His interview with influencer Adin Ross earlier this week is part of a broader effort to answer Kamala Harris’s nomination with an unabashed courtship of too-online misogynists.
UFC head Dana White, the wife beater, is “a fighter.” North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is “very tough,” while China’s Xi Jinping is “strong.” Elon Musk, the transphobe who has turned X into a megaphone for bigotry, is a “genius.” So said Donald Trump during his 75-minute livestreamed interview with Adin Ross, the 23-year-old gamer and influencer.
The adjectives and verbs for all of the women they discussed were very different. Kamala Harris was said to be “weak” and “stupid,” Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were “crazy,” and AOC was described as “ranting” and “screaming.” And, of course, there was that appellation Trump applies to every woman—most famously to Hillary Clinton in their final debate in 2016—who doesn’t supplicate herself before him: “nasty.”
In other words, the interview was vintage Trump—the latest of a million-plus examples proving that, no matter how many smarmy advisers and gullible political reporters insist otherwise, he is incapable of changing who he is for political expediency. He’s an out-and-proud misogynist who intends to appeal to closeted misogynists—and no one should be happier about that fact than Kamala Harris.
That’s not at all how it works…
It’s partially a joke, but there is non-negligible subsection of privileged gay men who believe than any form of femininity is beneath them, to the point of misogyny. They believe that trans women, femme presenting NBs, and even femme leaning cis gay men are lesser than them. Hence the joke among the queer community that “they hate women more than they like men”.
Reading Peter Thiel’s essay, it certainly seems to reflect the mentality of those types of people I’ve interacted with IRL. Fortunately they are drowned out by the rest of the queer community.