I’m going to rain a bit on this Democratic day of high expectation.
Voters on Tuesday are almost certainly going to repudiate the worst president in American history, turning control of the House over to Democrats, with the Senate having at least a 50-50 chance of following suit. If only President Trump would take the hint and resign.
But he is not going anywhere.
The dismal reality is that we are stuck with this corrupt and vengeful man for another two years, two months and 17 days.
At one level, Trump’s descent is great entertainment. Cultural liberals convinced of the virtue of self-expression may rejoice in the president’s open display of his androgynous love of hard male bodies, especially their buttocks.
At another level, for a right-wing president to openly declare his admiration for another man’s “ass,” as Trump has repeatedly done over the past few weeks, suggests that we will be governed for the next two-plus years by a rebuked but powerful president with fraying internal psychological guardrails. The Joint Chiefs of Staff should consider moving the threat level to DEFCON 1.
On the campaign trail, it’s all gotten weirder and weirder. Take Trump’s musings at a rally on Oct. 12 in Youngstown, Ohio, in support of the Republican senator seeking to hold on to his seat, Jon Husted:
I’m standing over here, and I don’t do this with men very often. I started examining his body because I didn’t know he was a great athlete. And I looked, and I watched up and down.
I looked at his ass and I looked at the whole — and then I looked at his hands. Look at his hands. He’s got these, like, claws. And I got it. You are a great athlete. I didn’t know that ’cause he doesn’t talk about that. Congratulations. Now, they finally know.
For a politician dependent on the support of MAGA voters known for their intolerance, these flights of the imagination suggest a man losing touch with reality.
A few days later, Trump brought the matter up again in Kentucky.
A few days after that, he did it again. Speaking in Greenville, N.C., on Oct. 20 in favor of the Republican Senate nominee there, Michael Whatley, Trump could not get his mind off Husted’s posterior:
So, he’s over here. I’m over here, and I’m studying his body. I’ve never studied the body of a man before. It’s not my thing. Nothing wrong with it, of course. I always precede it by saying, “Nothing wrong,” but it’s never been my thing, to be honest with you.
But I looked at his ass, and then I looked at his legs. I said, “His ass is, it’s like a pile of muscle.” Then I looked at his legs, and I said, “Man, his feet are big.” Then I looked at his shoulders, and I tapped him on the shoulder, and it actually hurt my hand. He’s like a piece of steel. I said, “This guy’s a monster!”
Trump has not confined himself to one particular body part. At least twice he has marveled before an audience at the size of Arnold Palmer’s penis.
At an October 2024 campaign rally in Latrobe, Pa., the president told supporters:
Arnold Palmer was all man. And I say that in all due respect to women, and I love women, but this guy, this guy. This is a guy that was all man. This man was strong and tough. And I refuse to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, “Oh, my God, that’s unbelievable.”
I had to say it. I had to say it. We have women that are highly sophisticated here, but they used to look at Arnold, this is bad, but he was really something special.
I asked a number of experts in the study of the presidency what they make of Trump’s thought processes.
“With Trump it has always been hard to tell whether his breaches of norms are the result of pathological disinhibition or an ingenuity in colonizing our attention,” Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, wrote in an email, adding:
He’s done it again — we’re talking about an inappropriate, offensive and downright weird affectation, loosely inspired by the latest MAGA theme (in this case, ostentatious masculinity), but manifested in a quirk that comes out of left field.
Both explanations may apply: Trump may be less capable of policing his fleeting thoughts but may also be indulging what he knows is outrageous because it not only has failed to cost him in the past but has worked to his advantage in remaining the topic of conversation (and to the neglect of more consequential failings).
“Something is changing with Trump,” Dan McAdams, a professor of psychology as well as human development and social policy at Northwestern University, pointed out. “Trump seems to be losing some of his powers of self-regulation, which have never been all that strong for him anyway.”
In later adulthood, McAdams continued, “regulatory powers of cognition and speech may wane somewhat. For example, when older people tell stories about their personal experiences, they often digress in unexpected ways and engage in what researchers call ‘story asides.’”
There are some who argue that Trump’s bizarre comments on body parts he finds worthy of comment are part of a diversion strategy.
Jennifer Mercieca, a professor in the department of communication and journalism at Texas A&M, questioned whether “Trump’s (admittedly very odd) comments about people’s bodies are ‘homoerotic’ or that there is a relationship between what you characterize as ‘homoerotic’ and Trump’s mental stability or his ability to control himself.”
Instead, Mercieca wrote,
if the goal is to explain the comments, then I think we could build a credible explanation in his well-established ability to set the nation’s media agenda. We live in an attention economy where what trends is determined by what is outrageous enough to attract attention, amplification and circulation.
Trump’s comments about people’s bodies (including Nicki Minaj’s) attract attention and dominate online conversation, so it’s likely that he keeps making them because they’re effective.
When the nation is talking about Trump’s gross comments, what aren’t we talking about? We aren’t talking about the affordability crisis, we aren’t talking about gas prices, we aren’t talking about the war in Iran, or corruption, or many other important things. Trump has very successfully used an outrage strategy to control our public sphere throughout the last 10 years.
I disagree with Mercieca. For a right-wing Republican to lovingly describe another man’s backside as “a pile of muscle,” supposedly as a strategy to cover for his failings as president, is a bridge too far, even for Trump.
Instead of treating Trump’s strange soliloquies as a diversion strategy, Paul Elliott Johnson, a professor in the communication department at the University of Pittsburgh, argued that they are evidence that
at this point he doesn’t have any mediators or processes for handling losses. How did he handle losing the 2020 election? Denial, claiming stolen elections, getting his sycophants to launch lunatic claims in the media and in the courts, self-pitying complaining so off-putting and noxious it ensured his party’s defeat in the Georgia Senate runoffs, all leading up to Jan. 6, 2021.
Johnson warned that a political loss for Trump today is “not a contingent threat but a primal one.” He sees himself about to be “stripped naked, humiliated, violated. So I firmly expect him to lash out in a catastrophic manner.”
Trump, Johnson argued, “won’t just see an electoral defeat; he’ll see his entire existence threatened and zeroed out. Because if you’re not constantly dominating and degrading others, you’re not a Real Man (which is to say in his register, a person).”
I thought Casey Ryan Kelly, professor of rhetoric and public culture in the department of communication studies at the University of Nebraska — Lincoln, had a particularly insightful take. In an email, he wrote:
Admittedly, his recent meditations on men’s physiques seem like he has lost emotional regulation.
On the other hand, Trump has always fetishized “men’s men,” telling stories about “big strong” men coming up to him with tears in their eyes to thank him. He was fond of telling stories about monstrous Border Patrol agents who could really hurt people.
Trump’s fascination with men’s — and women’s — bodies does not, however, disturb his core supporters, Kelly wrote:
It probably helps that the far right is obsessed with physical fitness, testosterone, carnivorism and traditional gender roles — so praising men for their impressive physiques is an acceptable form of homoeroticism so long as it reaffirms the gender order that is so foundational to their ideology.
They would not see his comments as gay fantasies but appreciation for tough guys with tough physiques, which makes them fit for office in his mind.
Kelly’s analysis, however, provides small comfort to an electorate that sees an already dangerously erratic president veer deeper and deeper into what amounts to hallucination.
Given the prospect of deeply embarrassing and shameful defeat in the midterms, the all-too-appropriate question becomes: Will Trump’s fantasies become sadistic? If so, who will he choose as his next victims?
Matthew Tobin contributed research to this essay.
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