Trading in lunacy. How Trump’s tariffs will ‘save’ masculinity

The atomic destabilisation of the world’s trade system through the imposition – and then partial retraction – of tariffs has been, it seems, bad for the economy, which is to say, bad for the US economy and pretty much every other economy you can name. (To be fair, the now-famous penguins of the Heard and McDonald Islands, who have been whacked with a 10 per cent “reciprocal” tariff, seem unbothered.)

Donald Trump on miners: “You could give them a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and a different kind of a job and they would be unhappy. They want to mine coal – that’s what they want to do.”Credit: AP

But in the land of MAGA, an economic justification is not required for acts of economic policy, no matter how vandalising.

We have heard President Trump talk of his tariffs as “medicine” for a sick patient (the US economy), which seems contrary to the “first, do no harm” part of the Hippocratic oath, but hey. We have heard him justify use of tariffs as leverage, gloating that leaders from all over the world are “kissing my ass”, pleading with him to spare them. This is tariff reduction as a protection racket.

But the most intriguing justification for the tariffs came this week, in the form of a claim that they will “reverse the crisis in masculinity”. It was made by an American columnist named Batya Ungar-Sargon, an author and the opinion editor of Newsweek magazine, who has a special interest in the growing political divide between the political elites.

Speaking on Fox News, Ungar-Sargon said that it was “not just the destruction of the economic vitality of the working class, but there has been a spiritual decimation that has come along with that”.

“We shipped jobs that gave men who work with their hands for a living, and rely on brawn and physicality, off to other countries to build up their middle class,” she continued.

Trump, she said, was “saying no to this”, which was why young men were so attracted to what he offered.

Trump, whose hands remain uncallused by any such honest labour, seems to hold the manual-worker, working-class man in similar high regard, at least as an ideal. On Tuesday, he signed four executive orders intended to bolster the declining American coal industry, by lifting restrictions on extraction and burning of coal, which the president says is a “powerful form of energy … almost indestructible”.

Experts are sceptical about Trump’s (or anyone’s) ability to turn around the declining coal industry. But again, let’s not pretend these decisions are based on economic rationalism.

The symbolism was clear: Trump made his decree surrounded by brawny coal miners, who he both infantilised and lionised in his accompanying remarks. He said he knew that mining coal was the only thing coal miners wanted to do.

A typically unambiguous banner at a Trump rally. Credit: Bloomberg

“You could give them a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and a different kind of a job and they would be unhappy. They want to mine coal – that’s what they want to do.”

Trump made numerous references to the miners’ physicality, according to The New York Times, “joking about whether the stage could handle their collective weight and about arm-wrestling several of them”.

Warming to his theme, he mocked Hillary Clinton for proposing job retraining for miners, implying it was a laughably feminine thing to do.

“She was going to put them in a high-tech industry where you make little cellphones and things,” he said, making a “dainty” gesture.

“Do you think you’d be good at that?” he asked the miners, to laughter.

On cue, the Chinese internet responded with AI videos of obese middle-Americans working miserable factory lines building iPhones and Tesla vehicles – a mocking picture of Trump’s American dream.

All over the perverse MAGA universe, you find this idea again and again, that “email” jobs are unmanly, that the best route to masculine pride is through “real” jobs where things are built, or “powerful” resources extracted. Never mind that many unskilled manual jobs, particularly those involving repetitive tasks such as factory work, tend to be poorly paid, more dangerous and less likely to be fulfilling for the average person.

Of course these jobs are just as important and noble as others, but few people working in a factory would want their children to also work in a factory one day, if they had better options.

As ABC News (US) reported this week, even as Trump was signing his executive orders to “save” coal miners, the federal agency responsible for protecting those workers “quietly announced that it would delay the implementation of new safety standards to protect them from deadly dust exposure”.

Speaking on TV after Ungar-Sargon, Fox News host Jesse Watters agreed with her that “when you sit behind a screen all day, it makes you a woman. Studies have shown this … if you’re out working, like building robots … you are around other guys. You’re not around HR ladies and lawyers that gives [sic] you estrogen”.

He was joking, I think, but his contempt for the feminine really shone through.

Strangely, an Australian video made by an office of young women has been weaponised in this gendered economic culture war. The (admittedly slightly cringy) video, filmed by the publicity department of a skincare company, shows the young women dancing and chanting their personal descriptions (“Gen Z boss and a mini”, “Five foot three and an attitude!” etc). It went viral when it was first made, and this week Max Lugavere – an uncredentialled American author who promotes a diet based on animal products and believes veganism causes dementia – reposted it.

“Tariffs or this? Tariffs,” he wrote in the caption.

Far-right influencer Vish Burra jumped on the post, saying that “men in America don’t need therapy. Men in America need tariffs and DOGE. The fake email jobs will disappear.”

Competing with “women like this” for “REAL JOBS” would finish, Burra said.

“Kitchens will be filled and sandwiches will be made” and “fertility rates will go to the moon”.

Here we get closer to the true reasons behind the MAGA fidelity to “male” jobs, and behind the retrograde policy of tariffs.

Men have been weakened by the forces of globalisation and by the large-scale entry of women, especially professional women, into the workplace; women with their skirts and their hormones and their ability to rise through the ranks on the back of unmeritorious “equity programs”.

If this is the case, maybe the men of MAGA aren’t so tough after all.

Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.