Look Who’s Standing Up to Trump

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, February 01, 2024

 

After Margaret Thatcher condemned the Soviet Union’s efforts at détente in the early 1980s, President Ronald Reagan waxed anatomical, declaring Thatcher to be “the only European leader I know with balls.”

 

Today’s GOP is drowning in men who are quick to tell you how masculine they are, just before they cower before Donald Trump like dogs that have taken one too many rolled newspapers to the nose. These men are unwilling to stand up to their reprehensible party leader because they believe he holds their political futures in his fist. They quickly abandon meaningful legislative priorities because it might hurt the former president’s chances for reelection.

 

Yet among a group of quickly vanquished male presidential candidates, a female emerged who is now willing to stand up to the party’s biggest bully. Even though she’s still a longshot, Nikki Haley is finally running the campaign others wished they could have run against him.

 

Haley has begun to poke Trump’s pressure points, saying, for instance, that she sides with the jury that just hammered the GOP front-runner with an $83.3 judgment for defaming a woman he sexually assaulted. Haley has repeatedly pointed to Trump’s age and mental lapses, most recently his confusing her with Nancy Pelosi. She has further rapped him for jacking up America’s debt, praising Chinese leader Xi Jinping, and proposing a 10 percent tariff, which, as she correctly points out, would raise taxes on every American.

 

And sure, Haley hasn’t gone full Katt Williams — if she were to beat the odds and end up with the nomination, she’d still need those MAGA voters to support her in the general election. But as she campaigns in her native South Carolina, she has finally (and too late, for many people’s tastes) begun saying things out loud that her male competitors could never say (save Chris Christie, who dropped out with around 3 percent support in national polls).

 

Just this week, Haley has attempted to save the party from the humiliation of killing a deal that would strengthen security at America’s southern border. After years of complaining about “open borders,” Republicans in Congress are now close to a deal that would help close them — but after Trump realized that passing such a bill would be politically beneficial for Joe Biden, he told GOP leaders to shut it down. So apparently the only thing more damaging to America than fentanyl and terrorists crossing the border is a temporary bump to Biden’s approval rating.

 

Haley, to her credit, is having none of this nonsense, saying Congress should pass the bill immediately because “we can’t wait one more day.” To the extent that Republican voters care about issues at all, immigration is near the top. And she has the chance to show voters that Trump is the one who, for his own selfish benefit, is keeping the border open, while she wants to close it.

 

And, of course, no Republican has shown more testicular fortitude over the past three years than two-time Trump voter Liz Cheney, who has been catapulted out of the party for merely telling the truth about Trump’s unfitness for the office. Cheney knew full well her honesty about January 6 would cost her her congressional seat. Her mostly male colleagues cast her out of her leadership position by taking weaselly anonymous votes to ensure their names weren’t attached to such gutlessness. But she sacrificed her own political future for a higher good.

 

The shrieking chorus of “real men” denouncing Haley and Cheney have simply become a band of performing circus animals, feigning offense at every cultural touchstone. Seeing a pop princess for 25 seconds at a football game is now the subject of days’ worth of deranged theatrics. Never mind that Taylor Swift’s romance with Travis Kelce is actually a confirmation of traditional masculinity. Previously, she had only dated men who looked as if they had some seafaring-pirate disease. Now, she’s hooked up with a 6-foot-5-inch behemoth of a man who slams his head into other men for a living — and who genuinely lights up at the sight of her.

 

Gone are the manly traits of our forefathers: stoicism, reliability, strength, and dignity. Now your manhood is gauged by how offended you can be in public if green M&Ms are portrayed as being gay. Traditionally, “toxic masculinity” meant bullying the theater kids; MAGA masculinity means becoming one.

 

That doesn’t mean every woman on the right is a paragon of clear thinking. New York representative Elise Stefanik might be the worst of the shameless Trump sycophants only because she really does know better.

 

But among male GOP members, “manliness” simply means abandoning your own decency in favor of a man who cheated on his wife with a porn actress, then repeatedly referred to said actress as “horseface” when the affair came to light. A man who spent a portion of his presidency ridiculing a cable-talk-show host for her cosmetic surgery. A man who, after a jury found he had sexually assaulted a woman, spent days posting on social media about her, suggesting that because she had written some spicy articles about sex, she probably wanted whatever he did to her — which landed him back in court.

 

In order words, being a Republican “man” now means demonstrating full obeisance to a man who is both juvenile and delinquent.

 

So while some men on the right are out demonstrating their masculinity by tanning their testicles, it will be left to a few of the party’s women to stand strong and call out misdeeds when they see them. The GOP has essentially become an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race: It’s the women who are genuinely packing the stones.