The underlying themes of the ambush on President Zelensky
March 3, 2025
The planned topic for today was preempted by the dastardly ambush of President Zelensky in the Oval Office last Friday, February 28. I use that adjective deliberately—it the same adjective used by President Franklin Roosevelt at the end of an address to a joint session of Congress on December 8, 1941, to describe the “unprovoked and dastardly attack” on Pearl Harbor the day before. The speech began with the well-known description of December 7 as “a date which will live in infamy”. Whether February 28, 2025, will also live in infamy is yet to be determined, but the events were, in the view of all but sycophants and Putin pals, “unprovoked and dastardly”. Several commentators have described the astonishing meeting and the continuing undercurrents that it expressed.
The title of Robert Reich’s post today was “The Trump-Vance-Musk-Putin manosphere”, with its description of “male domination”. He wrote, “I don’t want to insult great apes, but I’ve seen similar performances at the zoo. Trump and Vance sought to humiliate Zelensky, treating him with the same disrespect they treat … well, women.” The ‘manosphere’, he explained, is “a place where the main events are dominance and submission.” In a previous posts I have written that the Trump team has moved from governing to dominating, that the principal metaphors are wrestling (with its kayfabe) and use of a fire hose to knock down protesters. Rather than collaboration to achieve goals with broad benefits for the population, and especially for those most vulnerable, they actively seek submission in transactions (everything is a deal for Trump) that benefit them and their wealthy cronies. Prof. Reich emphasizes how this plays out, especially in Trump’s attempts to intimidate and bully women, particularly women of color. Citing several examples of women who have refused to be bullied, Prof. Reich writes that they “have distinguished themselves in standing up to Trump, maybe because they’re less intimidated by him than are many men, and because Trump has shown himself particularly fearful of strong women.” [Bold in original.]
Continuing the theme, Prof. Reich wrote: “If there was ever a president who represented unfettered male domination, it’s Trump. An implicit promise of the 2024 Trump campaign was to restore patriarchy to America. Trump voters were overwhelmingly male.” [Bold in original.] He points out the increase in sexist, threatening attacks on women online after the election. It is no accident that many of his most vocal supporters have been accused of sexual harassment including verbal, physical, and sexual abuse. One of them is now Secretary of Defense; another is essentially the acting president. Perhaps the most flagrant example is Trump’s intervention to have Andrew and Tristan Tate extradited from Romania to the US. As New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg explains:
“The Tate brothers, British American dual citizens, have been accused of luring women to Romania and then forcing them to work as pornographic webcam performers. They are also being investigated for rape and human trafficking in Britain and were to be extradited there when the Romanian cases concluded.
“Though they maintain their innocence, Andrew Tate, a self-described misogynist and the more famous of the two, has regularly boasted about abusing and pimping women. . . . He offered to teach his technique to other men in online courses where students could earn ‘pimping hoes degrees.’ Women who live in his compound . . . aren’t allowed to go out without him. Some are tattooed ‘owned by Tate.’ He left a voice note for a British woman who accused him of rape saying, ‘The more you didn’t like it, the more I enjoyed it.’
“Tate is a big fan of Donald Trump, championing him to his millions of mostly young male followers on social media. ‘I’m a Trump fan because I’m a man,’ Tate said in October in an online conversation with Adin Ross . . .who is something of a Tate protégé, and the white nationalist Nick Fuentes. ‘You have to support Trump if you’re a man.’ The brothers regularly lay the blame for their legal woes on Trump’s scapegoats, including U.S.A.I.D., George Soros and ‘the Biden crime family.’”
Ms. Goldberg later tied this action to the broader themes of the Trump campaign and maladministration:
“An implicit promise of the most recent Trump campaign was to restore patriarchy. Not the softer, pious kind of patriarchy once promoted by evangelicals like Mike Pence, but unfettered male domination. In seeking alienated and resentful young men, Trump appeared on podcasts and livestreams like Adin Ross’s. At the Republican National Convention, he was introduced by Dana White, chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, [again, playing up a violent sport] who was once caught on tape slapping his wife in a nightclub. Trump’s election, after a jury found him liable for sexual abuse, was a sign that the #MeToo movement was definitively dead.”
Prof. Reich’s post goes on to tie all this to Trump’s and his accomplices’ emphasis on “male dominance and misogyny” and “to connect this to what other authoritarians and neofascists are doing around the globe.” It is no accident that the previous major “America First” movement in this country came in the years leading up to WW II, not so much in support of the US, but for isolationism and for Hitler and the Nazi Regime in Germany. This theme of male dominance and misogyny is less about putting the US first than about winning. As Prof. Reich wrote: “Winning is all about getting other males to submit to the dominant male. Women are relegated to subservient roles.” In line with similar attitudes in the Third Reich and with Putin, Trump’s gang has also gone on the attack against LGBTQ+ persons, especially transgender persons, and broader gender identity issues. It is ironic beyond belief or description that the leading proponents of nuclear families and “traditional family values” are anti-democratic dictators, a president who has had three wives and is alleged to have had multiple affairs, a man who has fathered at least 14 children by several women, but who has disavowed a trans-daughter. We could go on, but you surely get the point that “family values” has always been a Republican con, designed to lure in voters without backing policies that would strengthen and support families.
The themes of toxic masculinity, dominance, demands for submission, and misogyny are not the only ones on display. As Heather Cox Richardson wrote, the shouting and anger also displayed for the world to see that Trump and Vance are clearly and openly aligned with Putin and other anti-democratic authoritarians. The identification is so blatant that she quotes Trump saying:
“‘Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,’ Trump said. ‘He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia… Russia, Russia, Russia—you ever hear of that deal?—that was a phony Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, scam. Hillary Clinton, shifty Adam Schiff, it was a Democrat scam. And he had to go through that. And he did go through it, and we didn’t end up in a war. And he went through it. He was accused of all that stuff. He had nothing to do with it. It came out of Hunter Biden’s bathroom.’”
So Trump claims that Putin “went through a hell of a lot” with him. He explicitly puts himself in league with a cruel, murderous dictator of a country that in recent years, until the Trump regime, was considered one of this country’s leading adversaries. To make matters worse, Ms. Richardson relays a report that “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered U.S. Cyber Command to stop all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions.” There are other moves designed to suppress or remove people and evidence that support the allegations of Russian interference in US elections. She concludes: “Today, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told a reporter: ‘The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. This largely aligns with our vision.’” So, in spite of all the toxic masculinity, they have essentially submitted to Putin.
The point of this post is not to discourage you or to induce anxiety. It is, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, to provide a basis for hope. It has been suggested that my columns on Substack cover a broad range of topics, that they are too diverse. Perhaps that is true. To address that, I had planned to write about the underlying themes that recur in the various posts. Discussing the themes evident in the Oval Office debacle on February 28 provides an opportunity to do that. My first post on Substack (October 15, 2024) was on “Anxiety and Hope”. At that point the election had not happened. I wrote that hope is grounded in trust, which I understand as reliance: we trust the people and institutions we can rely on, and that give us a basis for hope. I also wrote about the danger when trust is eroded, including in the world of science and health research.
In subsequent posts I wrote about the importance of respect, about the courage to speak truth to power (for example in the sermon by Bishop Mariann Budde), about the problems of structural bias, not only in epidemiology, but also in society. I invoked the work of Immanuel Kant to talk about how using people merely as means to our own ends is not only demeaning, but violates a fundamental, universal imperative of ethical conduct and human society. I recalled John Rawls, who wrote about a theory of justice that envisions a society in which fairness is key and the most vulnerable are supported. There were a few columns about the epidemic of loneliness, especially problematic among young people, and how the themes of hope and trust once again come into play.
Some may wonder what the columns about music, including posts about Bach, Mozart, and Rachmaninoff, had to do with any of these themes. One of the central ideas was collaboration: musicians collaborate, they work together to achieve the best performance. Soloists also collaborate, with their teachers and with the composers whose works they strive to interpret. Contrast that to the antagonism and domination we see repeatedly and which are the antithesis of working jointly toward a common goal. That is one of the things that breaks my heart (as noted in the previous post): because it is an assault on hope.
What gives me hope are some of the people I have quoted today and the increasing evidence of people and groups who are standing up and speaking up in whatever way they can to support immigrants and refugees, the weak and hungry and poor, and to oppose the wealthy, cruel, and avaricious gang that is attempting to seize the government for their own ends. We can be a part of those courageous people who are standing up and speaking up—in whatever way we can. Live in hope.
Notes:
Roosevelt, Franklin D. “The President’s War Messages.” Current History, vol. 1, no. 5, 1942, pp. 411–12. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/45305940. Accessed 3 Mar. 2025.
Robert Reich, “The Trump-Vance-Musk-Putin manosphere”, March 3, 2025, on Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/robertreich/p/the-trump-vance-musk-putin-manosphere
Michelle Goldberg, “Andrew Tate, Accused of Sex Trafficking, Is Trump’s Kind of Guy,” The New York Times, February 28, 2025: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/opinion/andrew-tate-donald-trump.html
Eve Batey, “Elong Musk Fathers 14th Child (That We Know Of): The pronatalist allegedly ignores several of his current children, yet keeps making more.” Vanity Fair, March 1, 2025: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/story/elon-musk-14th-child
Heather Cox Richardson, “Letters from an American”, March 2, 2025, on Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/march-2-2025