Chasing the Rage: The GOP’s Masculinist Playbook for November

How overt misogyny has become the American right’s last unifying cause

LEFT: U.S. President Donald Trump. Photo Credit: NBC News. CENTER: U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Photo by Adam Gray/Getty Images. RIGHT: U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Photo by Jim Bourg-Pool/Getty Images.

There’s a method behind Donald Trump’s increasingly unhinged attacks on women journalists, and it isn’t complicated.

When Trump shrieked “you’re either crooked or you’re stupid!” at NBC’s Kristen Welker during Sunday’s Meet the Press interview, he sent a signal to the men in his coalition. They have come to view female authority as an existential threat to their power. And as his MAGA movement increasingly splinters, he knows exactly how to get them all singing from the same hymn book again.

Helen Lewis, in her recent Atlantic cover story titled “The Men Who Want Women To Be Quiet,” defines this “Masculinism”—the organized political backlash against feminist gains—as “a virulent form of misogyny [that] has become the single most important force holding together the American right.”

And Trump is riding it deliberately.

The 2025 elections were a catastrophe for Republicans, driven in significant part by women voters breaking hard against MAGA candidates up and down the ballot. Trump and the MAGA movement have made a clear calculation: Inflame the men and chase the rage, not the voters who left.

That calculation has been building for nearly a decade, from the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings to Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon to the leaked Signal chats of Young Republicans nationwide. It is no longer fringe. It is policy, it is theater, and it is the Republican Party’s closing argument heading into the 2026 midterms.

To understand how we got here and where this is going, we need to go back to a moment in 2018 when the template was first road-tested before a national audience.

The OG rage of Brett Kavanaugh

Watching Sunday’s contentious Meet The Press interview, as Donald Trump raged at Kristen Welker for deigning to challenge his claims of voter fraud in California, I had flashbacks.

In most recent memory, Trump’s disproportionate aggression toward Welker was reminiscent of Trump’s “Quiet, Piggy!” outburst toward Bloomberg’s Catherine Lacey on Air Force One last year. But it was a different outburst that came to mind as I watched Trump on Sunday: Brett Kavanaugh during his 2018 confirmation hearing.

Dr. Christine Blasey Ford had just testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when they were in high school. Her testimony was credible and compelling, and as it went on, it was clear that Kavanaugh’s confirmation was hanging by a thread. So, in response, Kavanaugh chose to go into an emotional rage, tearfully and angrily disputing the accusations to the committee. As The New Yorker described it at the time, the spectacle of Kavanaugh was a gutteral assertion of “the intrinsic American ideal of white male privilege.”

“Because Kavanaugh is accused of sexual assault, and may be denied the career elevation that he has long plotted, he blubbered like a newborn.”

And it worked. Just over a week after that testimony, Kavanaugh was confirmed by the U.S. Senate 50-48.

For Martha Nussbaum of The Washington Post, Kavanaugh’s tearful rant was indicative of “a wave of fear-driven male rage” that had been let loose in response to the #MeToo movement, “as if masculinity itself were under attack.” Because to a large swath of men on the political right, it very much was. And now, eight years later, the reaction to that threat continues to drive our politics.

The Atlantic’s Lewis spoke with author Laura Field about the roots of the New Right’s rage, and Field put it succinctly:

“...They’re furious about their own loss of status in society over the last few years and the elites who made that happen, and I think that the pithiest short version of that is that it’s the women. It’s the women who took their status.”

So, in 2026, as Trump’s approval rating plummets, as Democrats’ chances of retaking the House rise, it’s no accident that Trump’s rageful rant against Welker came mere days after he attacked CNN’s Kaitlin Collins during a press availability in the Oval Office as “a corrupt reporter” who “never smiles.” And Collins hadn’t even said a word.

As Lewis notes,

“Masculinism has been a great gift [to Trump]], because factions with different views on, say, protectionism or Israel or Big Tech can all agree on the overreach of feminism and the need for a return to traditional gender roles.”

Trump knows exactly what he’s doing with these outbursts, and just as with Kavanaugh, he hopes it will turn the tide in his direction as his second term—and Republicans’ chances in November—hang by a thread. It’s all they have, and Trump knows it.

No longer just the fringe

While the seeds of the “masculinism” movement trace back to the impact of 2017’s #MeToo movement, it gained newfound momentum in the wake of the 2025 elections.

As Democratic wins rolled in all over the country last November, in both red states and blue and throughout exurbs and cities alike, a cross-section of far-right Christian nationalist pastors and influencers declared women the primary culprit for the loss of Republican power.

Their solution to this woe? The repeal of the 19th Amendment, which extended voting rights to women beginning in 1920.

As I wrote shortly after Election Day,

Prominent voices in the white Christian nationalist movement—one now deeply enmeshed with MAGA—view the repeal of women’s right to vote as more than about winning an election. It is a means to return to Biblical principles and a necessary step toward creating a theocracy in the United States.

But while such a prescription is radical on its face, the fearlessness with which the pastors rail openly about such a remedy—and the lack of consequences when they do so—speaks to just how mainstream it has become in far-right circles.

We see strains of it in Nick Fuentes’ Groyper movement of incels. We see it on display in leaked chats from Young Republican Signal groups around the country. And we see it playing out in real time at the highest levels of the U.S. government in the actions and words of Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth.

Hegseth’s masculinist extremism

Hegseth is famously a member of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), a global network of congregations founded by Pastor Doug Wilson in 1998. Wilson was profiled by CNN last year, in which he was cited as “a self-described Christian nationalist pastor, who supports repealing the 19^th Amendment.”

So, when Hegseth retweeted the CNN profile with his own celebratory “All of Christ for All of Life” caption, the Pentagon was forced to issue an awkward statement clarifying Hegseth’s view of the 19th Amendment:

“Of course, the secretary thinks that women should have the right to vote.”

This was not the first time Hegseth had to walk back one of his church’s radical views. As CNN noted, the governing documents of Wilson’s CREC churches state that it is

“neither lawful nor honorable for women to be mustered for combat service,” and that is “the duty of men—not women—to protect their homelands and nations.”

This is a view Hegseth has long held—that is, until he was forced to retract it once tapped to be Defense Secretary. Hegseth was clear when he appeared on a podcast on November 7, that “I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles.” On November 12, Trump nominated him for Secretary of Defense, and suddenly his view “changed.”

But while technically Hegseth must insist that, of course, he supports women in combat roles, his actions while leading the agency tell a much different story.

On June 3, The Guardian reported,

The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, stripped nine navy officers including women and Black service members from a promotion list last month, according to a person familiar with the matter, resulting in an all-male, overwhelmingly white slate of 22 advancing as nominees to become one-star admirals.

As Daily Journal recounts, this was hardly new for Trump’s DoD. In fact, it began on day two of Trump’s second term when the Commandant of the Coast Guard, Linda Fagan, the first woman to ever head up a branch of the U.S. military, was let go on January 21, 2025 “because she gave too much attention to diversity, equity and inclusion.”

And from there, Hegseth understood the assignment and how much latitude he had to pursue it. According to The Hill, by late July, 2025,

All women have now been purged from the military’s top jobs, with no female four-star officers on active duty and none in pending appointments for four- or three-star roles.

From Hegseth’s perspective, this is a project to set what is natural back in place: men are meant to be the protectors, you see, and women are meant to be trad wives devoted to family and the home. As Charlie Kirk implored Taylor Swift after her engagement to Travis Kelce: “reject feminism, submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.”

At the time of his death, Charlie Kirk was hardly a fringe figure. And as Lewis notes in The Atlantic,

“with the ascension of Hegseth to the top levels of the U.S. government, ‘no one can credibly say that Doug Wilson is fringe anymore.’”

Further from Lewis, “Far from being a fringe belief system, masculinism has become the single most important force uniting the American right, bringing together an unlikely constellation of pastors, posters, senators, preachers, influencers, podcasters, and fanboys.”

So, it is telling that Trump, when confronted with massive election losses driven by women voters, he didn’t seek to pivot to appeal to more women. Instead, he and the entire MAGA movement exploited and stoked male rage in hopes that emotion would suffice to mitigate midterm losses.

The emasculation of James Talarico

There is a second side of the masculinism coin. While it views women who have usurped men’s “rightful” power as villains, it reserves particular scorn for the men who enable that usurpation. In the minds of the new right, they represent an equally existential threat to their power.

The right’s coordinated messaging against Texas Senate candidate James Talarico provides the most current example. By attacking his masculinity and equating him with the very feminism that has taken away male status, they are field testing the arguments they intend to use to hold onto the U.S. Senate in November.

As NPR reported, Paxton went right at Talarico within days of his securing the GOP nomination with a singular message.

“He goes by a few names that you all may have heard of. Some people know him as tofu Talarico. Some people call him six-gender Jimmy. I’ve even heard some people call him James Talafreako,” he said to laughter and cheers. “And others refer to him simply as Low-T Talarico.”

Paxton also quickly released an ad that ends with an image of Talarico next to the words: “Radical Talarico: too low-T for Texas.”

And it snowballed from there, with everyone seemingly getting the memo:

White House advisor Stephen Miller used “transgender” as an insult, telling Fox News that Talarico is the Democrats’ “first transgender Senate candidate.” Talarico is not transgender.

“He’s clearly transitioning into a female,” Miller said. “When Talarico goes in for a blood test, when he gets a physical, blood doesn’t come out. Soy milk comes out.”

Fox host Jesse Watters taunted Talarico as a “gay vegan,” before quickly adding that Talarico is “not gay and not vegan, for the record.” (Talarico is neither vegan nor gay.)

Ted Cruz was on Fox News just yesterday making the argument with his typical subtlety:

“If you were making a list of 1,000 adjectives to describe this guy, ‘masculine’ would not be one of them.”

For his part, Talarico has worked to counter this narrative, confirming the identity of his girlfriend, calling the accusation that he’s a vegan “fighting words,” and even playing into the “Talafreako” moniker, attending a watch party of last night’s Spurs-Knicks showdown at a bar in Austin.

But more important than combating the two-dimensional caricatures of him, Talarico has taken to turning the attacks back on Paxton, and by extension Trump and the whole MAGA new right, by calling into question their very definition of what a “real man” is.

In a campaign speech last week, Talarico made clear, just as he wrote in the caption to his post:

There’s been a lot of talk in this race about what makes a “real man.”

A man does what’s right when no one is watching. He upholds his commitments to his family and neighbors. He doesn’t lie, cheat, & steal his way through life.

Real men serve others. Weak men serve themselves.

Then, in an interview with Ken Paxton’s own lawyer, who has just endorsed Talarico, when asked about the vegan jab, Talarico fired back with his now standard jab:

I’m an eighth-generation Texan. My family’s been here since it was Mexico. I’ve been eating BBQ since before Ken Paxton’s first indictment.

Talarico is turning the new right’s very conception of masculinity on its head, suggesting that Paxton’s corruption disqualifies him from higher office not just because of its criminality, but because Paxton simply isn’t man enough.

The existential threat

As we advance toward November, we should expect much more of this rhetoric from Republicans, whether against women seeking to operate above their “station” or against the “weak” men who support them.

They will continue no matter how often their attacks fall flat, because these appeals to misogyny are a skeleton key to unlock support from every corner of the new right. This applies whether it’s MAHA’s concerns about “low sperm counts” and “low T” in men, or Christian nationalists’ desire to repeal women’s voting rights and establish “traditional” gender roles in the home, or Fuentes’ Groypers who rage at girls for not paying attention to them.

For all of these groups, there is a unifying message. And Paxton’s anti-Talarico ad put it plainly:

James Talarico is a threat to everything we hold dear.

For the right, the threat from women is existential. The growing role of women in society, particularly as manifested at the ballot box in 2025, is a risk not just to their political power but to their very identity. It’s what Elon Musk and JD Vance’s new favorite philosopher Dr. Gad Saad has called “suicidal empathy,” a sort of virus the right claims women, and young women in particular, are infected with.

As Saad tweeted after the November elections,

“Suicidal empathy is going to destroy [The United States] because Western tolerance is its fatal Achilles tendon.”

Which was ultimately quote-tweeted by Musk, of course.

MAGA influencer Matt Van Swol explained more precisely the connection between the election results in November and the doom of our nation.

But in a year when people’s very livelihoods are threatened, when they can’t put food on the table or afford gas, is such a theoretical appeal really going to land? Donald Trump represents a much more tangible threat to people’s existence than empathetic women voting for Democrats does.

As Talarico said in his interview with Paxton’s lawyer,

“If the best they have is lying about me being a vegan. I feel pretty good about our chances in November.”