Writing With His Eyes Closed

the david french story

I’m a charter member of the “no one is above criticism” club. Everyone is fair game. People who run for office are really fair game. So I think it’s just fine to criticize Donald Trump, and to criticize JD Vance, and to criticize Trump/Vance 2024.

But what’s so obvious, over and over again, is that the people writing the most insistent criticism are playing critic. They know that they’re supposed to say that Donald Trump is very very very bad, so they…do that? A lot? But the substance of the criticism tends, with remarkable frequency, to be a set of non-sequiturs and self-refuting rhetorical dead-ends. They’re criticizing because they’re supposed to, not because they have criticisms to offer.

Take David French. Please. Here’s his latest: Donald Trump isn’t a real man, because Hulk Hogan.

The I-didn’t-think-this-through flavor of this piece can’t be exaggerated. It makes so little sense, so poorly, with such odd structure and framing, that it nears the level of Thomas Friedmanism. David French doesn’t know anything, or understand anything, but he really throws himself into it.

So.

Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock, and Dana White were at the Republican National Convention, French writes, so the Republicans are being macho, unlike Democrats, who are demonstrating a style of manhood that focuses on being kind, decent, and nurturing. Republican manhood is about complaints and empty rage; Democratic manhood is about building things and caring for others. Making the comparison concrete, French explicitly compares the macho grievance artist Trump to precisely four wonderfully gentle and caring men: Admiral William McRaven, the US Senator and former astronaut and fighter pilot Mark Kelly, “Mark Hertling, my former division commander in Iraq,” and the former Marine Corps General and Secretary of Defense James Mattis. Those four men are the model of a masculinity that nurtures, loves, and builds; Trump is the model of a masculinity that only destroys and tears down. David French hates machismo, so the list of men he admires is made up entirely of combat arms officers.

Do you…see the problem? Because David French doesn’t. At all. Donald Trump is a real estate developer, someone who spent his entire adult life actually building things:

It’s just fine to criticize Trump as a businessman, if you feel inclined to do that. But he’s a builder and a developer; that’s his actual background. He makes things. He spent his life making things. And his political message is about making things and protecting people who make things, whether you agree with the specifics of his policy arguments or not:

French draws a contrast to Trump’s supposedly macho manhood of mindless grievance and empty rage with four men who nurture and care — and all four of the men he names come from the literal profession of arms, the culture of organized state violence. I also spent a few years playing a marginal role in that profession (E-5 type, one each), and this isn’t a criticism. But Trump is macho and violent / McRaven and Mattis are loving and gentle is such dumb rhetorical construction that it could only make it into print in the New York Times. Watch this, as French describes McRaven:

But let’s return for the moment to the Navy SEAL who served his country for decades, who helped kill one of America’s deadliest foes and who declared to American college graduates, “You must have compassion. You must ache for the poor and disenfranchised. You must fear for the vulnerable. You must weep for the ill and infirm. You must pray for those who are without hope. You must be kind to the less fortunate.”

When I heard those words, I thought: That’s the message American men need to hear. That’s a message the American people need to hear.

McRaven says a real man weeps and aches. Also, he “helped kill one of America’s deadliest foes.” Of course a warrior can nurture and care for his family and his men and his community, but French doesn’t know what narrative effect he’s trying to produce: A real man is gentle and weeps a lot. Like a Navy SEAL.

This is an even stranger contrast to set up with JD Vance, who opens his widely read book with a discussion of the violent and flawed men who stood in as father figures in his disrupted childhood — writing about “honor culture” and “the kind of violence that should land someone in jail.” If you open Hillbilly Elegy and read the first ten pages of the very first chapter, you’ll see immediately that he’s talking about the rejection of violence and grievance in favor of a model of manhood, and adulthood, that focuses on making and building. Consistent with that theme, Senator JD Vance has been quite obviously focused on re-industrialization and industrial policy, and feel free to note that the unmanly and grievance-focused JD Vance co-authored the linked bill with David French’s nurturing real man Mark Kelly. See also, for example:

WASHINGTON, DC – Senators JD Vance (R-OH) and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) have introduced legislation, the Compressed Gas Cylinder Safety and Oversight Improvements Act of 2023, to strengthen safety standards for foreign-made gas cylinders and level the playing field for domestic manufacturers. Senators Bill Hagerty (R-TN), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Ted Budd (R-NC), and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) join as original cosponsors. 

WHY IS HE BEING SO UNMANLY, I guess.

I’ll hear criticisms of Donald Trump all day long. But so many of them are so pointless and forced that it becomes exhausting. Hulk Hogan spoke at the convention, so Trump isn’t a real man who makes things, and he isn’t gentle like a professional warrior. Here’s David French as he nears his Big Finish:

I wonder if Democrats should answer the Republican men’s night with a men’s night of their own — a night that features heroes instead of bullies and showmen, a night that answers the Republican appeal to men’s basest instincts with an appeal to their highest ideals.

I just…what?

What if we had an election that centered on discussion of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the trajectory of the proxy war in Ukraine, the hapless nature of policy choices like the Gaza aid pier and the undeclared war in Yemen, the future of American industry, the cause of inflation….

Or we could talk about the political implications of Hulk Hogan’s machismo, like a real deep thinker.