This from @RadioFreeTom is trending this morning, asking a core question that has baffled people since the beginnings of the Trump cult, but I think he made a misstep in his analysis. A thread: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/donald-trump-the-most-unmanly-president/612031/

Tom's examples of masculinity rely mainly on cultural archetypes and his personal experience growing up around Greatest Generation New Englanders, a far cry from the Southern/Midwestern white male boomers that make up the Trump base.

The latter group may have grown up with a similar code as the others, but things like desegregation, the Evangelical rebirth, and the culture wars played a much larger role in their lives. An exception to the code was found: The Other.

I'm from Alabama. I grew up around these men. They'd talk a big game about what a real man was, how he acted. Then I'd watch them give a black family bad directions on purpose so they'd get lost. Or not let the femme boy play with their kids anymore.

The right has, for decades, found it highly profitable to sell men on the idea that they are surrounded by enemies that want to steal their jobs, money, women, and power. Blacks. Gays. Feminists. Muslims. Immigrants. Jews.

But the cultural messaging is like a drug. You build up a tolerance to a certain amount, so the right wing scream machine has to up the dose. The messaging grows more and more hysterical, the proposed solutions more extreme. The fear and paranoia has overwhelmed them.

They see him as masculine because he is them. They live on self-hagiography, pretending to fear nothing while fearing everything. They are paranoid, petty, materialistic, disloyal, and vindictive. They *HAVE* to see him as a Real Man, otherwise they aren't Real Men anymore.

So, from the outside, Trumpworld looks like a fun house mirror of masculine stereotypes. On the inside, it's working exactly as designed. That's why shame doesn't work. The only way to beat them is to outvote them.