America Got the Father It Wanted
The last weeks of Donald Trump’s successful campaign for president were a festival of crudeness. In light of this, Tucker Carlson’s warm-up act at a Georgia rally late last month was, if notably creepy, still typical of the sunken depths of rhetoric. Carlson offered an extended metaphor in which Trump was an angry “dad” with a household of misbehaving children (a 2-year-old who has smeared “the contents of his diapers on the wall,” “a hormone-addled” 15-year-old girl who has decided to “slam the door of her bedroom and give you the finger”). The children in this metaphor, if it wasn’t clear, are the citizens of this country.
“Dad comes home, and he’s pissed,” Carlson said to wild cheers. “He’s not vengeful; he loves his children. Disobedient as they may be, he loves them, because they’re his children. They live in his house. But he’s very disappointed in their behavior, and he’s going to have to let them know.” Then came the grossest part: Carlson’s fantasy of Trump spanking “a bad little girl” as punishment.
What America did on Tuesday was elect that dad—vengeful, disappointed, erratic, and in the minds of his followers, benevolent.
A majority of voters preferred Trump, and likely for a variety of reasons; it may have been “the inflation, stupid” after all. But psychological forces also lie behind Trump’s appeal. Largely unexamined among these is the aura of paternalism exuded by the president-elect. Carlson, in his reptilian way, was getting at this idea in its most vulgar iteration. Trump wanted to be seen as a father figure for a nation he insisted needed discipline and defending. This felt like a role reversal from his 2016 persona: the class clown sitting in the back, lobbing spitballs at the establishment. If during his first administration he was a child dependent on “adults in the room” to make sure he didn’t fiddle with the nuclear code, this year he gave off the more assured air of an imposing patriarch in an overcoat; he’s been in the White House already and doesn’t need any help. This infused the slogan from his 2016 Republican National Convention, “I alone can fix it,” with new resonance eight years later.
When Trump started using this line again, I immediately understood its efficacy. I have a fairly egalitarian marriage, yet a common refrain in my house, whenever something breaks, is “Aba will fix it” (my kids call me “Aba,” Hebrew for “dad”). My wife even laughs at how quickly our determination to avoid traditional gender roles breaks down if there is a dead bird in the backyard that needs to be disposed of or an IKEA shelf that has to be built. The notion of a dad who can—or at least will try to—“fix it” is deeply embedded in our cultural psyche, and not just among Americans who consider themselves conservative. Even for people who didn’t grow up with a father—maybe especially for those who didn’t—the longing for a mythical male protector can run deep. Just think of J. D. Vance, the vice-president-elect, who has written that the “revolving door of father figures” his mother would bring into his life was the worst part of his childhood. He longed for stability and firmness, and he has allied himself with a right-wing movement that aims to restore a “father knows best” nation of single-earner households tended to by stay-at-home moms.
Consciously or not, Trump exploited this desire, and he did so at a moment of deep economic and social flux in the country. He painted an exaggerated (and often fictional) portrait of a nation of vulnerable children menaced by murderous immigrants, one that requires a paterfamilias to provide a defense—and to guard their reproductive rights (he is, of course, the self-styled “father of IVF”). At a Wisconsin rally late last month, Trump described a conversation with his advisers in which he told them he wanted to use this sort of paternalistic language on the stump. They disagreed, according to his story, and told him it would be “very inappropriate” for him to say, for example, “I want to protect the women of our country.” To this, he responded: “Well, I’m going to do it—whether the women like it or not, I’m going to protect them.”
Authoritarian leaders thrive on this kind of familial imagery. One of the most memorable photos of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin is from 1936: He smiles as an apple-cheeked little girl named Engelsina Markizova sits on his lap and throws her arms around his neck. (The year after the photo was taken, Markizova later said, her actual father was disappeared one night; he was executed in 1938 as part of Stalin’s purge.) During Benito Mussolini’s 1925 “Battle for Grain” propaganda campaign to boost Italy’s wheat production, the leader himself went out, sickle in hand, to thresh, as cameras captured the image of a man vigorously pretending to provide for his family. And, of course, “father” is a title borne by generations of dictators, including Muammar Qaddafi, who often went by “Father of the Nation,” and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (who gave himself a surname meaning “father of the Turks”).
(Russian State Film and Photo Archive / Alamy)
Trump might be too undisciplined (or unfamiliar with history) to follow this script exactly—though even some of his flights of fancy might be generously described as dad humor of a sort—but his projection of paternalism does fit a recognizable mold. In the 1960s, the clinical psychologist Diana Baumrind identified three distinct parenting styles: authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive. A good example of the “permissive” dad might be Tim Walz, a hugger and an emoter who is always up for a chat. As for Trump, all you needed to do was spend a few minutes at one of his rallies to see that he comes off as a classic “authoritarian” father: withholding, demanding, not open to negotiation over, say, curfew time.
[Adam Serwer: There is no constitutional mandate for fascism.]
The upside of the authoritarian style of parenting, according to Baumrind, is that it results in well-behaved, orderly children, and this is the society that Trump is promising: one without the flung diapers and slammed doors. But there is a clear downside to having a father like this.
According to the National Institutes of Health, children of authoritarian parents can have “higher levels of aggression” and exhibit “shyness, social ineptitude, and difficulty making their own decisions.” They may have low self-esteem and difficulty controlling their anger. I’m not seeing a recipe here for good citizens—just loyal subjects.
Is this who we might become? Trump’s paternalism, his projection of power and control, may have held appeal for his voters. It allowed them to project onto him all the things people project onto dads: that they are brave and indestructible and always there to kill an insect for us. Trump might have won his supporters’ love by fashioning himself as America’s father. But a democracy doesn’t need scared and obedient children. It needs grown-ups—vigilant, conscientious ones. And the president exists to serve them, not the other way around.