Donald Trump is taken with manly men. He thinks about them a lot. They impress him. He’d deny it, because…well, for the obvious reason. But it’s true, and right there on the surface.

Trump hires men on the basis of how closely they resemble Hollywood depictions of men in manly jobs. He notices and is impressed by square jaws and broad shoulders and thick-wristed handshakes. He reminisces about Cary Grant, and also about Arnold Palmer’s penis (which apparently was not as impressive as Trump understood it to be). He fired a qualified joint chiefs chairman to hire a less qualified guy with the nickname Razin Caine, whom he’s fawned over for years.

His mind is raining men, hallelujah. But not in a homoerotic way. This is how Trump processes his own soft-handed inadequacies. He’s never done manual labor—not for money, not for experience, not to help a friend move furniture from one apartment to another. He has no notable athletic accomplishments. He may be a decent golfer, but not as good as he claims, and he traverses the course in a cart, never on foot. He dodged the draft. He feels ashamed of his obesity, but instead of addressing it in a disciplined way, he orders his doctors to lie about it. And we have good reason to believe he doesn’t stack up to Arnold Palmer.

This would ideally be a problem for a therapist to address—but for our sins it’s a become a problem for the country and the world. Trump wishes to exorcise his insecurities by forcing as many men as possible into the kinds of jobs that conform to his trite view of masculinity—even if it means those men earn less money in the future than they should or than they do now. Even if it means they live harder lives, and die younger, preventably. A cultural revolution promulgated by a poser.

Trump wants to push men who work in laboratories and behind computers out of careers they’ve spent their whole lives building, and compensate them with a hard hat. After all, real men (the ones who make Trump feel insecure) work in factories, and on construction sites, and in coal mines.

Mining in particular seems to stir Trump’s man-dominated imagination.

He talks a big game about restoring the coal-mining industry to its former prominence, because of how manly he thinks the men who work in mines are. He recently told attendees of an official GOP dinner, “They love to dig coal. That’s what they want to do. They don’t want to do gidgets and widgets and wadgets. They don’t want to build cell phones with their hands, their big strong hands.”

That allusion to building cell phones may have been an offhanded rebuke of his most embarrassing cabinet secretary, Howard Lutnick, who recently swooned at the thought of putting Americans to work manually assembling iPhones. But generally Trump’s advisers understand, correctly, that the Trump vision is men—preferably burly ones—doing the kinds of backbreaking labor none of them have ever done or would ever do.

“On one side, the President is reordering trade,” his treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said recently. “On the other side, we are shedding excess labor in the federal government and bringing down federal borrowings. And then on the other side of that, we will have the labor we need for new manufacturing.”

Elon Musk echoed this idea a few days later, “We need to shift people from low- to negative-productivity jobs in government to high-productivity jobs in manufacturing.”

Hear that, men? If you research cancer cures or send food to children in poor countries, you’re “excess” or “negative-productivity” and probably a bit feminine. Enjoy this period of unemployment, and at some point in the future, you can have a real man’s job working with a pickaxe or on an assembly line.

Set aside for now the fact that Trump’s trade policies are antithetical to the goal of reshoring factory jobs for displaced information workers. Set aside that they actually stem from the same male insecurities that drive his obsession with men and their big strong hands—a desire to feel strong himself by wielding power over industries and nations. Set aside that even a logically taut policy to reshore manufacturing will leave people stranded in a years-long transition. Let’s imagine for argument sake that he could generate this economic transition overnight, and seamlessly.

I have two things to say about it:

First, I understand why this romantic vision of toil is seductive to many men. We’re raised, and our culture teaches us, to honor a hard day’s work. To pick ourselves up by our bootstraps, and be disciplined homemakers who work ourselves to exhaustion to feed and house our families. These are well-intended values, and we shouldn’t disparage them—particularly by exalting the indolent lifestyles of the rich and famous, or by condescending to the many men and women who do work in blue collar jobs in America today.

Second, Trump’s whole conceit is stupid. Not just in macroeconomic terms, or GDP terms, or personal income terms, or in any of the terms that will dominate the debate over his trade policy. It’s stupid on the terms Donald Trump has in mind, where masculinity inheres to the job (policing, construction, shopkeeping, war-fighting) rather than to the man. It is perfectly possible for men of all kinds—even soft, rotund men like Donald Trump and Elon Musk—to embrace and refine masculine virtues without regressing into chauvinism or, worse, destroying the foundations of American prosperity.

Real men read Off Message

NATIONAL INSECURITY

Backbreaking labor does make men strong. But it also makes them susceptible to injury, and long periods of disability, and untimely death. It really does require a great deal of physical toughness to work a lifetime in coal mines. But it’s also a less-than-ideal vocation for a family man. Coal mining poses both acute and long-term risk. Many coal miners die on the job; many others die of black lung.

This is why, as America has become more prosperous, coal mining has ceased to be a generational vocation. It’s not just that the economy doesn’t run on coal the way it used to, and that the industry is therefore shrinking—it’s also that many former coal miners happily sought better working conditions when opportunity arose.

By the same token, desk work does make men soft. Or, rather, it will make men soft, if they don’t also attend to their fitness. This is difficult, because there’s only so many hours in a day, and most men have more than just job responsibilities. If a man spends an hour a day commuting, and eight hours behind a desk, and another couple parenting, that doesn’t leave many hours for physical exertion, and most men won’t have much gas in the tank left anyhow.

And so, many men who work desk jobs will find their shoulders begin to slump forward. They’ll lose muscle mass, or they’ll gain body fat, or both. They’ll develop back pain and knee pain and tight hamstrings and dadbods. But one of the blessings of our prosperous society, full of softness-inducing middle-class jobs, is that we can take charge of our own destinies. We can be both desk-bound from 9-5 and strong as coal miners. We can join gyms. We can buy running shoes and cross-training shoes and a small number of training implements (dumbbells, kettlebells) to use at home. If we have a bit more disposable income, we can build home gyms and work with personal trainers. And by doing those things we can make it harder for MAGA people to peg us as “negative productivity” losers.

If Trump were interested in making men stronger for the sake of actual men, rather than to fantasize about leading an imaginary army of sweaty workers, he’d try to make it easier for them to become fitter people in the lives they’ve built, rather than upend their lives to play supporting roles in his.

One potential beneficiary of such a policy would be Stephen Miller, who also has some strange ideas about the role of men in society…

Miller may feel weak and soft by virtue of being a full-time online hate merchant. But we could fix that pretty easily. Miller has approximately no muscle to begin with, so his gains would be rapid, and he also carries very little fat, which means his joints are probably undamaged, and he can scale up training volume quickly. From the look of it, Miller is slumped forward at the shoulders and the belly, much like a wet noodle in the shape of an S.