Why MAGA calls Trump “Daddy”

The MAGA movement is determined to make politics as disgusting as possible, destroying democracy one juvenile 4chan meme at a time. It turns out that American fascism isn’t just wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross, but accuses women of having “Arby’s in your pants,” claims immigrants eat people’s pets and peddles conspiracy theories that politicians’ wives are secretly trans. In their mission to gross out normal people, Donald Trump‘s followers, much to his delight, like to call him “Daddy.”

It seemed to have really taken off in October, when Tucker Carlson gave his “Daddy’s home” speech at a Georgia campaign rally. He likened Trump to an abusive father, and compared America to his teenaged victim, all in an unsubtly sexualized way. “When dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now,” Carlson said, as the crowd cheered wildly.

MAGA crowds loved imagining their leader as Incest Daddy, dishing out humiliating vengeance on “naughty” Americans, whom they imagined as liberals, feminists, queer people, racial minorities. At rallies, they would chant “Daddy’s home” as they fantasized about the horrors Trump would unleash on their perceived enemies.

The “Daddy” meme stuck. Mere days after Trump’s re-election, golfer John Daly went on Fox News to proclaim, “I think our country needs Daddy Trump.” GOP Michigan State Sen. Jonathan Lindsey declared in June that many Americans see “Daddy Trump” as a “father figure.” Most disturbingly, in June, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte affectionately called Trump “Daddy” at the most recent NATO summit. Rutte may have just been trying to flatter the notoriously narcissistic president, but Trump’s team lapped it up with the eagerness of a dog going after beef drippings. His fundraising arm even got in on the act, releasing a T-shirt with his mugshot and the name “Daddy” underneath it. The official White House account posted a video of Trump at the NATO summit set to “Daddy’s Home” by Usher, which was swiftly taken down when the singer issued a copyright claim.

MAGA may have denied the Jeffrey Epstein vibes in Carlson’s image of Trump beating a teenage girl, but the use of the Usher song confirms that liberals aren’t wrong to hear a sexual fantasy in all this “Daddy” talk — which is really unfair to Usher, because his song is about consenting adults having sex. For MAGA, the whole point of the “Daddy” nickname is to celebrate force and domination, embodied in their leader who was found by a civil jury to have sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll in exactly the way he has bragged about doing to other women.

No doubt a lot of this is sublimated sexuality, which is often the case with a right-wing that outwardly embraces Christian right hostility to most forms of sexual expression. But it is the power dynamic that Carlson invoked — the large man versus the small girl — that really distills why Trump and the MAGA movement are so attracted to this “Daddy” idea. Fascism is a vehicle for weak, insecure people to feel powerful in the most cowardly way possible: By violating and abusing those they believe can’t fight back. It’s the attitude of the rapist and the child abuser, someone who pathetically congratulates himself for being “tough” because of his violence, but who fears taking on someone his own size. No wonder Trump is the perfect avatar for it.

The fascist theater Trump is putting on in Washington, D.C., right now is a classic example of the “Daddy” mentality — and not just because he always sends others to do his bidding while he hides safely in his make-up chair in the White House. Despite Trump’s hyperbolic rhetoric painting an objectively false picture of the capital as a hellscape of “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor,” the reason he picked D.C. is that it’s easy — it’s a way to look dominant and tough without actually taking on serious problems that genuinely tough leaders could handle.

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That’s why the National Guard troops and other federal agents deployed to fight this imaginary battle against crime didn’t go to neighborhoods with high crime rates, but were instead assigned to areas of the city, like the National Mall, with high camera rates. Instead of dealing with criminals, which is difficult and dangerous, the Trump “crackdown” has been almost entirely focused on abusing innocent and vulnerable people who don’t have the capacity to fight back. Most of the serious energy has been targeted toward tearing down homeless encampments, which are populated by the most powerless people in society, often destroying what meager possessions they have. There are also reports that federal agents, without much else to do, have been harassing people for the legal act of sitting on their stoops after dark. All of this is well-suited to generating video footage to satisfy the sadism of Fox News viewers, but it’s not really about stopping crime.

The national escalation from Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) is also rooted in this “Daddy” mentality. Despite claims to be going after the “worst of the worst,” agents — under pressure to meet draconian quotas handed down by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller — have largely focused on low-hanging fruit: Everyday people who haven’t committed crimes and are therefore easy to find at home, work or, perversely, when they are meeting with immigration officials in hopes of securing a legal pathway to citizenship. ICE, claiming a nearby “raid” as a pretext, was also deployed to intimidate California Gov. Gavin Newsom and other soft-handed Democratic politicians at a press conference. Underscoring how weak “Daddy” tactics are when deployed against anyone who has any real power in the world, however, Newsom just laughed at Trump’s impotent maneuver and then later made fun of Trump’s illiteracy on social media.

When Trump first returned to the White House, he spent months threatening Canada and Greenland with insinuations that he was going to invade and colonize them. This perplexed many in the mainstream news media, because it didn’t make any sense from a strategic, military or political point of view. Many wrote it off as a joke. But Canadians and Greenlanders understood full well that Trump really hoped to get enough political momentum to make these wars happen. The president, though, doesn’t think strategically. For him, this was all about his “Daddy” fixation. To be “Daddy,” he needed someone smaller to dominate and destroy — a country that symbolized the hapless teenage girl of Carlson’s sexual abuse fantasy. He zeroed in on these countries mainly because he believed his plans would be an easy win, as easy as reportedly sexually abusing a woman half his size in a Bergdorf dressing room. It’s hard to say why he’s dropped the issue, but the likeliest reason is he came to realize it was harder than it seemed — and above all else, “Daddy” doesn’t like taking on hard battles.

That’s the most critical takeaway of Trump’s whole “Daddy” branding effort: It reveals his weakness and insecurity. As Carlson’s speech shows, “Daddy” doesn’t take on grown men his own size. “Daddy” beats little girls. “Daddy” tries to make himself feel big by attacking people who are smaller. “Daddy” uses sex as a weapon, because it’s an easy way to degrade and humiliate people, making it the perfect tool for those who fear having to deal with conflict in a dignified, mature way. “Daddy” pretends to be powerful, but only to mask that he has nothing to offer but petulant aggression toward those who can’t fight back.

Make no mistake, though. There’s danger in this attitude. Obviously, the “Daddy” tactics are extremely dangerous to the people being targeted because they don’t have the means to defend themselves. But the behavior also reveals that MAGA has vulnerabilities. The entire movement is composed of cowards who only pretend at bravery, which means they can be defeated — but only if they face people who are willing to use true strength to fight back.