Donald Trump is a man, and he has gone to great lengths to prove it. He has tried, most recently, to steal back the presidential election he lost (democracy, which acknowledges the feelings of other people, is unfortunately feminine). And he has resorted to bullying in his effort to force others to join his war on the electorate. Here is how the president, The New York Times reported this week, tried to persuade his vice president to submit to his preferred reality: “You can either go down in history as a patriot, or you can go down in history as a pussy.”
The ultimatum was, like so many aspects of Trumpism, simultaneously cartoonish and dangerous. It was also repetitive. “Grab ’em by the pussy,” Trump had bragged of his treatment of women, in a recording made public just before the 2016 presidential election. The line rivals “Make America great again” as the defining motto of the Trump era. And “patriot or pussy,” with its tragicomic essentialism, now puts that era in stark relief. Trump’s invocations of pussy—the one a boast, the other a threat—make fitting bookends to a presidency shaped by malignant masculinity. With pussy it began; to pussy it has returned.
The Access Hollywood tape, in retrospect, was an omen. The video captured not only Trump’s misogyny, but also the mechanics of his mind: its abiding self-interest, its drive for dominance, its assumption that politics, like life, is little more than a string of arid transactions. The tape’s revelations led directly to the events that followed Trump’s inauguration: the marches, populated by people wearing “pussy hats,” protesting the new president. And it foreshadowed what it would feel like for a country—and a planet—to live at the mercy of one man’s whims. “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” Trump informed Billy Bush in the video. “You can do anything.” He turned that brag into a core principle of his political movement.