In many ways, the Trump administration simply lays bare what was always there: the American desire for world domination, imperial violence, a klannish order, the total control and disempowerment of women and anyone outside the gender binary. But there was a time when such ambitions were at least restricted to smoking clubs and locker rooms. When “locker room talk” was not acceptable as political platform.
I’m not saying that was better. But what our current moment reveals, and specifically what the gender spectacle of the SOTU drove home for me this week, is that American politics has morphed into something not only more brazen and frank, but also dumber, more crude, more brute, and far more childish.
Previously, men in power relied on reason to manipulate and validate a white male supremacist order. They turned to religion and scripture, or appealed to moral sense. This is why, post WWII, we saw philosophers wrestle with the death of reason. It was clear that rationality, scientific logic, could also be used for deeply nefarious, violent ends, not only for improving humanity. Still, “moral” appeals in politics continued. Paul Weyrich, for instance, is on record arguing that to further a white Christian nationalist agenda, and create solidarity among the American right, political leaders had to use the “respectable” cause of ending abortion to appeal to the masses, who no longer favored, at least outright, controversial issues like segregation.
But who needs reason today, when you have fabrication, and blatant hatred?
What was on display at the SOTU this week was not a new movement, but the character has certainly shifted (perhaps you’ve noticed!). There has been much discussion of the meme-ification of American politics, crucial in understanding the gratuitous brand of brain rot masculinity that now dominates American conservative rhetoric. But what about the sports-ification of American politics?
There’s a reason the MAGA crowd gets so upset about football halftime shows that celebrate diversity, queerness, and decolonization. And sure, there’s a bit of a chicken-egg hyperreality at work in American football, which has long been a microcosm for war.
But American politics today does not simply reflect the culture of football. The MAGA movement, and the billionaire class that has advanced, funded and promoted it, sees ruthless neocolonialism, misogyny, and racism as a game they are playing more broadly. So, too, does their base.
I can recall way back in 2016, arguing with some extended family members, about how politics was not a game. They played it exactly like it was— like politics was strictly an armchair debate. We also see this perspective, of course, in moderates today, who are just asking irresponsible questions, or who think the point of politics is people saying whatever they want, no matter how repugnant or violent.
But Trump has long explicitly aligned himself with the politics of sport, including most recently UFC and WWE. Journalist Frankie de la Cretaz—who writes an excellent independent newsletter on the intersection of sports, gender, queerness, and culture—told me that Trump’s “lifting up of the men's hockey team, who are largely MAGA-coded and from a professional league with some of the highest numbers of players who are registered Republican voters, is a continuation of his pattern of ingratiating himself with the most toxically masculine and politically conservative sporting audiences as a way to garner support for himself. He did it with boxing in the 1980s, WWE in the 1990s, and UFC in the 2010s onward.”
Insecure masculinity, a key feature of this administration and the MAGA crowd, needs the approval of the tough cool boys who win. So, Trump trotted out the US men’s hockey team in the SOTU, while insisting that AMERICA IS WINNING because TRUMP. All while insisting that the women’s team will come to the White House, even though they declined his invitation after he laughed at them. This is rape culture, paternalistic, and just gross. It’s also patently misogynist, a way of yanking the chain at the women’s team. de la Cretaz put it this way: “Trump's focus on the men's team while also degrading the women's shows that no matter what women achieve, they are still considered second class.”
The way men’s sports culture shows up in American politics today is also influenced by how late capitalism has changed sports culture itself, by dialing everything up. Teams are corporations; so is the national government. We can trace some of how sports shows up in MAGA culture to the two-party system as well, which invites a continuous winner-loser mentality.
Either way, the power source is brutish intimidation, and total submission to the group’s leader. In this way, men’s sports culture is authoritarian in nature. They require blind allegiance to the team.
At the SOTU, Vance and Johnson sat behind Trump, their facial expressions showing that they did not always believe his bogus statistics and knew he sounded like an idiot. But the proximity to powerful mean grandpa—or perhaps, the wealthy owner of the team, the CEO—was enough for these guys to smile anyway, to keep clapping and standing.
From a young age, boys and men are conditioned for this. This is especially true in boys’ youth sports. They learn to deny moral clarity in exchange for the approval of other boys and men, and to remain on the “winning” team. Young boys are discouraged not only from having human emotions, but from asking questions, standing up for themselves, advocating for others, from calling out sexism or racism.
Fandom feeds the beast. I know some diehard sports fans, and I’m always surprised by their seething displays of anger when anyone dares root for another team. Like, chill! But this is the blind loyalty required of the fan, who has no room for critique.
In this light, the hoots and hollers of “USA” at the SOTU are not just nationalistic, they are that new code for white male power, for anti-wokeness, for hatred of The Democrats™ and women and LGBTQ+ people, for male domination. These chants are an affirmation of total allegiance to the team, whatever its character, even when it is built on obvious misinformation, or led by an unhinged coach who has totally lost his marbles. Those chants are an insistence that, yes, we will win, we are winners, we won, look at us winning.
It’s straight out of the authoritarian playbook. "Trump is using the men’s hockey team as a way of sportswashing the horrors of his administration,” de la Cretaz said, “especially in the lead up to LA 2028,” the forthcoming summer Olympic games, which Trump mentioned in the SOTU, claiming he would make Los Angeles “safe” by then (LA IS FINE). As de la Cretaz pointed out, Russia did the same in the 2010s with the men’s World Cup and Sochi Winter Games, as did Germany with the 1936 Olympic Games.
My feminist colleagues and I have pointed out that the problem with the global elite conspiracy framework for understanding Epstein’s ring is that the same rape culture that enables such abuse also exists for everyday men and boys. We are, in fact, all conditioned to deny the banality and ubiquity of male violence, whether it’s by laughing at the racist or sexist joke, ignoring toxic displays of hyper-masculinity, dismissing feminine or feminist complaints (or feminism writ large), or failing to intervene in the abuse and exploitation of women.
And it is not just men who suffer from the bystander effect. Women laugh at jokes aimed at them or other women, or when witnessing racism. Women stand by when their friend’s husband yells at his wife, or when dad sits on the couch while mom frantically handles the kids and the party. Everyone dunks on moms all the time. The goal is to align with white men.
At the more extreme end, blind allegiance to the team of white male power is of course what leads men to rape another man’s unconscious wife, as in the case of Gisèle Pelicot (or this astonishingly similar case), rather than report that man. And what leads little boys like Nick Fuentes to get such an erotic thrill from simply saying how much he hates women; he desperately wants to be picked for the team.
Kate Manne points out that while patriarchal marriage operates on a narrative of protection, ownership, and male entitlement to sexual, emotional, and material services, the cases of Pelicot and Epstein show us how men bond over violence against women— how men, indeed, often create a “shared sport and lifestyle” built on the abuse of women, perhaps because of men’s own fears of “homosociality and even queerness.”
Soraya Chemaly writes, “There’s a straight line from ‘locker room talk’ to Epstein’s emails to the Internet’s red pilling.” And while we’ve heard much about the dangers of the internet when it comes to young boys, we more rarely talk about the troubling culture of boys’ sports—how it grooms young men for this pipeline. Instead, boys’ sports is often seen as an antidote to hyper-online childhoods, and rarely problematized for the way it prepares boys to grow into men who see the world as a game they must win by maintaining solidarity with other men, at all costs.
The transphobia on display later in the SOTU further highlights how this form of male bonding relies on strict heteronormativity. Trump “claims to want to exclude trans women from women’s sports in the name of ‘protecting’ cis women,” de la Cretaz said, “but we can see what he really thinks of cis women with the way he mocked the gold medal hockey team.”
This is why seeing women and queer folks excel at the winter Olympics moved so many people. Athletes like Alysa Liu, Eileen Gu, and Amber Glenn destabilize the dire hetero politics of sports culture, which almost uniformly relies on things like: gender segregation! transphobia! regressive gender performances with corresponding outfits! and uncompromising political “neutrality” as sportsmanship!
These women actively refuse the hyper-masculine culture that goes along with such pageantry—the kind that would have them deny not only their accomplishments, so as to retain their appearance of female submissiveness, but also their bodies, their emotions, their friendships, and their politics.
This is, too, the wild appeal of Heated Rivalry, which shows male athletes having personalities and, dare I say, hearts. These are men who feel, want, struggle, and care. And that’s not something we usually get to see in men’s sports—or in the athletics of American politics today.
