Trump's Administration of Toxic Masculinity

In April of 2016, then-candidate Hillary Clinton was asked during a town hall whether women would make up at least half of her Cabinet were she elected president. She replied: "Well, I am going to have a Cabinet that looks like America, and 50 percent of America is women."

That would have been a historic — and radical — reimagining of the President's Cabinet.

Instead, in an election that was a referendum on how the nation values women, a large enough portion of the electorate voted for confessed sex abuser and rank misogynist Donald Trump that he won the presidency. And naturally, his administration is not a model of gender parity, to put it mildly.

Molly Redden at the Guardian: Trump Is Assembling the Most Male-Dominated Government in Decades.

A new analysis shared exclusively with the Guardian has found that 80% of nominations for top jobs in the Trump administration have gone to men — putting Donald Trump on track to assemble the most male-dominated federal government in nearly a quarter-century.

Without a significant shift, men will outnumber women four-to-one in top positions of the Trump administration.

...Men also outnumbered women three-to-one in a separate group of about 400 people the administration hired as it transitioned into power, according to a Bloomberg analysis using data collected by ProPublica. These were appointees who did not require Senate confirmation.

With few exceptions, the men who have joined Trump's administration are wealthy, white, straight, cisgender, able-bodied, and Christian — men who abet and/or share Trump's patriarchal, white supremacist, nativist views.

Trump infamously surrounds himself with stooges and sycophants who won't challenge him. The men in his orbit reflect back to him his worst impulses and vile beliefs. Some of them are merely unprincipled yes-men; others, like Vice President Mike Pence, are true believers.

In either case, they serve (in every sense of the word) to uphold and empower the toxic stew of racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, disablism, nativism, nationalism, and Christian supremacy that are central to Trump's eugenical worldview.

It isn't just that his administration is full of men. It's that his administration is, by virtue of who those men are, full of toxic masculinity.

That has devastating consequences for marginalized people — most of whom voted for Trump's chief opponent, who promised she'd do precisely the opposite. And would have.