Trump Is the Last White Man to Be President
Trump is the last white man – the symbol of the hopes and dreams of white men that they can rule the world once again. The passing of the torch always has an ending – “the last” – followed by a new beginning. Our movies have produced an entire genre of “the last”: The Last of the Mohicans, The Last Man on Earth, The Last Starfighter, The Last Samurai, and Last Action Hero are examples. In this sense Trump will be projected as “The Last White Man.”
Howard Sackler’s 1967 play, “The Great White Hope,” is suggestive of the role now played by Donald Trump. The play’s title came from the descriptor assigned decades earlier to any white boxer who stepped into the ring to challenge African American Jack Johnson, although it was most famously used to describe James J. Jeffries, who had retired from the ring more than five years before the landmark fight. Upon being wooed into returning to the ring, Jeffries made his reasons perfectly clear, publicly announcing, “I am going into this fight for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a Negro.”
In 2023, Donald Trump is the “great white hope.” This is his attraction. From the beginning he promised to protect America from brown and black people. His famous “Build the Wall” trope should have been painted in white as metaphor for “protect white people.” The fact that he is a white man grotesquely parading the old-fashioned traits of the “real man” defines his support among white males. Prior to Obama, Republicans had supported an array of white men and some of them became president.
homestratosphere.com
What angered conservatives was that none of these white men delivered the expected victories over Democrats, liberals, feminists, socialists, pro-abortionists, and gays. They were tired of backing losers. And along came Donald Trump – a whole different breed of white man. Evangelical leaders whined that they had been following a bunch of white wimps for more than forty years.
Donald said what no other president or presidential candidate had ever said before. He upended decorum, disrupted tradition, and unraveled democratic deliberation. No president had ever been so unpresidential.” No one saw what was coming – a white man building a successful campaign on racist themes, demeaning attacks on women, the press, the “swamp,” and democracy itself. Only Donald seemed to realize that a large segment of the country had been holding their breath for eight years while an African American lived in their White House as if we were a squatter.
The irony of Donald Trump is that he is a New York Yankee with a Southern soul minus the shame. The South is central to the absolutes of human defeat: man is both noble and tragic, insecurity, guilt, violence, and alienation. But Trump is the preacher of shamelessness. Trump’s rhetoric masks his gigantic insecurities in bluster, braggadocio, and extreme claims of brilliance. He never repents, says “I’m sorry, or surrenders. His defiance is that of a solitary man facing a category five hurricane with gritted teeth and dogged determination.
The part of the Southern soul imbibed by Trump is a deep level of violence. This is not so much actual violence as sheer physical assertion. It’s not fist-fighting but it is bullying, asserting power of place, privilege, and intimidation. “If you go after me, I am coming after you.” This has been the most frightening part of Trump’s presence: the implication that he is always prepared to become his own law.
The White Plantation Owner Image
Trump is the “spitting image” a southern plantation owner: bravado, bluster, constant gratification of the male ego. Historian Thomas L. Connelly says, “The admiration of power is an old Southern trait which dates back to the cotton kingdom of the early 19th century. The rise of the cotton empire before the Civil War was an exercise in violence and power.”
Allposters.com
Often cotton planters were self-made men, the nouveaux rich. They flaunted wealth and power. Their lavish plantation homes attempted to bury in the basement their deep insecurities. The manly men of the South invented a code of chivalry. The elements of this chivalry color Donald Trump’s entire existence: defend your honor, idolize your women, and be skilled in the art of manhood. It was and is all about the shaping of an image.
The old South code of manhood still tries to protect its privilege. The old cult of manhood evolved into NASCAR racing, Southeast Conference football, Huey Long, and George Wallace. The threat of violence is everywhere. The production of power is in the air southerners breathe displayed by packed football stadiums on Friday and Saturday nights, pickup trucks with gunracks, bumper stickers which imply physical violence against political dissenters. “Get your heart in Dixie or get your ass out.”
Growing up in this culture, a part of me was horrified at it and the other part found me engaging in fist fights, boxing matches, strength tests, and proving my manhood by killing a nine-point whitetail buck with a single-barrel sixteen-gauge shotgun. Even good Christian “dads” taught their sons to fight back, not give ground, and never allow anyone to make fun of you.
The Violence of the Toxic Male Image
Violence takes many forms. It is in the football popularity of Nick Saban, the tan-legged “Golden Girls of Tigerland” at Louisiana State University, and the adoration of local high school football coaches who win multiple state championships. Violence sneaks out from the smile on the face of a good old boy demonstrating his disdain for the law and the admiration of “telling it like it is” rhetoric from a politician. Donald Trump has all these traits in spades.
syracuse.com
The dominant visual metaphor of what kind of president Trump would become was the images of Trump standing behind Hillary Clinton during one of the presidential debates. The Guardian’s Richard Wolfe said Trump “prowled around Clinton, looming behind her.” The message was clear: America needed a strong man and not a woman as president. Trump’s face screamed, “Intimidation. I’m stronger than you.”
Trump’s image of masculine boldness, physical assertion, and power combine to make him the last great white man. This is why historian John Fea asks, “How did a crude-talking, thrice-married, self-proclaimed philanderer and ultra-materialistic businessman who showed virtually no evidence of a Spirit-filled life win over evangelicals in a field of qualified GOP candidates who self-identified—in one way or another—with this form of conservative Christianity?”
Because he was a white man – a throwback, a strongman, a 1950’s man. When evangelicals cry, “Make America Great Again,” they are dreaming of returning to the 1950/s. In the center of this melancholic nostalgia is a strong, virile man. A white male denying that he is a racist, might in a moment of clarity confess, “I don’t believe in segregation, but I miss it.”
Summary
This obsession with the demonstration of power and the threat of violence in a masculine leader attempt to undo the gains our culture has made in opportunities for the marginalized, the powerless. Trump’s maleness must be continually performed, as if it were on an endless loop, to prove itself again and again. Trump must dominate the entire stage.
Trump returned the white male for one last ride of the bull. Trump is the “white dinosaur” and after him, the white male of the 1950’s will be extinct. The white Republicans who come after Trump will not be Trump; can’t imitate Trump. They are too fashioned by a society that has offered others opportunity. The culture will mold them into different images of masculinity which they will be powerless to resist.
Studied rhetorically in the discipline of performance, Donald Trump is a one-act politician engaged in a gendered performance. His maleness reinforces his populism and his demagoguery. Trump hides his political program in an “ostentatious masculine posturing” that has the look of a caricature but has the loyalty and commitment of millions of MAGA followers.
Trump’s masculine act obscures his undermining of democratic institutions, his constant lying, his disruption of the truth, and his constant inference of a coming violence. Trump is directing the politics of the nation to form a spectacle and to divert attention away from serious issues, including policies that directly harm Americans.
Trump may go to prison for life or return to the White House in 2025. Either way, Donald Trump is America’s last white president. Eventually, he will remind the majority of Americans that the old image of the manly man has no place in the land of freedom and opportunity.
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