For the better part of several decades, the Big Three1 (media, government, and academia) have largely ignored male health, education, and a host of concerns regarding boys and men in America. It can be difficult at times to call them out, especially when those who deeply understand these issues are trying to build bridges with those who:
control the news in this country
lead the institutions that create the social narratives that influence policy
hold the purse strings that could help our boys find purpose, relief, and self-reliance at a time when the policy deck, media coverage, and academic institutions disproportionately work against them.
Just four days after holding a symposium on the 2024 California Report on the Status of Boys and Men—where I showed boys were behind in reading at all grade levels, behind in college, and where males accounted for 78% of opioid and 78% of suicide deaths in California— Joy Reid started a new blog post on The ReidOut about the dangers of Donald Trump’s masculinity. The post begins with an epigraph that captures the theme and purpose of the anti-Trump pieces written by Ja'han Jones, “a futurist and multimedia producer focused on culture and politics."
Trump leads a movement of men who are indifferent to suffering, averse to health guidance and overly agitated. And it's putting America's men in danger.
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.
While Jones claims Trump is “indifferent to suffering…And it’s putting America’s men in danger,” there is little evidence to support such a claim as male deaths have risen steadily under the Biden/Harris Administration. Male overdose deaths under the current administration are 48% higher from 2021-2023 than they were during the Trump administration from 2018-2020, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If we discount 2020 and 2021 due to the Covid lockdowns that led to deep depression and compare outcomes in 2018-19 (Trump administration) to 2022-23 (Biden/Harris administration), the increase explodes to 68%, with 2023 data still being provisional and likely to show slight increases in number of deaths as data is added.
Blaming Biden/Harris for all of this would be unfair as well; however, it is fair to claim that the increased illegal immigration and problems at the border have certainly led to increased fentanyl and illegal drugs into the country.
In the tables above, I compare the last year of the Trump administration to the Harris/Biden administration in 2021, then 2022, and then 2023 using data from the CDC.
Comparing 2020 to 2021 shows an 18% increase in male overdose deaths.
Comparing 2020 to 2022 shows a 21% increase in male overdose deaths.
Comparing 2020 to 2023 shows a 19% increase in male overdose deaths.
And overdose deaths are not the only area we are seeing poor male outcomes. Suicide deaths have also crept up and have remained more prevalent under the Biden/Harris administration.
Comparing 2020 (36,551) to 2021 (38,358) shows a 5% increase in male suicide deaths.
Comparing 2020 to 2022 (39,273) shows a 7.5% increase in male suicide deaths.
Comparing 2020 to 2023 (39,046) shows a 6.8% increase in male suicide deaths.
Despite these very real observations, the Biden/Harris administration seems to have little interest in discussing it and I haven’t heard much from Trump on this issue; although he has mentioned his brother Fred who suffered from alcoholism and eventually lost his life to the disease. And the country certainly knows about Hunter Biden and Ashley Biden’s struggles with addiction.
None of the data above, or anything like it, appears in Jones’s articles, even as Jones offers up misguided claims at best about women dying after being denied an abortion and “anti-trans laws that have led to a spike in attempted suicides by trans teenagers.” Those issues are certainly important and dominate the landscape of Jones’ reporting, but they are misreported and misunderstood by Jones. Those are malpractice and mental health issues that have less to do with a genuine concern for male suffering.
But the real point of these comments is a type of bait and switch that keeps us from talking about male and instead talking about social constructs of masculinity. At the root cause of the challenges boys and men face is an actual debasement of their sex and replacement of it with some socially constructed concept of masculinity embodied in the forms of Doug Emhoff and Tim Walz. This too simplistically misses the great variety of male energy and places it into one kind of form, the kind that votes Democrat.
When Jones says “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,” he lays down incredibly baseless assertions that equate men with violence and stupidity. Overwhelmingly, the majority of men do not commit harmful acts, and men are greater victims of violent crime according to the Federal Bureau of Investigations Crime Data Explorer. And, men are not stupid for having different viewpoints or even being a bit stoic at times, a philosophy espoused by Seneca as far back as 60 BC that encourages moral purpose and virtue as something a person controls, not something society controls. If anything, men could use a bit more stoicism, something it seems Jones is confusing with chauvinism.
The harsh truth is that the last three years under Biden/Harris and for too many presidencies have been hard on men and have led to an overall increase in despair and death. Under the current administration, suicide is slightly up over all because mental health is worse over all, partly because male mental health and male purpose are only campaign issues when masculinity is toxic and emasculating for political advantage. Males are rarely part of any real and robust policy and debate.
When the Biden/Harris administration released its 2025 budget, it made sure to mention women and girls eighty-one times, gender twenty-two times (specifically in regard to women and transgender groups), and LGBTQ and underrepresented groups some sixteen times collectively. Boys and men are absent from Biden’s $7.2 trillion budget, as boys and men remain unacknowledged anywhere in the budget. The question to Reid and Jones is obvious, albeit rhetorical: Whose presidency has led to more male suffering?
According to Jones, “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.”
A little FYI to Jones: Too many of the “social and emotional learning” programs in schools do not address things like brain-sex difference, involve too much talking and not enough doing—something boys need— and often remove parents from the process. The removal of parents from a child’s mental health is evidenced most in the gender-affirming care industry that keeps a child’s gender-questioning from the parent. Policies in schools and in government remove a parent (a child’s most important advocate) from her child when the child is most vulnerable to suicidal ideation, social contagion, and coercion under the guise of social and emotional learning. A child who is questioning his/her identity does not commit suicide because of a law; he or she commits suicide because they are suffering from depression, mental-illness, addiction and needs the love and support of parents.
Like so many of these types of comments, Jones relies on masculine social norm theory and not the facts around mental health and males and the policies and social constructs that ignore them. Men are not killing themselves, overdosing, drinking themselves to death, or committing random acts of homicide because Trump has a certain type of personality or that he doesn’t care about their suffering. If anything, he wants them to thrive because they are his base. Reid and Jones want to suggest men are more masculine if they ignore Trump instead of looking at the last several years of male outcomes in so many areas. Another point missed by Jones is the women who support Trump who tend to be married with children or look forward to being married and having children. Are they part of the “cult of personality” that Jones refers to as well?
The failure to address male physical and mental health under the Biden/Harris administration is most evident—as mentioned earlier— in the 2025 budget that includes a program led by the first lady to head up a $12 Billion initiative to “transform women’s health research and benefit millions of lives across America,” something highlighted in the President’s State of the Union earlier this year as well. The Biden administration was concerned that “despite making up more than half the population, women have historically been understudied and underrepresented in health research” (2025 Budget). This cliché remains overused and ostensibly wrong, and the CDC has already reported there is “no evidence of any systematic under‐representation of women in clinical trials.” Interestingly, the President does not need to make such claims, as men certainly care about the health and well-being of women, often more so than their own well-being that we find in the death of men like Corey Comperatore who shielded his wife and daughter from an assassins bullet intended for former President Trump and current presidential candidate, the only candidate who has had multiple assassination attempts on his life.
The 2025 “budget also invests in a new technical assistance center to strengthen health providers’ understanding and treatment of women’s mental health and substance use.” This investment is wonderful for women and also exclusionary of men. Have Reid and Jones seen the numbers above? Have Biden/Harris?
In truth, Harris is hemorrhaging when it comes to the male vote, and Reid and Jones want to stop the bleeding by dividing men into camps of masculinity at a time when boys and men need programs that build resiliency, and yes, maybe even a bit of stoicism (mental toughness without ignoring mental pain). The great harm men face today is not masculinity or someone’s idea of the social concept; although that too has drawbacks—it is the denial of male in our media, policy, and academia—something Reid and Jones are too far removed from ideologically to even consider.
The Big Three, a phrase coined by Michael Gurian
Joy Reid: "Trump leads a movement of men who are indifferent to suffering, averse to health guidance and overly agitated. And it's putting America's men in danger." I see no evidence, however, that Reid actually cares about men in danger. I suspect (given her many other statements about men) that she cares only about women in danger from men. But Reid herself is no authority. The American Psychology Association is supposed to have scientific authority. Its "division 51" (which specializes in explicitly feminist approaches to the psychology of boys and men) made this much clear in an early version of its new (and first) guide to the clinical treatment of boys and men. The final version, after many complaints, toned down that message with evasions and euphemisms. But because most psychologists are not simply women but feminist women, I'd warn any man, and the parents of any boy, not to seek counseling from anyone who belongs to the APA (which is the body in charge of accrediting departments of psychology and therefore of their graduates).
I'm glad, Sean, that you challenge the prevailing assumption that male public figures, who present either healthy or (more often) unhealthy "role models," are the central or only factors in the formation of masculine identity. I suspect that fathers are still much more important figures for their sons--unless, of course, they're banished from the family for reasons that have nothing to do with abuse. In traditional communities, religious leaders and teachers participate in the task of turning boys into men. In secular communities, though, many boys must look to those who "perform masculinity" for either financial or political gain: rock stars, sports heroes, gang leaders, "influencers" and even terrorists for socially approved causes). But a president or any other politician? How many of those, since Abraham Lincoln, have demonstrated real wisdom instead of political savvy? This is a profoundly cynical age. It's true that many men could find legitimate reasons to vote for Trump instead of Biden (or Harris), but few of them would claim that his personality is admirable, let alone that his masculinity is healthy. My point is that even children are skeptical.
But the UNDERLYING problem here is not the lack of masculine "role models" (although that lack is not a good thing). Rather, the problem is that society presents boys and men with obstacles that prevent them from establishing ANY healthy identity as boys or men. In other words, they quickly realize at some level of consciousness that society has no need for them and no room for them specifically as men. The state, as you show so convincingly, has abandoned them. Women have married the state, for all purposes except emotional or sexual gratification, and therefore rely on the state for everything else. Boys learn quickly enough that society does not value them (unless they can be more like girls or even become girls). In short, masculinity no longer has any FUNCTION that is reliably (a) distinctive; (b) necessary; and (c) publicly valued. (Fatherhood is the one function that remains a source of masculine identity, but even that is increasingly trivialized or disputed.) If anyone wonders why so many men drop out of school, drop out of the work force, drop out of the family and drop out of life itself, THIS is why.