Grandiose and effusive praise of a leader is a key ingredient in a cult. The Leader is the smartest, strongest, richest, and (of course) the sexiest. (Remember when the White House doctor claimed that if Trump ate a slightly better diet, he could live to be "200 years old"? Turns out that guy was drunk and sexually harassing women on the job, but I digress . . .)
The Leader is always right, even when he utters contradictory statements within mere minutes or says absolute nonsense like this health tip: injecting bleach into your lungs might help clean them. In cases like that, when it is virtually impossible to assert the Leader is speaking truth, the next best option is to simply claim he never said what he said (despite video and audio evidence) or state that (as anyone can see) he was making a "joke" (because his sense of humor is also the greatest).
The ritual, shameless, and public self-abasement becomes slightly more understandable when you realize that these people (and there have been dozens of them over the last five years, both working for trump and at the propaganda networks) are addressing an audience of one. They are not doing a television interview or hosting an entertainment program at all. They are speaking directly to Trump, trying to flatter him as ostentatiously as possible with the desperate hope of becoming anointed as his "favorite". It's a temporary appellation, at best. One nano-second after Trump decides you are no longer useful to him or someone else has debased himself by spewing even greater praise, it will be as though you never existed.
Also, no praise can ever be too much, or too over-the-top. As long as the words are excessively positive and spoken in public, even if the speaker is blatantly talking out of his ass, the Supreme Ass will lap it up.
Trump also had the thinnest-skin of anyone to occupy the White House. He was the ultimate "snowflake", a fragile, insecure moron who needs multiple sycophants around him at all times, to coddle his hurt feelings and assure him that HE is the smartest and bestest.
"But at no time, having known Joe Biden for quite some time, does he have the energy of Donald Trump. We both know it. Donald Trump didn't need to sleep five hours a night" -- Kevin McCarthy to Hannity pic.twitter.com/LKSKLUoC8E
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 15, 2021
I’m gonna say this was taken a few years ago, because he has gained a little weight since then. pic.twitter.com/at3re1sgVf
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) May 7, 2021
Anna North, Vox, May 12, 2020:
The Trump administration's behavior around masks has gendered overtones. For Trump and Pence, not wearing a mask may be a way to project a macho image, [Jonathan] Metzl [a professor of sociology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University and the author of Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’' Heartland] said, playing into "tropes of indestructibility."
"Appearing to play it safe contradicts a core principle of masculinity: show no weakness," wrote social sciences professor Peter Glick at Scientific American. "Defying experts' warnings about personal danger signals 'I'm a tough guy, bring it on.'"
Trump's messaging has also helped promote the idea that ignoring the risks of coronavirus is the tough or strong thing to do. . . . Such militaristic, tough-guy messaging, along with Trump's refusal to wear a mask, may encourage ordinary people — especially men — to minimize the risk of coronavirus for the sake of appearing manly.
Tom Nichols, The Atlantic, May 25, 2020 (my emphasis):
So many mysteries surround Donald Trump . . . Some of them are merely curiosities; others are of national importance, such as whether he understood the nuclear-weapons briefing given to every president. I prefer not to dwell on this question.
But since his first day as a presidential candidate, I have been baffled by one mystery in particular: Why do working-class white men—the most reliable component of Donald Trump's base—support someone who is, by their own standards, the least masculine man ever to hold the modern presidency? The question is not whether Trump fails to meet some archaic or idealized version of masculinity. . . . Rather, the question is why so many of Trump's working-class white male voters refuse to hold Trump to their own standards of masculinity—why they support a man who behaves more like a little boy.
I am a son of the working class, and I know these cultural standards. The men I grew up with think of themselves as pretty tough guys, and most of them are. They are not the products of elite universities and cosmopolitan living. These are men whose fathers and grandfathers came from a culture that looks down upon lying, cheating, and bragging, especially about sex or courage. . . . They admire and value the understated swagger, the rock-solid confidence, and the quiet reserve of such cultural heroes as John Wayne's Green Beret Colonel Mike Kirby and Sylvester Stallone's John Rambo (also, as it turns out, a former Green Beret).
They are, as an American Psychological Association feature describes them, men who adhere to norms such as "toughness, dominance, self-reliance, heterosexual behaviors, restriction of emotional expression and the avoidance of traditionally feminine attitudes and behaviors." But I didn't need an expert study to tell me this; they are men like my late father and his friends, who understood that a man's word is his bond and that a handshake means something. They are men who still believe in a day's work for a day's wages. They feel that you should never thank another man when he hands you a paycheck that you earned. They shoulder most burdens in silence—perhaps to an unhealthy degree—and know that there is honor in making an honest living and raising a family. . . .
I do not present these beliefs and attitudes as uniformly virtuous in themselves. Some of these traditional masculine virtues have a dark side: Toughness and dominance become bullying and abuse; self-reliance becomes isolation; silence becomes internalized rage. Rather, I am noting that courage, honesty, respect, an economy of words, a bit of modesty, and a willingness to take responsibility are all virtues prized by the self-identified class of hard-working men, the stand-up guys, among whom I was raised.
And yet, many of these same men expect none of those characteristics from Trump, who is a vain, cowardly, lying, vulgar, jabbering blowhard. Put another way, as a question I have asked many of the men I know: Is Trump a man your father and grandfather would have respected? . . .
[T]he fact of the matter is that Trump is an obvious coward. He has two particular phobias: powerful men and intelligent women.
Whenever he is in the company of Russian President Vladimir Putin, to take the most cringe-inducing example, he visibly cowers. . . .
Trump talks too much [and] he ends up saying things that more stereotypically masculine men wouldn't, like that he fell in love with North Korea's Kim Jong Un. "He wrote me beautiful letters, and they're great letters," Trump told a rally in West Virginia. "We fell in love." One can only imagine the reaction among working-class white men if Barack Obama, or any other U.S. president, had talked about falling in love with a foreign leader. . . .
Trump never seems more fearful and insecure than when women question him. His anxiety at such moments—for example, when he calls on female reporters in the White House press room—is palpable. He begins his usual flurry of defensive hand gestures, from the playing of an imaginary accordion to a hand held up with a curled pinky finger like some parody of a Queens mobster, while he stammers out verbal chaff bursts of "Excuse me" and "Are you ready?" . . .
Trump's lack of masculinity is about maturity. He is not manly because he is not a man. He is a boy. . . .
It should not be a surprise then, that Trump is a hero to a culture in which so many men are already trapped in perpetual adolescence. And especially for men who feel like life might have passed them by, whose fondest memories are rooted somewhere in their own personal Wonder Years from elementary school until high-school graduation, Trump is a walking permission slip to shrug off the responsibilities of manhood.
The appeal to indulge in such hypocrisy must be enormous. Cheat on your wife? No problem. You can trade her in for a hot foreign model 20 years younger. Is being a father to your children too onerous a burden on your schedule? Let the mothers raise them. Money troubles? Everyone has them; just tell your father to write you another check. Upset that your town or your workplace has become more diverse? Get it off your chest: Rail about women and Mexicans and African Americans at will and dare anyone to contradict you.
Trump's media enablers do their best to shore up the fiction that Trump and the men who follow him are the most macho of men. The former White House aide Sebastian Gorka, one of Trump's most dedicated sycophants, has described Trump as a "man's man," despite the fact that Trump has no hobbies or interests common to many American men other than sex. In this gang of Sweathogs, Gorka is the Arnold Horshack to Trump's Vinnie Barbarino, always admiring him as the most alpha of the alphas. To listen to Gorka and others in Trumpworld, the president can turn his enemies to ash through sheer testosterone overload. . . .
Donald Trump is unmanly because he has never chosen to become a man. He has weathered few trials that create an adult of any kind. . . .
Howard Stern, of all people, said it best: "The oddity in all of this is the people Trump despises most love him the most. The people who are voting for Trump for the most part … He'd be disgusted by them."
The tragedy is that they are not disgusted by him in return.
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