How Donald Trump’s Truculent Retro Masculinity Duped Working Class Men

The gender gap in politics has been documented since the 1970s and was particularly large in 2016. In 2024, the gender gap fell slightly—but it remains large. But the traditional focus is on the gap between the voting behavior of men and women, and the reasons women have increasingly favored Democrats. It’s time to shift our focus to men and masculinity. Adept manipulation of masculine anxieties is an essential ingredient in the secret sauce of many far-right figures, from Donald Trump to Jair Bolsonaro to Viktor Orbán to Alternative for Germany’s call to “rediscover our manliness.”

Telling the story of far-right populism as a story of class-based masculinities is dead easy. Roughly two-thirds of white noncollege males voted for Trump each time he has run for president, making them Trump’s biggest supporters. Trump’s gains among people of color were chiefly fueled by the votes of men. An analysis of the 2022 midterm elections showed that 43 percent of Latinos, but only 34 percent of Latinas, voted Republican. In 2024, the big story was men of color’s shift toward Trump. Latinos favored Trump by a 12-point margin (a 32-point shift away from Democrats), while Latinas favored Harris by 22 points.

Trump’s support among Black men more than doubled, from 12 percent in 2020 to 25 percent in 2024. Only 10 percent of Black women voted for Trump. “There’s a big masculinity component, the Joe Rogan effect,” Equis Research’s Carlos Odio told me, referring to the tough-guy podcaster “with cross-racial appeal.”

Politics is one arena in which men enact their masculine identities through the endorsement of politicians, parties, and policies that appear tough, strong, and forceful. Trump’s bad-but-bold strain of masculinity excuses men’s bad behavior on the grounds that “boys will be boys” (i.e., men are designed for dominance). He taps age-old understandings of virility as a way of using sexual domination of women to negotiate a status hierarchy among men. This explains Trump’s obsessive bragging about his brilliance and big hands, his weird belittling of the attractiveness of opponents’ wives, his admiration for oh-so-macho Elon Musk.

Trump constructs his insults of women and disabled people as courage in taking on “political correctness”: he stands up to elites who seek to silence red-blooded men who want to tell it like it is. Even his speaking style connects with blue-collar talk traditions that associate blunt talk with personal integrity. “He doesn’t try to sugarcoat things,” explained one woman. Media scholars have shown how Fox News connects emotionally with the “NASCAR audience” by using a blue-collar confrontative style and masculinist personalities like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson. The first two “performed the role of an ‘authentic,’ blue-collar everyman.”

A qualitative study of 2016 Trump voters details their attraction to Trump’s self-presentation as “an icon of manhood: a confident, savvy, and aggressive businessman who had the guts to take on the political establishment.” To a one, they praised Trump’s willingness to tell it like it is without fear of being labeled politically incorrect, which tapped into a classic theme: that a real man exerts control and resists control by others—John Wayne masculinity. Even those who felt that Trump went too far felt he was a “natural and authentic force that could not be leashed by political correctness.” Trump’s unvarnished-truth style made him seem more trustworthy: a 2023 report found that more young men trusted Trump than Biden.

Being a man is a cherished identity for most men: a 2023 study found two-thirds of men feel more praised and accepted when they act manly. Cherished—but precarious. Social psychologist Joseph Vandello and colleagues point out that being a “real” man has to be earned, over and over again. This makes noncollege men’s loss of social status particularly painful. And the loss of status is real: as of 2009, the subjective social status of women was lower than that of similarly educated men; by 2014, women noncollege grads felt higher status than their male counterparts in both the US and five European countries. “The relative social status of men without a college education is lower today than it was 25 to 30 years ago,” with some of the most pronounced declines between 2009 and 2014, conclude Noam Gidron and Peter Hall. Susan Faludi pointed this out as far back as 1999. In districts where Google searches signaled precarious masculinity, Republicans’ vote share was higher in the 2018 midterms, an effect researchers tied to Trump.

History provides perspective. The breadwinner-homemaker model, invented in the late eighteenth century, was “unattainable for all but the upper and upper-middle-class and an elite minority of the working class” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A man who was a breadwinner with a wife at home was living up to both a gender ideal and a class ideal. That helps explain why, even today among non-elites, “it is still considered the norm and mark of financial success for a woman to stay at home while the man works.” Privileged men have alternative sources of social status—but also maintain their breadwinner status. Among married couples in the top 1 percent by wealth or income, 70 percent prioritized men’s careers and had a gender-traditional division of labor. Elite families can spout feminism all they want; they let men’s salaries do the talking.

For a brief period from roughly 1970 to 2000, many blue-collar families could access this social ideal because highly paid blue-collar work meant that their families could get by on only intermittent work by wives. Thus Michelle Obama’s mother stayed at home until her kids were in high school, when she went back to work to help pay for tuition—just like my mother-in-law. Because white men had privileged access to blue-collar jobs, the breadwinner ideal was even stronger among non-elite whites. Jennifer Sherman found that 59 percent of the rural whites she talked with said they’d grown up with homemaker moms. “During the forest ’s industry’s heyday,” she notes, “solid lower-middle-class lifestyle was more commonly achievable without a working wife.”

Gone with the wind. The reality changed, but the ideals didn’t; both men and women still embrace the provider ideal. Nearly three-fourths of Americans still say it’s important for a man to be able to support his family, including 78 percent of Latinos and 84 percent of Black Americans. The lower the education level, the higher the endorsement of the provider ideal: about half of college grads think it’s better for children if “one parent” stays home, as compared with two-thirds of those with high school or less and 60 percent of those with some college. One parent? Who are we kidding? Said the wife of a laid-off steelworker, “Men have a tendency to identify with what they do. To Al, he was a steelworker. That’s who he was.” Said another laid-off worker, “I felt like I should be the one out earning money for the family and my wife should be home taking care of her kids, and I just felt horrible.” It’s non-elite men who feel horrible, not elite ones: elite women actually earn less in comparison to elite men than in 1990, whereas non-elite men’s wages have fallen so sharply they’re now a lot closer to women’s than they once were.

Working-class men still want to be providers; many working-class women still want to marry providers. If we look at who earns more, we can see why. While women with degrees have entered traditionally male careers, noncollege women grads typically are stuck in low-paying, pink-collar jobs. One or even two pink-collar jobs means a fragile hold in the middle class (at best); the best defense against downward mobility is a blue-collar job, only 17 percent of which are held by women.

Michèle Lamont found that providing was one of the top three values held by white blue-collar men and one of the top five held by Black blue-collar men. Being “unemployed or underemployed is thus, for many in the working class, not only an economic catastrophe but a moral one.”

The loss of non-elites’ ability to fulfill the breadwinner ideal is part of what drives the nostalgic deprivation political scientists document. The loss is not just symbolic; it’s material. In a society that steadfastly refuses to invest in a childcare system adequate to support two-job families, the alternative to the wife at home is far from ideal. Remember Bailey Hodge, who worked tag team and complained that she had no time to do anything other than sleep and work. She was one of the lucky ones: she had a union job. More common is the experience of Mike, who drove a cab; his wife worked at a hospital. They decided it would be best if she was there during the day and Mike was there at night because “he controls the kids, especially my son, better than I do.” So she worked the graveyard shift. “I hate it, but it’s the only answer: at least this way someone is here all the time.”

After her shift, she returned home at 8:30 a.m. to an empty house. Instead of going to sleep, she cleaned the house, did the shopping and the laundry, then finally slept—but only for an hour or two until the kids got home from school. After Mike got home at five, the family had dinner together, and she grabbed another couple of hours of sleep. “I try to get up at 9 so we can have a little time together, but I’m so tired that I don’t make it a lot of times”—after all, she’d only had four hours of sleep. By 10:00 p.m., Mike was sleeping because he had to get up and on the road at 6:00 a.m. “It’s hard, it’s very hard. There’s no time to live or anything.” No surprise: tag team families have three to six times the national divorce rate.

Sherman details the creativity with which non-elite men redefine the provider role when family-sustaining jobs disappear. Almost every man Sherman interviewed listed hunting and fishing as their favorite hobbies. They were also “the best way for poor men to contribute non-monetarily to his family’s basic needs with little loss of respectability.” One class migrant noted her aversion to deer meat—associated in my crowd with tasting menus, but in her childhood with unemployment and poverty. “When people don’t have money for food, there’s lots and lots of food just runnin’ around the woods,” noted a gamekeeper who cut the locals some slack for hunting to feed their families.

Families also relied on unemployment and disability: nearly 40 percent of rural men Sherman interviewed between twenty-one and sixty-four were on disability, nearly twice the rate in the state. She found “a growing incidence and acceptance” of stay-at-home fathers on disability. But this is making lemonade out of lemons: the provider role is so deeply intertwined with masculinity that unemployed men are more likely to be impotent. “I felt like a man again,” said a Pennsylvania toll collector when he got a new job after being injured in his prior job as a dockworker. His new job evaporated during COVID, when he was permanently laid off two and a half months before qualifying for a full pension.

It’s easy for elites to look down on the provider and protector as outdated. But these stereotypes still hold tremendous power for both elite and non-elite men. “Even in the world’s most gender-egalitarian countries, women tend to prefer men with relatively high income and education,” noted Vegard Skirbekk, a population economist. An experiment with a class-diverse sample found that men preferred women who earn less than they do because they saw women who earn more as less likable and less likely to be faithful.

“Where’s the boss?” my mother-in-law used to ask me, until I told her in no uncertain terms that no one in our family is the boss. In her generation, men earned the lion’s share of the family income so—though they were subordinated at work—at home, they were the boss. A second subtext: to her, it was a privilege to be a homemaker. It gave her pleasure, too, to make her husband feel like he was the boss somewhere. “A man’s got his pride.” This used to be a common saying, now defunct in polite circles as sexist. It is sexist but it’s still true, whether we admit it or not. It helps explain why high-paid women lawyers drop out of the workforce to support their husbands’ careers and why women in blue-collar families mourn the loss of well-paid blue-collar jobs. “I’m voting to save my boyfriend’s job,” said a white working-class woman to explain her vote for Trump. Both emotional and economic logic drive this. No one wants the person they love to feel humiliated. And working-class women, who still chiefly hold dead-end pink-collar jobs “with no flexibility and no future,” often still see good blue-collar jobs held by men as their best hope for a stable, middle-class standard of living. Working-class wives work primarily for the money rather than career satisfaction; this results in more marital tension, which can fuel marital instability that spirals into yet more economic insecurity.

In this context, the common policy prescription that blue-collar men take care-work jobs can only fuel the Far Right. Alas, blue-collar men want what white-collar men have: traditionally male jobs. Reporters who’ve interviewed me on the topic typically focus on male nurses; one protested that her nephew was a nurse (as is mine). But most pink-collar jobs aren’t like nursing: they’re low-wage, dead-end jobs, which is one reason men don’t want them. It’s a recipe for resentment to have college-educated elites (whose men still hold traditionally masculine jobs) tell blue-collar men that the solution to their families’ gutted-by-neoliberalism economic prospects is for men to take the low-wage, feminine-coded jobs.

Steve Bannon couldn’t think this stuff up. But that’s not the only fix Richard Reeves suggests in his influential Of Boys and Men. He also suggests giving boys an extra year in the classroom, telling us how he held his middle son back. I’m all for holding kids back if they need it—we held my dyslexic son back when he was in second grade; he now has a PhD in electrical engineering. But I recognize this as responsive to my class-specific obsession on optimizing children’s academic potential. It’s counter-productive as a solution to working-class economic woes. In many areas of the country, kindergarten is free but pre-K is not; it can cost as much as $10,000 a year. Reeves recognizes the need for free pre-K for working-class kids but doesn’t seem to recognize that without it, his proposal would mean they’ll be stuck in inadequate childcare for yet another year or that working-class moms (or, less often, dads) will have to take more time out of the workforce in families that need two incomes to survive, much less thrive.

So the plan for addressing the bleak prospects of working-class families is low-paid, pink-collar jobs, and to shoulder yet another expense they can’t afford? This is just one way class blindness leads to poor public policy. What working-class families need are family-sustaining jobs to address people’s desire for dignity, meaning, marriage, and cash. College-educated men—overwhelmingly white—are the only group whose real wages have increased since 1980. Solutions to the problems faced by non-elite men should not be designed to ensure that elite men can reach their potential.

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From Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back by Joan C. Williams. Copyright © 2025 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan.