The men in President Donald Trump’s circle appear to be primping for their leader and reaching Mar-a-Lago levels of vanity, says New York Times columnist Jesse McKinley,.
“For the men of the Trump administration … the concentration on their appearance is a constant, with policy pronouncements and social media feeds suffused with displays of physical strength, tough-guy talk and masculine mojo,” said McKinley. “At the same time, those traditional tenets of masculinity have been accompanied by flashes of vulnerability about how the men look and dress.”
Men like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and especially Trump, frequently fuss at media for not helping them present their very best face. Trump complained that Time Magazine made him look bald. Rubio castigated a raft of Vanity Fair photos for allegedly being “manipulated” to look less awesome, and Hegseth has barred reporters from Iran war briefings because he found photos to be “unflattering.”
“It’s constant attempts at trying to cultivate a persona that in their eyes seems strong and powerful and dominant and stoic,” said Zac Seidler, a clinical psychologist and the global director of research at Movember, a men’s health charity. “But once you scratch the surface of that, all you see is fragility.”
Trump, who is known for thick makeup, has normalized critiquing men’s appearances, which McKinley says “is ushering in a new era of fawning assessments and regular commentary about the appearance of his cabinet members and others.”
Trump’s obsession with outward appearance is echoed by his staff, said Fairleigh Dickinson University government and politics professor Dan Cassino. “Men in the Trump administration are performing a very specific type of masculinity in order to try and appeal to Trump,” said Cassino.
But Seidler said all the focus on Trump’s men is triggering insecurity with the “overarching belief that you must look and appear a certain way or you have failed.”
“[Trump’s] surrogates frequently tout his vitality,” said McKinley, “and the president often connects himself with men who evince masculine traits, including musclebound influencers.
Masculinity is a constant evaluation among men in the Trump community, but that process of evaluation has been “supercharged,” said “Manhood in America,” author Michael Kimmel, adding that many male members of the Trump administration are seemingly “cosplaying their Rambo-ness” to impress the president.
