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Sit with what happened on that South Lawn Sunday night. A fighter named Josh Hokit won his bout, grabbed the microphone in front of the president of the United States, and used the moment to yell, “Michelle Obama is a man, am I right, America?” Trump sat right there in the front row.  He said nothing. This is exactly what I have been telling you. These people have been handed a permission slip to act like this, in public, into a live microphone, on the lawn of the People’s House, with the president of the United States sitting in the front row saying nothing. His administration has not put out a single word denouncing it. Not a statement, not a post, not a syllable. The highest office in the land could not summon the same. Every famous face who lined up for an invite to that spectacle has gone every bit as quiet. Their silence is the answer. These people watched a grown man degrade a former First Lady on the people’s lawn and decided it was fine. NYT best-selling author, Jeff Pearlman, had a good take on Sunday night and Hokit’s comments. Jeff teaches journalism at Chapman University where I guest lecture several times a year:  That fight had nothing to do with America’s 250th birthday. It was a Freedom 250 spectacle timed to his own 80th, invite only, partly paid for with your tax dollars, staged on the people’s lawn to feed Trump’s chauvinist manosphere fantasy.¹ I have practiced law in California for forty years. I have stood in front of juries, sat with families on the worst day of their lives, and watched what real strength looks like up close. Strength is quiet. Strength tells the truth when a lie would be easier. The performance coming out of this White House and frankly, many in last Sunday night fight crowd is the opposite of strength. The Con They Sold YouHere is the product Trump and his supporters are selling. Be loud. Be cruel and a male chauvinist. Racism is fine. Mock the weak. Call people names. Shout down anyone who corrects you. Repeat whatever Fox News told you this morning as gospel, even when you know nothing about the subject. Wrap all of it in a red hat and call it manhood. A man convicted on 34 felony counts and who was found guilty of sexually assaulting a women and named tens of thousands of times in the Epstein files, sits is at the center of the sales pitch, and millions of men have been told that following him is the price of admission to being a man. The pitch is a lie from top to bottom, and the daily noise machine exists to keep you from noticing. Real Men Don’t Lie To Your Face For A LivingPicture the man you trust most in your life. Your father. Your grandfather. The coach who shaped you. The partner who has stood next to you through the hardest year of your life. Now ask yourself a simple question. Has that man ever looked you in the eye, day after day after day, and lied to your face about whether he was doing his job. Of course he has not. That is the whole reason you trust him. A real man tells you the truth even when the truth costs him something, especially when it costs him something. His word is the bedrock everything else stands on. This president lies to your face for a living. He swore an oath on the steps of the Capitol to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He stands at a podium and tells you he is keeping that oath while his own Justice Department prosecutes the people he hates, while courts strike down his deployments of soldiers into American cities as illegal, while a federal judge has to demand sworn declarations from his own attorney general because nobody on the bench trusts a word coming out of his administration. He tells you the economy is roaring while seven in ten Americans say the place they live has become unaffordable. He tells you tariffs are making you richer while the prices on your shelf say otherwise. He tells you he is your protector while he calls your neighbors vermin and your daughters’ favorite reporters pigs. The lies are not slips. They are the job. Now picture how he handles a hard moment. A reporter asks a question he does not want to answer and he stomps his foot, points his finger, and calls her a pig. A judge rules against him and he calls her stupid and corrupt. A newspaper publishes a story he dislikes and he posts in the middle of the night that the writer is ugly inside and out. A senator crosses him and he tries to bury her career. He pouts. He sulks. He throws fits on social media at three in the morning. He blames every failure on someone else and claims every accident of luck as his personal triumph. That is the conduct of a spoiled child holding the most powerful office on earth. Hold that behavior up against the standard you set in your own home. You would not tolerate it from your husband. You would not tolerate it from your wife. You would sit your son down in a heartbeat if he treated a girl in his class the way this president treats the women who cover him. You would correct your daughter on the spot if she belittled a classmate the way he belittles federal judges. The standard you teach the eight year old at your kitchen table is the same standard a grown man in the Oval Office has spent his entire public life dodging. The lying, the name calling, the tantrums, the inability to apologize, the refusal to ever once say I was wrong, you would never accept any of it from the people you love most. There is no good reason to accept it from the man holding the nuclear codes. This is the part the noise machine works hardest to hide. They want you to believe his cruelty is candor, his lying is fighting, his tantrums are toughness, and his refusal to ever take responsibility is some kind of alpha confidence. None of that is real. Candor tells the truth. Fighting takes the hit and stays in the ring. Toughness keeps its temper when the temper would feel good. Confidence owns a mistake out loud and tries to repair the damage. The man in that office has never once shown you any of those things. He shows you a child in an eighty year old suit, and his enablers are paid to call it manhood. This Is What A Man Actually Looks LikeHere is what the Trump manosphere salesmen do not want you to know. A man stands tall and tells the truth even when the truth costs him. A man keeps his word. A man protects the people who have no one else to protect them, the kid getting bullied, the worker getting cheated, the stranger getting hounded by a mob. A man stays calm when calm is hard. A man extends his hand to the person everyone else wrote off. Compassion is strength. Empathy is strength. Owning your mistakes out loud is strength. Shouting the loudest in the room has never once made anyone a man. Name calling is the move of a coward who ran out of arguments. Repeating something you heard on television about a subject you never studied is not conviction. Loud is not strong. Cruel is not tough. Stupid said with confidence is still stupid. The smallest man in any room is the one who has to remind everybody how big he is. You get to argue his policies all day long. Tax rates, the border, trade, drug prices, debate me on any of them and we are two citizens doing exactly what citizens do. Calling your neighbors vermin and a working reporter a pig sits in a different universe from policy. No tax cut on earth turns cruelty into character. Some Were Once Good MenHere is the part that keeps me up at night. Some of the men buying this were once good men. Hard working, church going, kids in cleats on Saturday morning, the guy who helps you jump your truck in the cold. They got handed a counterfeit version of manhood by people who profit from their anger, and the sales pitch runs through their phones every hour of every day. So many of these men have lost the thread between what they know in their gut is right and what a convicted felon in a red hat is ordering them to feel. You love a few of them. I do (or did) too. They are the target of the con, and they deserve better than the small, mean, frightened model of manhood being shoved down their throats. Women TooOne more thing, because I refuse to let anyone feel left out of this. I wrote these words for the men still standing behind the convicted felon in the Oval Office. But here’s the deal. Every line lands the same for the women standing there beside them. Character never belonged to one gender. The woman who cheers a president who calls female reporters pigs and brands them ugly is applauding the contempt he holds for women like her. The mother who teaches her kids that cruelty is courage is buying the same con sold to every man in that red hat. Backbone, decency, and love for your neighbor belong to all of us. The standard holds for women and men alike. A person of real character stands tall, tells the truth, and protects the people getting stepped on. Every woman who knows better and looks away made the same wrong choice, and she owns it the same way he does. Where You Come InSo, for all the men out there, here is your move, and it is the most masculine thing you will do all year. Stand tall. Tell the truth out loud, even when the room goes quiet. Treat people asking the hard question with respect. Defend the neighbor getting called vermin. Be the calm, steady, decent person in the life of your kids who are watching, because they are always watching. For everyone, please raise your sons and daughters to know the difference. The man worth trusting tells you the truth on the worst day of his life. He keeps his word when keeping it hurts. He sits with a kid who is scared and listens. He looks the person across the table in the eye and answers the question. He owns his failures and shares the credit for his wins. He treats the waitress and the CEO with the exact same respect. He gets quieter when he gets angrier, not louder. He is the man you would want your daughter to marry and the man you would want your son to grow into. The man currently in the Oval Office is the cautionary tale you point at when you teach your kids what to avoid. Share this with one person who needs to hear that real strength never had a thing to do with cruelty. This country gets its spine back one honest person at a time. Be one of them. Then tell me in the comments what real strength means to you. Mitch Jackson, Esq. |
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