We need honest role models, not hateful MAGA men
Trump and his hyper-macho followers lie about nearly everything — including what it means to be a man
So, Donald Trump and his running mate, Laura Loomer — er, JD Vance — know they are lying about immigrants. And not just those in Springfield, Ohio.
I don’t at all mind sounding like Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz in saying, jeez, before this dismaying era of gleeful shamelessness and hate-mongering, a person’s word was their honor, facts were facts, and we all lived much better lives.
I’ll sound like a fuddy-duddy here, but when I was growing up boys and girls were taught, by parents and teachers (and maybe the occasional principal), that a small lie was okay only if you were protecting someone’s feelings or otherwise maintaining social courtesy, but that telling falsehoods about anything important was simply not to be done if you wanted to lead a good, upstanding life.
For us kids paying some attention in church or synagogue, we understood it as one of the specific commandments, to not bear false witness, as liars would create not love but hate, not peace but destruction.
Church or no church, kids were taught that telling the truth was a whole lot easier to live with, usually with a saying attributed to Mark Twain: If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything. Hammering home the point about the moral necessity of being honest, all the bad guys we saw on TV and at the movies never hesitated to tell lies, often with a telling smirk.
Speaking of telling, but unwarranted, smirks, the disgraced former president and convicted felon’s increasingly fragile mind seems overtaxed by trafficking in lies about, well, everything, from crowd sizes to his “stable genius”–level mental prowess, from how The Bible is his favorite book to his democracy-shaking lies about election results. He opened his first campaign for president by smearing Mexican immigrants, but we now know all too well who was bringing the crime, the drugs, and the rape.
How many lies flew from that strange pouty mouth during the debate with Vice President Kamala Harris? According to a CNN count, more than 30, about the same number of outright lies and obfuscations he told during the previous debate, with President Biden. This time the moderators, ABC’s David Muir and Linsey Davis, were deft and steadfast in correcting the record, at least about Trump’s most outrageous lies — you know, the ones about election fraud, newborn infants being killed, pets being eaten.
Bearing false witness is Trump’s main business. Of course, being corrected put the oh-so-manly guy into a little boy tizzy. I imagine he fell back on a fainting couch (or, more likely, a toilet) at Mar-a-Lago and started “truthing” furiously.
The firehose of falsehoods propaganda technique Trump borrowed from his mentor Russian President Vladimir Putin has exhausted most of us and now appears to be overwhelming the rapidly aging candidate himself. As you may recall, the Washington Post reported Donald told more than 30,000 lies or falsehoods in his 4 years occupying the White House (they skipped the lies he told about his game on the golf course). Trying to keep count since his loss by more than 7 million votes in 2020 would be a fool’s errand.
For a narcissist bully like Trump, insisting that your followers believe whatever you say is the point. As American historian Heather Cox Richardson noted after the debate, his incessant lies are about making people relinquish their own integrity, which makes them more willing to believe the next lies (because they don’t want to admit to themselves that they fell for the first ones). They find it difficult to pull themselves up from the sunk costs of their earlier support Trump, much in the same way that gamblers keep betting and cult members cannot see their way out from their brainwashing.
Like Trump, they double- and triple-down on their lies, to protect their own fragile sense of self and to get the small dopamine hit from “owing the libs.”
However, the truth will set you free, and laughing (hard as it is these days) might help get you there, Richardson notes further:
That’s why the lie about the size of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration is so important: it is the foundational lie on which all the others stand. Harris, who spent her legal career dealing with criminals and abusers who depend on this technique, knew exactly how to undermine it. She made fun of it, making his “obsession with crowd sizes” a national joke. The jokes set him off not only because he cannot bear to be laughed at, but also because challenging that lie challenges all the others.
Beyond keeping his purposeful and reflexive lies straight, Trump’s brain is additionally saddled by his decades-long envy of the old money set in New York City, who turned their noses up at the brash developer from Queens for being the bridge-and-tunnel lout that he is; by all those Hollywood celebrities and recording artists who still show him no respect, including that one “childless cat lady” with impeccable timing after the debate; and by the many politicians and journalists he fantasizes about punishing (there’s a lengthy enemies list being worked on) — not to mention his old-guy preoccupation with low-flow showers and toilets that don’t flush vigorously.
That’s a lot of anger for one mind to bear.
Oh, I would add — and this is only an educated guess — all those made-up stories about what a big and smart and successful guy he is and those complaints about disloyal people and disloyal toilets are also vying for increasingly limited brain-synapse space with a mental file stuffed with glossy images of various Playboy Playmates circa 1973–86.
As for the strange bird he picked as his running mate, what can one say? It’s enough to point out the obvious, that Vance gives off pretty unsettling “someone-keep-an-eye-on-the-troubled-loner” vibes. Vance, an actual U.S. senator, admits that he needs to make up stories to get media attention. As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte puts it, “Vance lies just as much as Trump, but with a syntax that resembles normal human speech.” He is such an oddball that the “Downfall” Adolf Hitler rant meme recently had a field day with it. (I want him replaced on the ticket! Let’s go with that woman who shot her dog!)
These two ignorant yet cocky — i.e., “ignarrogant” — males, who talk down America, who throw fits like toddlers, who whine about strong, independent women and who are the lapdogs of tech and Wall Street billionaires and oligarchs and murderous despots, well, to again be plainspoken like Walz, they give a lot of us the creeps.
They don’t behave a bit like the Christians they claim to be. They don’t even behave like adults.
How either of them got elected to any public office is beyond me and proves that the way we go about electing our political leaders is beyond flawed — it’s suicidal. A quick check of a voter’s IQ (Q: “Please, click on the state of Michigan”) makes far more sense than requiring voter ID, which has never been a real issue and is meant to suppress the vote.
Over these exhausting years that we have been forced to think about Trump, I’ve considered him akin to the character Archie Bunker from the television show “All In the Family,” without any of the charm brought to the part by actor Carroll O’Conner. Archie, who, like Trump, was from Queens, NY (the show was a remake of a British series), is played as a so-called lovable bigot. Donald would prove himself over many decades to be merely an outspoken bigot (yes, I know his cult members think he’s both lovable and hilarious) as well as a braggart, pathological liar, sociopath, misogynist, sexual predator, and felon. Many others would add “traitor” to finalize their completist list of despicable Trumpian traits. No one should forget “flailing businessman,” as detailed in the book “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune And Created The Illusion Of Success.”
The wistful song “Those Were the Days,” representing Archie’s nostalgia about his “golden past,” morphed with Donald into MAGA and his “American carnage” take on our country and a dream to return us to some vague era before Title IX, or before civil rights, or before women had the vote, or maybe before the Civil War. With Trump praising authoritarians around the globe, far-right extremists have felt much more comfortable talking up their fantasies of taking us all to their super-cool Dark Enlightenment.
Everybody, except possibly Donald, understood that Archie Bunker was never supposed to be a role model, and Walz is right on the mark to point out how unsettling (yes, weird) many of these men are.
As unpleasant as it is, consider just a (small) handful of them for a moment: the sniveling cowardice of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, the sheer falseness (right down to his phony dialect) of Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy, the smarmy creepiness of Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, the pretend manliness of Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, the hatemongering and oozing menace of Trump advisor and speech writer Stephen Miller.
The list of self-serving people attached to Trump, like remoras on a bloated shark, goes on and on. I know I’m forgetting someone just awful. Oh, yeah: Roger Stone.
As others have noted, we have been sorely in need of more examples of what people have termed tonic masculinity around these here parts. As if on cue, enter Walz, whose father, James, had been a U.S. Army veteran of the Korean war, a teacher and a school district superintendent. After his father’s death, Walz had teachers and coaches and Army National Guard colleagues as role models for how one can be curious about the world and open to people different from yourself without resorting to silly macho posturing to prove something which, the MAGA men manifestly don’t realize, proves the opposite.
While Republicans do their utmost to smear Walz (farmer, teacher, football coach, veteran, a longtime member of Congress, a two-term governor and gosh-darned “Minnesota nice” — golly, good luck with that!), the rest of us continue to scratch our heads trying to figure out why any working person would support a criminal con artist like Trump, who was (to play with an old saying) born on third base insisting that he’d hit a walk-off grand slam and also knows more about baseball than Bob Costas and maybe all the professors at MIT.
As Marcotte has pointed out many times, young men have been exploited by right-wing politicians, so-called journalists and “manly” podcasters for political gain for years now. It’s nice to have in Walz and also in Doug Emhoff examples of men who are comfortable with themselves and with women being in leadership roles, as opposed to the so-called men, like Trump and Vance and Elon Musk, who rage and say creepy things and throw little hissy fits and resort to name calling because they are deeply threatened by strong women — a “masculinity” which has rightly been called “toxic.”
Earlier this year, Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams wrote a well-considered commentary about how boys need more empathic guidance from society (and less talk about toxic masculinity). Christopher Cotton, a longtime teacher, wrote a beautiful essay for Salon on how boys and young men can simply embrace humanity instead of ghost-dancing for the lost patriarchy.
A while back I tried to weigh in about how Republican men were exploiting and setting terrible examples for younger males, noting there’s another way for young men to turn (showing my age, it had something to do with a Stephen Stills song).
Trump and Vance as male role models? Please.
Trump loves to put our country down (a key job for a wannabe dictator), and he often says the rest of the world is laughing at us. The truth is (as Harris pointed out during the debate), if the rest of the civilized world is laughing at us, it’s because of him. But I know that most of our Allies have not been laughing for many years now — they are saddened to see us sunk so low by possibly putting such a vile person back in a position of leadership. Trump and Vance as male role models? Please.
People are desperate for normalcy, for politicians who don’t lie, who stand up to bullies, who speak out against people who are unfit for public office. That’s why people have reacted so positively to men like Republican John Giles, mayor of Mesa, Ariz., who has been bravely speaking out against Trumpian politics, including at the Democratic National Convention. We may have many disagreements with traditional Republican positions, but our patriotic fight is with their embrace of Trump — and Giles understands just how un-American that is.
Teaching young men that bullshit flies is not a good life lesson. Maybe it used to work in a frat-boy secret handshake “Isn’t it great that with our connections we get to fail up?” sort of way, but it doesn’t anymore, not with smart, capable girls and women competing in school and in the workplace.
This summer, American women won more than half the U.S. medals at the Olympics and, along with the men, helped show everyone that diversity is America’s greatest strength. Our daughters grew up knowing how to throw a tight spiral. They honed this skill while waiting for Shakespeare in the park to begin each summer.
Guys, you really have to both up and broaden your game.
Boys and young men may have a different kind of restless energy, as we are told by the thoughtful folks at The Art of Manliness. They need to be active, engaged in play, work, sport and service. They can still do all those things, but a fundamental lesson that needs to be imparted has to do with being honest. They should be shown how to spot the people who are telling obvious untruths or are trying to grift off their concerns about what it takes to be a man.
Among politicians, Governor Walz, not billionaire bro JD Vance, is a sterling model of masculinity for American guys. He’s curious, empathic, thoughtful and present for his family and others in the community. Again, he is comfortable with strong women.
Republican (and former GOP) men, like Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, still standing firm against Trump and his minions trying to steal elections, and Mayor Giles and former U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who have courageously spoken out against Trumpism, are among others in the GOP who stand as strong role models. I’ll swallow hard and add former Vice President Dick Cheney to that list.
Beyond the politicians, take a listen to some of the men and women on the Republican Voters Against Trump website articulating why they can no longer support Trump. Many mention his dishonesty, his lack of moral character, his endless grifting on supporters, and how he serially dishonors veterans as examples of how he’s about as bad a role model for young people as one can imagine.
Trump and his ultra-macho followers are driven to lie about just about everything — including what it means to be a man.
It starts with being honest. And then, as we also learned from “Pinocchio,” picking your friends, and the people you emulate, with great care.
