This post is the second in “MAGA and Masculinity in 2024,” an ongoing series examining the societal fallout from right-wing hypermasculinity — and the people fighting its toxic messaging by positively redefining what it means to be a man. You can read the first post here.
Former President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement is a hypermasculine cult of personality, in which men are encouraged to remain stoic, inflict harm on others and ignore experts in favor of the advice of tough-talking podcasters. We’ve seen the ways this kind of machismo has hurt the movement’s perceived nemeses.
Women have suffered — even died — while being denied abortion care. And a recent study from the Trevor Project links state-level anti-trans laws to a spike in attempted suicides by trans teenagers. In the name of upholding arcane gender roles, the male-dominated MAGA movement has relentlessly infringed on other people’s health and well-being.
But MAGA masculinity poses health risks to its hosts, too, particularly with regard to mental health and susceptibility to gun violence. The MAGA movement’s toxic mix of ignorance, vitriol and bravado poses a threat to the men most likely to be drawn to it.
The Covid-19 pandemic was a clear example. Trump and his supporters portrayed defiance of public health measures, like wearing masks and practicing social distancing, as matters of manhood and toughness. Studies have shown that this kind of toxic masculinity was a major driver of vaccine hesitancy in men, which in turn was a contributing factor to the disproportionately high excess death rate for Republicans after the Covid vaccines became available.
Trump has only leaned in to his hypermasculine anti-science agenda by promoting his “Make America Healthy Again” slogan with anti-vax conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an archetype for toxic masculinity in his own right, who has reportedly been promised a role in Trump’s administration if Trump wins the election and has promoted the idea of banning U.S. agencies from studying infectious diseases.
In 2022, NBC News reported on a study that linked conservative policies to higher mortality rates among working-age people.
According to the NBC News report:
[C]onservative policies on guns — such as fewer bans on semi-automatic weapons or more lax background check rules — were associated with higher suicide rates among men.
The overwhelming majority of gun violence in the U.S. is committed by men, and activists and researchers have long pointed to hypermasculinity as key to gun culture and a driver of gun violence — both self-harm and violence committed against others.
And the MAGA movement has done a great deal to discourage men from receiving the mental health care and attention they need to thrive. We see this in the right-wing attack on suicide prevention programs and “social and emotional learning” programs in school, which experts have used to help boys better process their emotions. Evidence shows that fear and stigmatization make men less likely to receive the mental health care they need. And yet it even found a way to stigmatize mental health and demonize immigrants at the same time by falsely claiming the Biden administration is welcoming them from “insane asylums” and “mental institutions.”
MAGA men get the message, and it's just one of many ways they've endangered their own health — and others’ — thanks to their allegiance to Trump.