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The macho men who bootlick Trump show us what weakness looks like
It is a peculiar paradox of the cronies and thugs who surround President Donald Trump: the more macho their image and the harder they try to project manliness (and boy, do they try hard), the more submissive they are to their boss.
Take, as a first example, the craven spectacle of Vice President J. D. Vance providing bully boy back-up to his master as Trump berated Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, during their catastrophic meeting on Friday.
Or take Pete Hegseth, Trump’s defence secretary, a former TV host with scant military experience who is an apparent magnet for sexual assault allegations (which he says are false).
Hegseth is a tough guy; just ask him. He wants to have “the biggest, most badass military on the planet” and recently told a NATO meeting that the US will “not allow anyone to turn Uncle Sam into Uncle Sucker”.
Yet in the case of pleasing his leader, he acquiesces as sweetly as a tradwife. When Trump went over Hegseth’s head to abruptly fire the nation’s senior military officer, amid a wider purging of three- and four-star generals at the Pentagon, Pete was on hand for slavish support.
“The president deserves to pick his key national security advisory team,” whimpered Hegseth, as decades’ worth of military expertise walked out his department’s door.
Or take Elon Musk, tech bro-in-chief. Musk asserts what fellow tech-bro Mark Zuckerberg might call his “masculine energy” through scattergun siring of children and his triumphant dominance of the misogynist swamp of X (formerly Twitter, which he owns). He has taken to his position as head of the dubious “Department of Government Efficiency” with the swagger of a Roman emperor.
Yet, Musk is the president’s most puppyish hypeman. He never appears in public these days without his special Trump-tribute black MAGA cap.
During his boss’s first cabinet meeting on Wednesday (where Musk held court, despite not being a member of cabinet), he grovelled before Trump by calling himself “humble tech support” to the president. Musk said Trump had “put together, I think, the best cabinet ever … and I don’t give false praise”.
He sounded like the second-most popular girl in school reassuring the most popular girl in school that she is definitely the prettiest.
If you wanted to be mean, you might even call these men simps (the manosphere insult for men who show too much deference or solicitude to the object of their affection). And none is worse than Jeff Bezos, the world’s second-richest man, who, like Musk, has space travel ambitions that even Sigmund Freud would have found too psychologically obvious.
(My name is Bezos. Jeff) Bezos used to be a schlubby tech nerd but has undergone a substantial “glow-up” with the help of Tom Cruise’s personal trainer. Bezos once clashed with Trump, and Trump was angered by the coverage he received by the Washington Post, which Bezos owns.
But more recently, the mogul, who has billions in contracts that depend on the US federal government, has come on board with the MAGA program, meek as a mouse. He has dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and following the president’s election, Bezos praised Trump’s “extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory”.
Last year he donated $US1 million to Trump’s “inaugural fund”. He was given a prominent seat at the presidential inauguration. Then this week Bezos announced a directive that the newspaper’s opinion pages will henceforth reject all viewpoints that oppose “personal liberties and free markets”.
“We are going to be writing every day in support and defence of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” Bezos told staff in a statement he later posted on X. “We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”
Freedom, he continued, apparently without irony, is “ethical – it minimises coercion – and practical – it drives creativity, invention and prosperity”.
His opinion editor, the experienced and revered David Shipley, decided to “step away” from his job as a result of the new directive, Bezos said. He would soon appoint a replacement “to lead this new chapter”.
It is difficult to grapple with the hypocrisy of a newspaper owner who cancels certain opinions from his opinion pages in the name of freedom – put it down on the list of Trump-era outrages that would be funny if they weren’t so scary.
A newspaper’s opinion pages are the place where the contract between reader and journalist is at its most sacred, and, not being independently verifiable, those opinions are taken on trust. An opinion columnist is paid to tell readers what he or she really believes. Readers are paying to hear what their favoured opinion columnist really believes. Opinion columnists at the Post, no matter how pure of heart, are now operating under strict orders, and readers can no longer be sure what they really believe.
When Bezos directed the Post editorial team not to run their planned editorial backing Kamala Harris for the presidency, the paper lost about 200,000 subscribers, according to reports. More recently, the Post refused to publish a political cartoon that showed Bezos and other powerful American businessmen bowing to Trump. The cartoonist resigned in protest.
It is bad business for the newspaper that broke Watergate, and which has the masthead motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness”. But Bezos doesn’t need the money from a profitable newspaper (a diminishing prospect anyway, given the crisis in legacy media).
He can use the paper as a newsletter to Trump and his allies in government and business, to relay one simple message: I am on your side.
The cancelled Post cartoon hurt because it contained truth. The more cravenly these men bow to Trump, the weaker they look. But that is a small price to pay for their self-interest, financial and otherwise, which is bolstered by intimacy with a president who seems actively to be cultivating an oligarchy.
Tim Snyder, the Yale University history professor and Holocaust expert who wrote On Freedom, a brilliant exploration of that topic that lays out 20 lessons from the history of the 20th century, is enjoying a renaissance at the moment.
The first rule in On Freedom is titled “Do not obey in advance”, and makes the point that “much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given”.
“Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom,” he writes.
Former Post executive editor Marty Baron said he was “sad and disgusted” at his boss’ former actions this week, thereby demonstrating the sort of strength and integrity that is fast going out of fashion in the world of Trump 2.0. His comments were a good example of what freedom is really for.
Jacqueline Maley is a senior writer and columnist.
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