Men have been explaining things to me. They have explained that Donald Trump’s win wasn’t about gender—about America not being ready for a woman president; about people not caring whether all Americans can enjoy equal bodily autonomy—or about race, but instead that it was about the economy. They have explained that it was about elite condescension, a wokeness backlash, that Democrats have made a major miscalculation in siloing certain commentators and platforms. Harris, for instance, should have gone on Joe Rogan’s podcast, wrote Ezra Klein. Bernie did it! Trump gave Rogan three hours of his time, in his studio, and Rogan rewarded him with an endorsement.
Maybe that’s right. Maybe Harris should have acceded to Rogan’s condition. Maybe Harris, a Black woman who is the sitting vice president, should have traveled to the Austin podcasting studio of a white man who considers it his bailiwick to discuss the merits of famous women’s “pussies.” (Incidentally, Rogan in 2022 told fellow white guy Jordan Peterson that he thought the term “Black” should be reserved for “someone who is 100% African, from the darkest place,” and over the span of 12 years deployed the N-word at least 20 times on air. He later apologized, clarifying that he’s “not racist.”)
There were, inarguably, major flaws in a Democratic campaign that, among other problems, anointed a presidential candidate a mere 107 days before the election—and in a party that has had issues with its messaging for years. But perhaps, as others have pointed out, the outcome of the election wasn’t just about the economy, wasn’t just about gender, but that illusive third thing—their inherent interconnectedness.
It’s hard to argue that gender didn’t affect the results of the election when, in its aftermath, men have been making “jokes” about sexually assaulting liberals. Nick Fuentes, the 26-year-old white nationalist, former YouTuber, and onetime Trump dinner companion, went on a particularly unhinged rant. “Hey bitch, we control your bodies,” he said, pausing to cackle. “Your body, our choice.” One source received a digitally created image of Trump anally raping Harris with the caption “Daddy’s Home.” Another circulated GIF depicts an anatomical drawing of a penis becoming erect, overlaid with the image of an eagle, which ejaculates stars from the American flag. No doubt there are people who’ve shared such imagery who would say they voted for gas prices.
We know the GOP, and the MAGA movement in particular, to be obsessed with penises and testicles. In 2022, following the release of the redacted affidavit the FBI used to obtain a search warrant for Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump Jr. posted an image of his father on the golf course, grasping his belt buckle, with a long black bar added from his crotch to his knees. “Redact this!!!” Trump Jr. wrote. This year, he weighed in on X and Instagram about Biden having reportedly joked that the key to his marriage was “good sex”: “There’s literally no amount of Viagra on earth that’s going to give Joe Biden…wood.” Trump himself seems equally fascinated by penis size—his own and others. Back in 2016, after his Republican primary opponent Marco Rubio said that he had small hands (“And you know what they say about men with small hands? You can’t trust them”), Trump attempted to assure voters that there was “no problem” with the size of any part of his anatomy, hands or otherwise. He has talked about deceased golfer Arnold Palmer’s penis (drawing a rebuke from one of Palmer’s daughters). Days before the election, after melting down about a “too low” microphone stand, Trump mimed giving it oral sex.
A company called MAGA Nuts sells branded “trump nutz,” a.k.a. rubber scrotums that dangle from a truck’s trailer hitch—the company suggests that customers hang them other places, including strollers. Trump backer Elon Musk has been locked for years in a rocket battle with Jeff Bezos to see who can out-penis each other in space. (Space: Olivia Rodrigo’s ultimate red flag—cosigned by Grimes, with whom Musk fathered three children.) In 2022, Tucker Carlson paused from spreading racist and antisemitic “replacement theory” rhetoric to promote red-light testicle tanning in his documentary special, The End of Men.
