Prominent voices in the national media are attempting to hit President Trump where it hurts: His manhood.
Journalists are calling Trump’s masculinity into question, soon after White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci was ousted after his profanity-laced screed in New Yorker magazine.
New York Times columnist Roger Cohen on Monday likened the White House staff to a 16th Century Italian comedy, and said Trump would best be portrayed by a character who pretends to be well endowed.
“The president, at 71, is clearly a ‘vecchio,’ or elder,” wrote Cohen. “He is probably best imagined as the miserly Venetian known as Pantalone wandering around in red breeches with the oversized codpiece of the would-be womanizer. … The key to understanding him is probably that oversize codpiece.”
On the same day, David Brooks, also a Times columnist, said that the Trump administration “certainly giving us an education in the varieties of wannabe manliness” and that the president demeanor is a “parody of manliness.”
In the few days of his new role at the White House, Scaramucci, who unexpectedly resigned on Monday, put himself forward as a swaggering, in-your-face tough guy, sniping publicly at other White House staff, most famously in an interview with New Yorker magazine.
The anti-Trump writer Kevin Williamson wrote Sunday in National Review that both Scaramucci and Trump displayed characteristics of insecure men aspiring for “alpha male” status, “an obsession for some sexually unhappy contemporary men.”
The 2016 campaign, particularly during the Republican primary, was often seen as a display in male aggression and one upmanship on an unofficial scale of masculinity.
Trump memorably tagged then-GOP candidate Jeb Bush with the “low energy” title that many saw as a jab at his virility. Marco Rubio, late in the contest, dredged up an old Mad magazine joke about Trump having small hands as a retort to the celebrity businessman’s “Little Rubio” taunt.
“And you know what they say about small hands,” Rubio had said during a campaign rally in Virginia.
During a debate, Trump responded to the suggestive remark by saying, “I guarantee you there’s no problem.”
On Trump’s decision to publicly and aggressively criticize Attorney General Jeff Sessions and others, Times writer Maureen Dowd said last weekend the president is “trapped in a caricature of masculinity that corrodes his judgment.”
And conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, writing last Thursday on Trump’s well known Twitter outbursts, said Trump is a “drama queen” and “must remind people of their first wife.”
