he would vigorously spank, revealed the extent that the former president's base fears women, he argued.
"It also provides a revealing glimpse into some of the deeper psycho-sexual resentments and frustrations of right-wing masculinity in an era of steady feminist progress that Trump, MAGA, and their white evangelical allies are furiously trying to roll back and undo," he said.
Katz then revealed his own fears about such rhetoric — namely what happens if it doesn't work and Harris wins.
"I am worried about violence in the streets for days, weeks and even months," Katz said. "Many people in that movement — especially men — believe that violence is justified if they don’t get what they feel entitled to."