He is full of praise for tough leaders, he surrounds himself with combat sports champions and above all wants to project an image of strength: Donald Trump is playing the virility card to the hilt.
• Also read: Trump and Harris neck and neck in three key states
Facing a Democratic candidate (incumbent Vice President Kamala Harris), just as he did in his victorious 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton, Trump finds himself on the defensive over his fluctuating position on abortion.
Kamala Harris is enjoying a surge in support from female voters as the Republican billionaire has often boasted about helping to repeal the federal guarantee of abortion rights.
But Donald Trump is assiduously courting the electorate which, pell-mell, supports cryptocurrencies, MMA and considers that American society has sunk into “wokeism”.
“He speaks to our generation,” Nick Passano, 37, told AFP, along with four other tattooed cryptocurrency investors known as the Maga Boyz, attended a Trump meeting in Johnstown, Pennsylvania (northeast) last week.
AFP
“We need to make our voices heard about the example we want to give to our children, which is strong, masculine men,” he adds.
The 78-year-old Republican candidate’s combative demeanor, his cheek bloodied, just after escaping an assassination attempt at a rally on July 13, further galvanized that fervor at the Republican Party convention a few days later.
“If you’re a man in this country and you don’t vote for Donald Trump, you’re not a man,” conservative commentator Charlie Kirk said.
And during the convention, wrestler Hulk Hogan ripped his t-shirt and called Trump a “gladiator.”
AFP
A striking contrast, exploited to the full by his campaign team, with the decline displayed by the outgoing president Joe Biden, 81 years old, weighed down by his catastrophic debate against Donald Trump in June.
“Persecuted White Masculinity”
But the withdrawal of Joe Biden, suddenly replaced by Kamala Harris, 59, has changed the situation.
It is riskier for Donald Trump to puff out his chest in front of a woman of Jamaican and Indian descent than in front of another white man over 70, according to commentators.
Paul Johnson, a professor of communications at the University of Pittsburgh, believes, however, that he will not adapt his message to this change of adversary.
The “Trumpist vision” consists of describing a “wicked” world, where “real Americans must be prepared to fight for their place, to tell unpleasant and racist truths, and if necessary to use violence,” Paul Johnson told AFP.
This is evidenced in particular by Donald Trump’s frequent republication on his social networks of crude sexual attacks against Kamala Harris.
His young supporters at the Johnstown meetings saw it as proof of his fearlessness.
“The fact that he’s himself is why I love him so much,” says Wyatt Waszo, a 21-year-old restaurant worker.
But Donald Trump is only riding the wave of the macho movement, according to analysts.
Many conservative radio shows are echoing what they call “male malaise.” It’s a visceral reaction to globalization and movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University in Michigan (north), told AFP.
“This idea of a persecuted and disdained white masculinity is very closely linked to that of American greatness, considered to be in a state of siege,” she says.
And in this worldview, “that greatness can be restored by giving free rein to that rough, even ruthless masculinity,” continues Kristin Kobes Du Mez.
“Trump plays on the fear of losing what we have,” she sums up.
For her part, Kamala Harris is careful not to place her candidacy under the sign of the unprecedented accession of a woman to the White House.
And Democratic strategists are hoping that the profile of his running mate Tim Walz — a progressive but also a former military man, a former football coach, a hunter and a fisherman — will gain him some points on that front.
