Last fall, I sat down to watch newly rebranded “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth stalk around a stage with the energy of a cocaine-addled banker (with a dash of high school wrestler taking his loss out on his girlfriend). The subject of his speech, to a roomful of what are often euphemistically called military brass, was to hammer home the point that the military had gone soft, woke, and girly.
Those military men (and they were overwhelmingly men) are the architects of the hell that has rained down on Iran in recent months. They sculpted the raid on Caracas, Venezuela, that kidnapped Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and before that, many of them were leaders of drone bombing campaigns, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and much else besides. We shouldn’t spare much sympathy for them, in other words. But Hegseth’s speech was remarkable for the way it laid bare the obsessions of the second Trump Administration: The whole thing was positively fixated on gender.
Oiled and orange-hued, the former Fox News host lectured the generals about their weight, facial hair, and “superficial individual expression”; complained that they had become the “woke department”; and insisted that “the era of politically correct, overly sensitive, don’t-hurt-anyone’s-feelings leadership ends right now.” Physical requirements for troops, he insisted, would return to the “highest male standard only.” Softness, weakness, or “dudes in dresses” would not be tolerated. More recently, as the Iran war drags on, criticisms of his behavior, his cartoonish machismo, and his gleeful disregarding of any rules of engagement for war, have been widespread.
Hegseth is easy to pick on. He’s got a long enough history of misogyny and sexual assault allegations that his own mother wrote an email, later leaked to press, that read, in part, “You are an abuser of women—that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego.”
But Hegseth is a symptom of the broader problem. President Donald Trump’s newest appointee, as I write this, is Hung Cao, a failed Republican candidate elevated to acting Secretary of the Navy, someone apparently concerned that California is being taken over by witches. While discussing a drag queen the Navy hired to be a “digital ambassador,” he insisted, “When you’re using a drag queen to recruit for the Navy, that’s not the people we want. What we need is alpha males and alpha females who are going to rip out their own guts, eat them, and ask for seconds.”
These are the people Trump is hiring, cast in his own image.
Trumpism is many things, and one of them is backlash politics. This has been laid out clearly when it comes to overt white supremacy. As political scientist Julia Azari explained to The New York Times, “What ties together Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Donald Trump is that they all presented visions of victimhood in response to racial change.” But Trump’s anti-“DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion) obsession isn’t just about race—or rather, race and gender are inseparable in his politics and the politics of the global far right. The victimhood is gendered, too. As Rodrigo Nunes notes in his forthcoming book, Anatomy of Disintegration: What Brazil Reveals About the Global Far Right, Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former president, made “a regular spectacle of himself in hospital ever since his 2018 campaign stabbing,” and, at rallies, raised a chant “about his immunity to sexual impotency,” a little tongue in cheek, but nonetheless presenting himself as someone relatable who could seize back Brazil from the grips of “gender ideology.”
But the backlash is bigger than its front men. This past winter, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, released a position paper, “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years.” The document is a model for how to bring back the heterosexual nuclear family and ensure it produces as many babies as possible. That family is “natural,” according to Heritage (historians and sociologists beg to differ), and the real problem with American society is that we have allowed “the sex act” to be separated “from marriage and childbearing.” Amy Matsui of the National Women’s Law Center notes to Ms. magazine that the context in which this report has landed is different than previous attempts by Christian conservatives to stuff feminism, queer liberation, and the sexual revolution back in the bottle: “This paper was released at a time when people like white nationalist Nick Fuentes are talking about putting women in gulags. People are now saying the quiet parts aloud.”
Trumpism aims to put white men back on top, white women back in the kitchen, and subjugate everyone else, with military force at home as well as abroad. Attacking DEI is a perfect methodology because it at once targets programs for racial equity and the acceptance of queer and trans existence. Under the blanket of the administration’s rhetoric, what was once a flurry of state attacks on gay and trans rights has turned to an avalanche.
My former home state of Louisiana—the home state, too, of Speaker of the House Mike Johnson—is adding to its existing transphobic laws with a new bill to create “a uniform statutory definition of sex,” defined as “an individual’s biological sex, either male or female, as observed or clinically certified at birth.” But there are hundreds more bills in motion around the country this year, on top of several record-breaking years for attacks on trans people’s right to use the bathroom, access health care, compete in sports, or exist at all in public.
As political theorist Melinda Cooper puts it, “Trumpism would revolutionize the world in order to reinvent the most archaic social structures, a lost world of racial, sexual, and class subordination.” To get there, it is willing to lie and dissemble, and it outright prefers to use force.
The straights, as people like to say, are not OK. Trumpism picks up on something real, as I’ve been witnessing while I work on my next book project. Heterosexual marriage, particularly among the working class, has indeed lost its popularity, its grip. But what most scholars note, and what is nowhere in the bluster and bombast of this administration’s new obsession with war, is that a huge part of the reason for this is economic inequality. And Trump has nothing to offer to fix that.
Instead, he’s hoping that enough punishment for so-called deviants will drive people back to the “natural” family. (Would it take so much effort to uphold, if it were truly natural?) Cracking down on trans children in sports won’t make it easier for working-class men to find decent, stable jobs, the kind that used to pay a family wage. Banning abortion won’t change the fact that health care fills the role in the U.S. economy that manufacturing used to, as Gabriel Winant laid out in The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America, and that health care labor is dominated by women. Indeed, Rana Foroohar at the Financial Times notes that:
“In [the March 2026] job report, health care accounted for a whopping 43 percent of all new jobs added. The sector was a steady driver of growth over the previous year as well, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that it will continue to be so in the future. In fact, its 2024 to 2034 projections show that health care and the social assistance sector (which includes things that overlap with health care, such as vocational assistance and food support, as well as other things like housing aid and child care) will be the fastest growing sector over the next decade, with an 8.4 percent predicted job gain.”
I’ve begun to think of Trumpism as a backlash in part to the feminization of work. Historian Bethany Moreton commented to me many years ago that the real story of the transformation in the U.S. economy was not that women get to be chief executive officers, but that men wind up working as retail clerks. The disappearance of the industrial job has hollowed out the middle of the American economy, and the men who used to do those jobs, as I detailed in From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, feel as though their very masculinity has been stripped away.
Trumpism promises to restore what I increasingly think of, following W.E.B. Du Bois and David Roediger, as the public and psychological wages of white masculinity. Rather than offering decent jobs, it offers men the pleasures of vicarious identification with the President himself, with Hegseth, with Elon Musk. Musk, Cooper notes, is not just a pronatalist but an “Aspirational Abraham,” a twenty-first-century would-be patriarch aiming to beget a “ ‘legion’ of children who would save humanity from demographic freefall and bear his superior genes into the far future.”
We shouldn’t discount the backlash to #MeToo, of course—Cooper points to the men whose pivot to Trumpism, at least according to them, is due to “anecdotes of sexual injury that seem too trivial, not to say ludicrous, to have occasioned a sense of world-historical collapse.” While #MeToo threatened the power of the patriarchs—studio heads like Harvey Weinstein and talk show celebrities like Matt Lauer—Trumpism aims to shore it back up. The emotional benefits will trickle down, with some help from the manosphere. Never mind that you still can’t afford a house; at least you’ll feel like a man in your rental apartment.
Why am I writing about heterosexuality in our Pride issue, you might be wondering? Because it’s worth considering that the Trumpists have a point when they see queer and trans people as a threat. Queerness was a challenge to the idea that the family was “natural” well before Musk’s tech-enabled gaggle of offspring. Queer and trans people remind everyone that our desires, our very selves, are bigger and messier and more powerful than the offer that capitalism has given us. If the story we have been told about gender and sex and love for so long has turned out to be this flimsy, to need this much aggressive shoring up, which other social institutions might turn out to be easily torn apart?
For decades, centuries even, we were told that hard work was what made men—that and a particular capacity for violence. The opportunities for the work are gone, or at least for that work to remotely pay off, and we have been left with only the violence. But we have seen, all across the country, a vision of resistance to fascism that is based in care as well as a type of bravery that doesn’t require guns and violence. In the streets of Los Angeles, Chicago, Memphis, New Orleans, and most particularly Minneapolis, we’ve seen attachments that go beyond the nuclear family, love that isn’t rooted in biological kinship, and community based on looking out for one another’s needs and refusing the brutal zero-sum logic of Trumpist manhood.