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“There are some reasons to be president,” Donald Trump mused at a rally in Georgia earlier this month. Take a wild guess what these might be. The cool armored car? Custody of the nuclear button? The opportunities for immense corruption? Wrong. The leader of the free world was referring to the joy of living in a house guarded by “big, strong, handsome soldiers.” Under Joe Biden, soldiers were not allowed to be hot, because of woke. Even worse, some of them were girls.
Yes, after two grinding years of governance, Trump is back in his happy place, out on the campaign trail, voicing whichever disconnected thoughts crackle and fizz through his frontal cortex. His favorite rhetorical theme lately is an unexpected one: the official presidential dreamboat rankings. In multiple rallies, Trump has gone on and on about the relative hotness of male politicians, soldiers, and even protesters. As a result, people on the internet have diagnosed him with a novel medical condition: gay dementia. After putting in a solid shift in the heterosexuality mines, has the former beauty-pageant proprietor now become so disinhibited that he can no longer repress his thirst for man-flesh?
A less salacious explanation might be that the president has always refined his speeches based on audience feedback, and he’s discovered that his hot-guy material absolutely kills. In 2024, he kept going on about “the late, great Hannibal Lecter” and whether being electrocuted is preferable to being eaten by a shark, simply because the crowds enjoyed those riffs. Today the MAGA faithful get a transgressive thrill from hearing a man put into office by Christian conservatives deliver homoerotic stylings on male beauty. Calling women hot would read as creepy, and might remind audiences of the sexual-assault allegations against Trump, or the locker-room gaucheness of “grab ’em by the pussy.” But lusting after men is good, clean fun, and after a decade pushing the limits of outrageous behavior, here is a taboo that Trump can harmlessly break. Which Democrat is going to mock a guy for being a little bit swishy? Stephen Miller will not dare whisper to his boss: Sir, you know that we keep snidely implying that James Talarico is secretly gay? Your obvious love of buff soldiers is giving—mixed messages.
Enough of the serious chin-stroking electoral analysis, though. You want to hear which men America’s greatest president considers to be stone-cold babes. Step forward, Jon Husted of Ohio, with your glorious, rippling glutes and your valiant crusade against energy-efficient dishwashers. At a campaign stop for the Republican Senate nominee in Dayton, Trump discovered that Husted used to be a star football player. Naturally, the president looked for evidence of this in Husted’s buttocks—the windows to the soul. As he later told a crowd in Youngstown: “I don’t do this with men very often.” (A lie.) “I started examining his body because I didn’t know he was a great athlete. And I looked and I watched up and down. I looked at his ass.” The crowd laughed, which encouraged Trump to add that he also admired Husted’s hands, which he said were “like claws.”
Days later in Kentucky, Trump returned to the theme of Husted’s badonkadonk. “I examined his ass, and then I looked at his shoulders. I looked at his feet. I looked at his hand. I looked at his jawline,” he told the crowd. “I then patted him on the shoulder, and it was like a piece of steel. I’m still recovering.” The Ohio candidate had gained “nine or 10 points since I talked about that,” he said. (Also a lie.)
Trump has always had a weakness for a photogenic guy. He reportedly chose members of his Cabinet, such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, after seeing how good they looked on television. He’s long made a habit of singling out attractive men in his audiences, entreating the rest of the crowd to join in his appreciation. (“Get up here, please. I want to see,” he told a muscled young man at a Coast Guard ceremony this spring.) Back in February, the president described a “very powerful” steel-factory owner who was so grateful for his policies that “he said, ‘Sir, I want to kiss you so badly.’” In May, my colleague Ashley Parker chronicled some of the men whose looks had Trump favorably assessed. These included the president of Paraguay (“young and handsome”), military pilots (“perfect specimens”), and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (“under that beautiful exterior is a killer”).
The president’s homoerotic stylings have become more obvious, however, because he has so little else to talk about on the campaign trail. Crooked Hillary and Sleepy Joe have long since departed the scene, Shifty Schiff’s impeachment plans went nowhere, and the fake-news media have been replaced by MAGA toadies. With few enemies left (except his own terrible judgment) Trump is struggling to develop new material. Like many older people, he has retreated to his comfort zone, and his comfort zone is guarded by big, strapping men in uniform. “They’re always great-looking, these four-star guys. I don’t know if they get the job by their look,” he told a rally in Kansas this week. He also praised the rock singer Ted Nugent for having a son who was “a beautiful-looking guy.”
The president has ruminated so often on male beauty lately that it’s become very obvious that he has a type. His taste in men turns out to be somewhat basic—white, beefy, butch; think corn-fed midwestern fireman—and thoroughly partisan. At the same rally in Georgia where he enthused about the White House guards, Trump incorrectly declared that Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, was not a “good-looking man,” unlike his Republican challenger. “I actually think Mike Collins is a good-looking man—and he’s all man. He’s all man,” added Trump. “I’m not sure about Ossoff.” (Let me save you a click: Collins is a mulleted 59-year-old with a touch of latter-day Newt Gingrich about his facial features, whereas Ossoff is so cute that he clearly had to shave off his beard in order to be taken seriously.) Trump went on to declare that the GOP candidate for Georgia governor, Rick Jackson, was also a “very handsome, distinguished, beautiful-looking guy.” In Kansas, Trump expanded his hotness rankings to encompass the crowd. Describing one loyalist’s confrontation with a protester, he noted approvingly that “the MAGA guy beat the crap out of him. Not that that matters. Good-looking guy.”
Trump’s MAGA goggles do have some limits. Last month, he went through a phase of roasting Ken Paxton, devoting sections of multiple speeches to what a schlub he found the Republican Senate candidate in Texas to be. “He may not be the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen,” the president observed on September 9, adding the next day: “I’m not sure if I like your look. I’m not sure if I like the way you dress. I don’t like the way you talk.” Sad! Paxton, apparently, has a face not even a homoerotically inclined Republican president can love.
An enthusiasm for buff young men in uniforms (or out of them) has always been one of the hallmarks of authoritarianism—a form of governance enamored of strong male bodies, and the promise of violence that they contain, even when the rulers consider overt homosexuality degenerate. Mussolini’s Italy simultaneously exiled dozens of gay men to the island of San Domino and produced the jaw-droppingly campy naked statues at the Stadio dei Marmi in Rome. Many dictators end up mired in camp: Muammar Qaddafi had an all-female bodyguard troop. Turkmenistan’s Saparmurat Niyazov renamed April after his mother and built a gold statue of himself that rotated to face the sun. Emperor Bokassa I of the short-lived Central African empire tried to make his coronation ceremony an exact replica of the one held by Napoleon Bonaparte, but was hampered by having to hold it in a basketball stadium.
[Read: The surprising reason for the new homophobia]
Donald Trump’s simultaneous love for unchecked executive power and a well-turned male ankle is therefore part of a rich historical tradition. At the same time, it is also one of the many ways in which his political style represents a departure from typical American conservatism. From the 1970s onward, the Republicans were the party of the “moral majority” and “traditional values.” The idea that the party’s base is casually homophobic is still such conventional wisdom that J. D. Vance, a Millennial who very obviously had LGBTQ friends in his student years, now has to play-act as an old-school social conservative to show the depth of his political conversion. When a man at a rally in Texas shouted out that he loved Vance, the vice president replied: “I love you too, sir. In a totally platonic way, to be clear. I’m the vice president, not James Talarico.”
Vance does not seem to have grasped that his boss’s campiness is key to his political appeal—it’s the secret sauce that transforms nastiness into showbiz sass. Trump is politics’ answer to Joan Rivers, and his persona is influenced by all the flavors of American fakery: the carnival barker, the reality-TV host, the kayfabe world of professional wrestling. He looks like a man doing a drag performance as himself.
Trump’s embrace of camp also reflects his immunity to shame. I get the sense that Vance is crippled with embarrassment by the thought of that famous picture of him in eyeliner and a blond wig. His unease with gayness, campiness, and femininity reads as insecurity. By contrast, Trump loves Sunset Boulevard and doesn’t care who knows it. Hell, he even went to Liza Minnelli’s wedding. That authenticity and disinhibition means he can get a crowd of white Christians in Kentucky to listen to his homoerotic ramblings—and applaud.