Trump, Child-men and a Maturing Masculinity

The president and many of his followers have been stuck in a juvenile version of masculinity. But plenty of men are maturing their male ethos in this moment—maybe even millions of former Trump supporters.

We’re at a pivotal moment, both in America and across the globe.

A perilous yet potentially positive moment.

And a fundamentally masculine moment.

I say a masculine moment not to exclude anyone, but to highlight how important definitions of manhood are to the crises we find ourselves in today.

Our struggles in America and beyond with the Coronavirus pandemic, with the related economic downturn, with racial injustice, with a potential constitutional crisis surrounding the Nov. 3 election and with a looming climate catastrophe have much to do with a stunted masculinity embraced by President Donald Trump and many of his male followers.

Our future depends, to a great extent, on whether enough of these men will use this moment of crisis to update their understanding of what it means to be a man.

Should we be hopeful? I am. I see at least 7 million reasons to think American men are poised to mature their masculinity.

A 21st Century Masculinity

In a recent essay, Washington Post writer Monica Hesse described the “weird masculinity” of Trump and his supporters as a manhood defined primarily by resentment. By a stubborn refusal to adapt to the times.

“The 21st century has sought new expectations for men and new responsibilities: to listen, to yield, to accommodate, to check their hormonal impulses and be held accountable. Looked at one way, this is necessary and dignified. This is adulthood,” Hesse writes. “Looked at by others, it’s emasculating.”

That emasculation anxiety has something to do with a fear of losing power. It’s a reaction to the social justice movements in recent decades—and recent months—that have shaken America and much of the world. #MeToo and Black Lives Matter protests threaten the privileges men, especially white men, have long enjoyed.

But for Trump and many of his followers, you can see a deeper, Peter Pan-like unwillingness to move forward in life. Some men are chafing against leaving a simpler time and accepting a more complex reality, even when it promises greater satisfaction, capabilities and possibilities—in effect, greater power—when fully embraced.

Despite these upsides, Trump and many of his male followers have been shutting their eyes tight. They have been refusing to move on from the old ways.

But those old ways leave men rigid, cold and isolated in a world calling for flexibility, warmth and connection. 

From Confined to Liberating Masculinity

In a forthcoming book, my co-author Ed Adams and I explore the change under

way in our views of manhood from a “confined masculinity” to a “liberating masculinity.” The emerging, liberating approach to being a man builds on traditional masculine roles like the protector and provider to include identities such as caregiver and spiritual seeker, and it expands men’s options to include cooperation, emotional expressivity, an inclusive spirit, and environmental stewardship.

This version of masculinity frees individual men from a cramped, fearful, deadening existence. It also liberates people around those men to live fuller lives--richer in emotional depth and less constrained by close-minded views. 

You could rightly call this shift from confined to liberating masculinity a “transition to greatness,” to borrow a Trumpian term. But this move to a better way of being a man is not easy. And Trump seems unable or unwilling to make the rite of passage. His name calling, his disregard for the death and suffering he’s caused with a botched Covid-19 response, his retrenchment on race in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, his authoritarian announcements regarding “rigged” elections, and his denial of the climate crisis add up to a juvenile version of masculinity.

Straddling the protected innocence of childhood and the freedom yet responsibilities of adulthood, teens often refuse to grow up for periods of time. They revert to moodiness, selfishness and recklessness—behaviors with real potential to harm others when young adults get social media accounts, driver licenses and access to guns.

An adolescent no-man’s land

In the same way, Trump seems stuck in an adolescent no-man’s land when it comes to masculinity. He is the worst of both worlds. He demonstrates none of the honor of earlier generations of confined men, such as the courage to go to war, the good sportsmanship to accept a loss gracefully or the work ethic to read intelligence briefings. Instead, he is defined by combativeness, misogyny and a willingness to bully. He lacks the sense of a universal, interconnected humanity—a vision that represents the best of childhood idealism and that is central to liberating masculinity.

Instead Trump is all about division and a warped version of emotional expressivity. He’ll share his feelings, all right. But childish self-pity is the main one, along with old-school anger.

It’s tempting to call Trump and those like him men-children. A man-child is an immature man, one who refuses to grow up. But “man-child” has a sweeter meaning as well. It can refer to a physically big adolescent. And increasingly, adolescent boys and young men are proving more mature than their elders in Trump’s camp. Consider the brave activism by Parkland school shooting survivor David Hogg, or the way many young men organized protests in the wake of Floyd’s death. 

The Child-man in me

So I propose calling Trump and guys like him "Child-men."

I offer this term to explain what’s happening with many men today, not to demean or “other” them, as Trump’s labels often do. Indeed, I find myself in a Child-man state much of the time. Especially as the pandemic grinds on, I can fantasize about being an island to myself, and going anywhere I want without a mask or sense of duty to my community, country and world. As a white, middle-aged man, I have felt flashes of resentment as women and people of color have risen in prominence—in ways that seemed to reduce my status in a giant zero-sum game. And I have urges to flee when called to reflect on feelings and experiences around difficult topics like race and masculinity itself.

Those urges, flashes and fantasies, though, are fundamentally childish.

Maturing one’s masculinity means getting woke to inequities and privilege. It means graduating past a sense of self-worth grounded in beating others to one anchored instead in service, compassion and connection. It means the curiosity and courage to enter the emotional realm, even when what surfaces are painful feelings of shame and guilt.

It means a commitment to doing the work of developing as a human being. It means growing up, which includes growing outward and extending our circle of care to include all people and the entire planet. It also entails growing down, to a richer awareness of our roots and values and emotions. It means growing into our soul, and a realization that all human souls are equal and intertwined.

Can Trump and today’s Child-men mature?

It might take a miracle for Trump to morph into a man with a modern masculinity. As the new book by his niece Mary Trump suggests, he may have been damaged beyond repair by a cruel father who groomed his boys to be win-at-all-cost killers.

But we may be closer to a widescale advance in masculinity than we realize. Like the sudden shift in acceptance of same-sex marriage, our society may be on the brink of shedding the shell of a crude male ethos in favor of one that is more flexible, more capable and attuned to our times. For one thing, there’s widespread awareness that something is toxic with the way we’re taught to be a man. In a 2018 poll, 60 percent of men said society puts pressure on men to behave in a way that is unhealthy or bad. The younger a man was, the more likely he was to believe that.

What’s more, there are more and more examples of liberating men, who are giving permission to other men to move their masculinity forward. Exemplary men include professional basketball coaches Gregg Popovich and Steve Kerr, who have achieved great success with a deeply respectful, compassionate approach to leadership. They include business titans like Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins, who was inspired by a dream to pitch in to fight homelessness—and who in turn inspired his employees to amplify their giving-back efforts.

Or look to the political arena, where displays of a highly developed masculinity can be found on both sides of the aisle. Consider Doug Burgum, the Republican governor of North Dakota. In May, he tearfully urged residents of his state not to politicize mask wearing, and to realize that people may be wearing masks because they care for a "five-year-old child who's been going through cancer treatments" or "have vulnerable adults in their life."

A new “Mask-ulinity”?

In fact, the mask issue is a telling—and hopeful—one.

Nothing captures today’s puerile, juvenile version of manliness better than the refusal to wear a mask. Trump and some of his followers have suggested the mask is unmanly, a cowardly muzzle that reins in their freedom. The liberty argument, though, is simplistic bordering on infantile. And far from signaling fearfulness, a mask is about selflessness, given that it primarily protects others. Earlier generations of men might have considered mask-wearing a noble sacrifice. But in effect, Trump and many men have been screwing up their faces and screaming, “You can’t make me!”

Except that we have.

Or the facts of the pandemic have, such that Trump finally is carrying around a mask and advocating that people wear them. More and more other men are covering up their faces as well. A mid-April survey by Gallup found that 38 percent of men said they had “never” worn a mask or face covering during the previous seven days. In late June and early July, though, just 20 percent of men told Gallup that they never wear a mask when outside their home.

And there are other signs that many child-men may be moving on from a brat-like bro culture. As Trump has destroyed lives and livelihoods with his reality-denying machismo during Covid-19, and as he has acted like an authoritarian strongman in response to civil rights protests, his support among men has dropped. An average of polls found that 46% of men approved of Trump from late May to June compared to an average of 53% from January to early May.

A 7 million-man march?

Seven percentage points may not seem like a lot. But it represents 7 million American men 18 years and older. And many of those men distancing themselves from Trump could be taking a step or two away from his pouty, confined version of manhood.

True, there’s no guarantee they are embarking on a deeper journey in the way they see themselves as men. Political polarization has made views about gender roles more rigid.

But precisely because we live in a starkly divided population—shown by Trump’s approval ratings remaining in the mid-40-percent range despite multiple missteps over much of the past three and a half years—it is significant that so many men have decided to break from the president recently. That requires a measure of courage. Possibly a willingness to disagree with family and friends who remain Trump backers. Some or many of these men could be starting down the path—however tentatively—toward a more mature, liberating masculinity.

And just in time.

A more-advanced masculinity is necessary to meet today’s moment. It’s needed for the kind of nuanced thinking that integrates individual freedoms with social obligations in order to navigate the Coronavirus challenge. A more-developed approach to manhood is required to listen and extend empathy to people of different races and backgrounds, who may have been mistreated historically and systemically.

We need a courageous, truth-seeking masculinity to see through spurious claims of electoral fraud and to defend democratic principles from would-be tyrants. And we need to progress beyond a masculinity of myopic self-reliance and materialism to one that acknowledges our interdependence with all living things and our role as caretakers of the earth.

Anything less than this reinvention of masculinity will lead us to a sickly, impoverished, despotic, catastrophic future.

But if American men—and our counterparts across the globe—can stop behaving like Child-men, a much brighter future is ahead.

And there are reasons to believe we men will seize this moment to mature our masculinity.

Millions of reasons.