Why Trump Might Win the Presidency

Image from https://www.onlinestores.com/trump2024-fight-fight-fight-3ftx5ft-polyester-flag.html

The issue has largely gone unnoticed this political season, but the last three years have been the worst in U.S. history when it comes to suicide and overdose deaths, with 328,372 males and 114,144 females loosing their lives to these deaths of despair, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Males account for 74% of those deaths, yet there is no compelling question from the media and those running for office about the topic. Despite the town halls, podcasts, various media interviews, and mothers and grandmothers out there, no one has dared to ask this question: The U.S. has experienced the worst overdose and suicide outcomes in its history, with males accounting for 74% of suicide and overdose deaths combined. What will you do as president, senator, or congress member to improve male mental health in this country?

There are over 66 million infant boys, boys, and young men 30-years-of-age and younger, which means there are a healthy number of mothers and grandmothers out there who—I would think—are increasingly concerned about the boys and men in their lives, not only in mental health but also in education and other areas.

When some attempts are made to discuss issues regarding males, the media and policymakers tend to focus on particular racial groups—in essence erasing the fact that all males—regardless of race—die of suicide and overdose at higher rates than their female counterparts and often across racial groups. (The same is true with educational outcomes.) These political escapades essentially erase male and racialize them for political advantage—in part—because it divides people and allows those in politics, media, and government to avoid conversations around male as a unique social group with unique social problems collectively, even if some males in certain racial cohorts suffer more or less than males in a different racial/ethnic cohort.

Instead, media outlets, academics, and even policymakers try to look at things like stoicism, bravado, racism, and other socially constructed ideas of masculinity as the root cause of grossly disproportionate male suicide and overdose outcomes. But a boy does not take his own life or engage in excessive drug use because of some socially constructed reason, he does these things because he is depressed, takes extreme risks—more relevant to his brain-sex, and we—as a culture—fail to see it or acknowledge it because we are not even looking.

So, why aren’t we looking?

There are at least two reasons in our current political climate as to why we are not looking at male outcomes, one is the abolition of sex and another is our cultural obsession with the abortion rights issue—a predominately female voting issue—at the expense of other discussions around male mental health and other male health concerns. Regardless of how one feels about the abortion issue, male suicide and overdose deaths are at least as equally compelling.

The Abolition of Sex

The abolition of sex (XX and XY) and the denial of sex differences that manifest from chromosomal differences have been a driving force in contemporary social thought—the idea that there are no differences in males and females, at least from a brain-science point of view and even now from a physical stand point in things like sports. Gender identity is replacing sexual dimorphism in our political talk and the policies that follow, and there are those in our culture who want to erase sex as the first principal and replace it with gender, a social construct. And I would argue that it is this type of thought that makes it easier to abandon males all together. If we deny sex (XX/XY) while simultaneously focusing on policies that overwhelmingly support females and other groups, the concept of male falls into the abyss and is politically abandoned. That’s the reason the American people do not know about the 328,372 male suicide and overdose deaths.

Those who would like to discuss issues affecting boys and men certainly fear a backlash from the feminist lobby or worry about offending a few people who deny sex as the first principle. This creates a sort of mindset that is zero-sum and a belief that male nature is problematic and does not deserve our attention.

These types of attitudes collectively displace males from the social conversation, even though we know that all people participate in sex (XX/XY) but not everyone participates in gender, something Michael and I discuss in our upcoming book, Boys, A Rescue Plan: Moving Beyond the Politics of the Masculine to Healthy Male Development.

It’s also important that we recognize that there are males and females on the gender spectrum who are suffering and need our compassion and understanding. And Michael and I have some similar and differing opinions discussed in the book.

The language of those in the Big Three (Michael Gurian’s term for media, academia, and government), however, is moving away from sex as a construct and toward a type of androgynous culture or a culture that is overwhelmingly fixed on issues relevant to women and girls only or race only. This narrative makes it easier to promote, through language and policy, the abolition of the male and the demonizing of the masculine when the male is erased and blended into an oppressor/oppressed narrative that essentially ignores male suffering as a singular concept that cuts across races. This has never been more present than in the 2025 Harris/Biden U.S. Budget (I’ve discussed a number of times) that mentions concerns and programs for girls and women 81 times while boys and men are absent. The word “boy” and the word “man” do not even appear in the budget.

To the Democrats, our nation’s sons are beyond irrelevant. They don’t exist. Unless, of course, you want their vote—just look at white dudes for Harris, the girl dads for Harris, or the black males scolded by Barack Obama for sexism. Was any of the concern directed at the overdose and suicide crisis of males? The educational outcomes? The loss of father involvement? Careers and jobs?

The substance is overwhelmingly gynocentric. This might—more than any other reason—explain the male vote moving to Trump as well as the mothers and grandmothers of sons and daughters who are in families and are leaning toward Trump. Something like Make America Healthy Again has a lot more appeal than no appeal at all.

Republicans, too, have largely ignored males in budgets but to a slightly—I really mean slightly—lesser extent than Democrats. In various budgets over a number of presidencies, Republicans tend to mention men and women in the same context, such as men and women in the military or men and women in the workforce. They do too, however, cut out slivers of budgetary items for females without slivers for males; although, it should be noted that Republican policies are more likely to provide some protections for males and females more equally—we see this mostly in Title IX practices and the attempt to remove diversity, equity, and inclusion programs that Republicans claim violate equal protections and reinforce oppressor/oppressed narratives that disproportionately discriminate against males. The new Title IX policies may be some of the most egregious to date when it comes to violating equal protections for males and acknowledging sexual dimorphism.

We Can’t Talk about Male Health because We Can Only Talk about Abortion Rights

A second issue is the abortion rights issue, which consumes the American consciousness and takes up an enormous amount of space in the Big Three and by activists. The conversation (once about choice and safe, legal, and rare) is no longer an issue about choice but about abortion and seemingly abortion only. There is some talk about reproductive rights but it is tied up in abortion—which is peculiar—because abortion and reproduction are antonymous to one another. Abortion, to terminate, is the opposite of reproduction, to cause to exist again. And we almost never hear about the thousands of women who perhaps regretted their abortions or who worked with agencies that helped them carry out their reproductive rights and give birth. A 2015 study in Cureus by Reardon, Raffery, and Longbons concluded that “two-thirds of women experienced their abortions as a violation of their own values and preferences.”

Perceived pressure to abort is strongly associated with women attributing more negative mental health outcomes to their abortions. The one-third of women for whom abortion is wanted and consistent with their values and preferences are most likely over-represented in studies initiated at abortion clinics. More research is needed to understand better the experience of the two-thirds of women for whom abortion is unwanted, coerced, or otherwise inconsistent with their own values and preferences.

Why has this happened?

The answer is an uncomfortable one, but it is part of a larger collective social narrative that includes drugs, abortion, and violent crime that seem to embrace a type of cultural death instinct, something I unpack more fully and explain in a second book I am working on for the beginning of 2026. Our current political climate seems obsessed with a type of death instinct more than it does a necessary life instinct.

When policymakers allow drug addicted people—most with mental health issues— to wander the streets, purchase illegal substances, use “safe injection sites,” litter streets, and place harms on citizens, there must be some acknowledgement that these policies are only placing bandaids on gaping wounds and that the majority of people who use these sites will not seek or receive long term treatment and whose deaths will only mount.

Nonetheless, addictive drug injection site supporters argue that they provide “treatment” to drug users. But enabling those suffering from addiction to go to the brink of death is a dubious treatment. In fact, a health organization that manages injection sites in Canada estimated that only “about 10% of [its] users enter treatment.”

Injection sites may also endanger the surrounding community. As drug users gather, so do drug traffickers who prey on them. An Australian injection site became a “one-stop-shop for crime,” and a Canadian injection site fostered “open-air drug trafficking.” In Philadelphia, the local police union echoed these concerns, warning that an injection site would bring increased crime to their community, including violent crime among drug dealers seeking to protect their turf (U.S. Department of Justice).

Of course, 72% of those who die from overdose and 79-80% of those who die from suicide are male. Our policymakers would never tolerate this for our girls and women, and we—as a nation—shouldn’t. But the current administration has made the conscious decision to ignore the 72% and and 80% of males to protect the 28% and 20% of females discriminately. Despite these disparities, the Harris/Biden administration 2025 budget has decided to “invests in a new technical assistance center to strengthen health providers understanding and treatment of women’s mental health and substance use.” That is great. This decision, however, exemplifies the type of abandonment of our nation’s sons, where some people’s well-being and deaths matter less than others. That is what prejudice look like.

We also saw this in the social unrest after the killing of George Floyd, where male homicide deaths after Floyd’s death increased dramatically, 22% in the same month of his death and anywhere from 30% to 40% increases when we compare each month after April of 2020 (May through December) to April of 2020.

Black males in America account for the majority of homicide deaths, and not at the hands of police officers, but more because of defunding the police efforts, the abundance of rampant drug use, poor educational outcomes, and a problem more rooted in male psychology than masculine identity politics.

When we look at yearly data, including the 2023 provisional homicide data that will be better understood once it is finalized, it is clear that the homicide trend has not returned to those seen in 2019.

And with recent concerns regarding violent crime reporting; it is critical to be a bit more skeptical in general as the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) “quietly revised [their] numbers, releasing new data that shows violent crime increased in 2022 by 4.5%. The new data includes thousands more murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults.”

“The Bureau – which has been at the center of partisan storms – made no mention of these revisions in its September 2024 press release” (RealClearInvestigations).

While those on the left discuss Trump’s fascism and references to Hitler (completely ridiculous) maybe it’s time for them to look in the mirror and at the insatiable prejudice our nation’s sons face year after year and decade after decade and policy after policy.

Stopping MDS (Male Discrimination Syndrome) and Employing Solutions

Solutions can happen, but it will probably take grass roots efforts in our homes, communities, schools, faith based communities, PTAs, voting for candidates who care for them, and—unfortunately—massive legal action to go after the policies and policymakers at the center of what I will now call Male Discrimination Syndrome (MDS), a form of prejudice that denies the suffering of boys and men and denies their rights, allowing a large apparatus of institution to create laws that discriminate against them and promote a rhetoric that misplaces their suffering into a socially constructed anti-hero called masculinity.

But there are actions we can take. These are some of the things needed to help our boys and men thrive in family, school, and life.

• Get your feet wet and look at the Santa Fe Boys Educational Foundation and its conference on Sex/Gender Difference

• Encourage schools to implement boys and girls learn differently models, even in the face of those who oppose them

  • Bring a boys and girls learn differently program to your school district or school

• Offer small coed classes and single sex classes that allow teachers to actually have the time to introduce lessons and plans to boys and girls who have different needs in the aggregate

  • Look at smaller class sizes (especially in reading, writing, and math) in coed schools so that teachers can deliver the types of lessons that impact boys and girls positively and differently

  • As one principal of a Christian school mentioned to me, socializing boys and girls together in the same class can help socialize the interactions of boys and girls together, but accepting sex differences and having the class size to do it makes that more possible

• Form male mentoring and rights of passage programs, for boys who do not have fathers and boys who do have fathers as an extension of the three family system Michael Gurian talks about in our upcoming book and in previous works.

• Restore clubs like the Boys Scouts of old that are boy friendly and geared toward boy needs and development

• Faith based communities can institute male and female ministries that discuss things like what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman in single sex spaces. How does a modern family stay together and cooperate together to help its sons thrive and its daughters thrive?

  • Introduce more men’s ministries in your faith communities and open them to the public.

• Expand the Police Athletic League (PAL) to bridge the relationship between law-enforcement and the community with programs that are boy friendly and boy specific. PAL will also have programs for girls.

• Insist on programs that do not discriminate based on sex. If there is a girls in STEM program, why isn’t there a comparable program for boys?

• Become a citizen scientist when you read, listen, and follow various things in media, policy, and your school. Are they looking at data by sex and by both race/ethnicity and sex? When not, call them out for it.

• Make a list of psychologists and counselors who practice from the frame of mind that brain-sex difference matters when it comes to—not only treating depressed and traumatic ridden boys, but who can also educate coaches, mentors, teachers, and others on brain-sex difference. (Try GurianInstitue.com)

The ideas above are meant to get us thinking a lot more about boys and men as those who deserve to be understood, not under the guise of some socially constructed narrative alone, but one that blends nature and nurture to help boys to grow, thrive, and learn and become healthy men in their homes and communities.