Didn't I tell you? Politics is sex by other means. Trump and Trumpism are all about sexual fears. Being cuckolded, overcoming or fear of impotency. The threat of the handsome, virile, Black man. This is it. I have been saying it for almost four years. My Lincoln Project homies know it. This is Maureen Dowd today:
WASHINGTON —Macbeth has his doubts.
But his wife taunts him about his manliness until he bloodies his country.
It’s hard to believe, four centuries after Shakespeare, that the fear of being unmanned is still so potent that it could wreck a country.
But it is. And it has.
Donald Trump’s warped view of masculinity has warped this nation’s response to a deadly pandemic. And Trump doesn’t even have a diabolical Lady MacTrump whispering in his ear, goading him about being a man. He goads himself, fueled by ghostly memories of his autocratic father.
As the Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt writes: “The tyrant, Macbeth and other plays suggest, is driven by a range of sexual anxieties: a compulsive need to prove his manhood, dread of impotence, a nagging apprehension that he will not be found sufficiently attractive or powerful, a fear of failure. Hence the penchant for bullying, the vicious misogyny, and the explosive violence. Hence, too, the vulnerability to taunts. Especially those bearing a latent or explicit sexual charge.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/01/opinion/sunday/trump-coronavirus-herman-cain.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
Every now and then even a blind drunk stumbles into the right bed.
WASHINGTON —Macbeth has his doubts.
But his wife taunts him about his manliness until he bloodies his country.
It’s hard to believe, four centuries after Shakespeare, that the fear of being unmanned is still so potent that it could wreck a country.
But it is. And it has.
Donald Trump’s warped view of masculinity has warped this nation’s response to a deadly pandemic. And Trump doesn’t even have a diabolical Lady MacTrump whispering in his ear, goading him about being a man. He goads himself, fueled by ghostly memories of his autocratic father.
As the Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt writes: “The tyrant, Macbeth and other plays suggest, is driven by a range of sexual anxieties: a compulsive need to prove his manhood, dread of impotence, a nagging apprehension that he will not be found sufficiently attractive or powerful, a fear of failure. Hence the penchant for bullying, the vicious misogyny, and the explosive violence. Hence, too, the vulnerability to taunts. Especially those bearing a latent or explicit sexual charge.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/01/opinion/sunday/trump-coronavirus-herman-cain.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
Every now and then even a blind drunk stumbles into the right bed.
