Trump’s Tariff Pause Sets Back the “Make Men Manly Again” Movement
Parts of the online “manosphere” welcomed Trump’s tariffs as a way to bring back men’s work.
Coal miners listen as President Donald Trump speaks and signs executive orders about coal production at the White House on April 8, 2025 in Washington, D.C.
(abin Botsford / The Washington Post via Getty Images)
There’s an overlooked element to President Donald Trump’s cave-in on some of his tariff plans Wednesday afternoon: It had been welcomed in parts of the manosphere as a way to bring back manufacturing jobs, and with them, hoary notions of masculinity. After all, you can’t spell manufacturing without “man.”
The only group that favored Trump’s tariffs, before he abandoned most of them, was non-college-educated white men, according to a Marquette national poll.
Even though, as I’ve written, Joe Biden focused more on so-called men’s jobs than the care economy, or women’s jobs, he never got the credit. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump notes that Biden’s manufacturing moves “lacked…the emotional appeal of restructuring the economy to assuage male fragility.”
Trump was going to do it right—or at least his people would talk about it that way so their white blue-collar voters got the message.
Let’s hear the pitch straight from the number one man whose masculinity is seemingly always under threat, Fox court jester Jesse Watters. (I’d have put Tucker Carlson there, but since he lost his Fox Show, he’s broadcasting on the margins—which must be a real blow to his masculinity.)
On Wednesday, Watters insisted that Trump’s tariffs would bring back manufacturing and reanimate American men. He was elaborating on a point made earlier on Fox by wing nut Batya Ungar-Sargon, who claimed that the US had “shipped jobs [for] men who worked with their hands for a living and rely on brawn and physicality off to other countries to build up their middle class.” Watters went on: “When you sit behind a screen all day, it makes you a woman. Studies have shown this!… If you’re out working, you are around other guys, you’re not around HR ladies and lawyers that gives you estrogen.”
Watters was maybe joking. A little.
Trump himself said his tariffs and other policies were bringing back jobs for manly men. Like coal miners. “One thing I learned about the coal miners is that’s what they want to do,” Trump said. “You could give them a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and a different kind of a job and they’d be unhappy. They want to mine coal, that’s what they love to do.”
He harked back nine years to his rival Hillary Clinton, who promised to replace mining jobs with other forms of manufacturing, making “widgets and gadgets and technology, which they didn’t want to do.” He went on: “She was going to put them in a high-tech industry, where you make little cell phones and things, I don’t know, do you think you’d be good at that?”
Popular
“swipe left below to view more authors”Swipe →At the same time Trump was mocking phone assembly jobs, his risible trade representative Howard Lutnick was promising that tariffs would bring exactly those jobs to the United States. “The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones—that kind of thing is going to come to America,” Lutnick told CBS’s Face the Nation.
Anyway, there were a lot of MAGAsphere folks rooting for the return of men’s jobs. “Men in America don’t need therapy. Men in America need tariffs and DOGE,” wrote Vish Burra, a MAGAt whose X bio says he worked for former representatives George Santos and Matt Gaetz. “The fake email jobs will disappear.” And, he added, “Kitchens will be filled and sandwiches will be made.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent promised—to Tucker Carlson, so he hasn’t gone away entirely—that draconian federal layoffs will force thousands of workers, if not more, back into factories. “We are shedding excess labor in the federal government.… That will give us the labor we need for the new manufacturing.”
Alas, Trump sold out all the American men who need the curative power of factory labor to purge estrogen and e-mail from their systems.
I should note here that some pillars of the manosphere—the fabulously wealthy ones—raged at Trump’s tariff inanity, because they saw their wealth crater. Podcast machers Joe Rogan and Dave Portnoy shrieked at what their man Trump’s moves had done to tank the stock market. At the end of the day, the worries of the wealthy matter more to Trump than the woes of jobless sad sacks. Meanwhile, on Fox, Jeanine Pirro put Watters in his place. “What do you do?” she asked him icily. “You sit behind a screen!” I swear I could see Watters wonder if he had another tampon back at his desk.
Support independent journalism that does not fall in line
Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets.
Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new “forever war”—with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground—may very well be upon us.
As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war.
In these dark times, independent journalism is uniquely able to uncover the falsehoods that threaten our republic—and civilians around the world—and shine a bright light on the truth.
The Nation’s experienced team of writers, editors, and fact-checkers understands the scale of what we’re up against and the urgency with which we have to act. That’s why we’re publishing critical reporting and analysis of the war on Iran, ICE violence at home, new forms of voter suppression emerging in the courts, and much more.
But this journalism is possible only with your support.
This March, The Nation needs to raise $50,000 to ensure that we have the resources for reporting and analysis that sets the record straight and empowers people of conscience to organize. Will you donate today?
