Trump is what happens when we equate idiocy with masculinity. His AI hijinx video posted on the official social media accounts highlights how his weakness is born of faulty intellect and a paucity of interior thoughts. Culturally, he also points out why American society has lost its way. If we might have started as a nation based on the intellect, we’ve spent decades villainizing thought. If Odysseus was a contemporary MAGA, would he be foiled by the first challenge? Watching Trump’s AI short the week after the Odyssey came out, the glaring weaknesses in our nation seem obvious.
Conservatives often post men who used to go to war, and now they wear skirts. MAGA men avoid engaging with literary fiction, making it easy for them to serve up fictional takes on history as fact. MAGA men are particularly good at misunderstanding the history of masculinity. Many of the men who went to war wore skirts—miniskirts at that. Our binary sensibility about pants versus skirts is largely born out of the Industrial Revolution and solidified in the post-World War II era.
Ancient manly men like Julius Caesar and Augustus basically donned maxi skirts. But for them, masculinity was an action and a thought. The rise of the pant was likely associated with horseback riding coming out of Central Asia, where badass warriors, men and women alike, attacked with bow and arrow while charging across the plains on their steed. So, the pants didn’t make the man, and women had a long history of wearing pants.
Masculinity based in thought takes effort. A masculinity that is defined by the clothes you buy or the testosterone you inject is subpar and all artifice. The bankrupt masculinity of MAGA, therefore, must constantly posture; inherently, they understand the falseness of their actions. Again, if only they engaged in fiction and found worth beyond the lies, they live. Instead, they make their whole personality, the fiction of who they are, rather than putting in the work to find their own truths.
While MAGA is a plague upon my nation, weak masculinity is a global problem. How many strong men have come to the fore in the era since the Internet? Algorithmic social media particularly offers a diversion from an unquiet mind. Tranquilizing yourself from the churning emotions within you will not save you from facing your truths.
Taking time with hard ideas is how you harness your mind and calm your soul. The epic has a long tradition in almost every culture. While the Odyssey is fairly well-known globally for its association with classical ideals, many cultures have used the frame of heroism. The epic of Gilgamesh, the Ramayana, and the Shahnama are among the many epic stories of travel and travails. These long-form explorations of the journeys taken by mythical figures allowed the listener to model their own journey to self. In a time before the idea of uniform hours or wage labor, spending months and years to understand your duty was not seen as a waste.
But the attention to self that would be required by going slower also makes for a person who is much less easily led. Your morality sets boundaries and draws limits when you’ve settled into yourself. Speedy thought is a fast way to misunderstand yourself and become easily tricked.
Think of the discourse about the Odyssey. The majority of the cast is white and largely ethnically northern European. They generally speak with a generalized American accent. In terms of screen time, it’s mostly dudes fighting. If your whole raison d’etre is men being men, this movie actually is for you. But then you would have to slow down enough to watch three hours of film to engage with concepts that might be different from how you understand them. You would need to allow for uncertainty. In other words, you have to handle everything the Internet has prevented you from doing. Frankly, most MAGA are too weak to handle the truths about themselves.
Trump put out his Rick and Morty-style AI video, which is all about weakness. His addiction to AI is basically a tell that he cannot produce something himself. He’s a slave to a machine that regurgitates ideas. Given much of his verbal effluvia is also regurgitated ideas from the 1980s (tariffs), his reliance on AI is no surprise.
The video is short, obvious, and stupid, not unlike the leader himself. Trump’s refusal to see himself as anything but the hero is such a tell. Someone who consistently compliments themselves has obvious self-esteem weaknesses. The short starts with Trump, front and center, running down his tacky photo wall, JD Vance Bible in hand in tow. His general athleticism in going those few feet is itself a type of fiction, but again, these are people who cannot see the fictional worlds they built for themselves. I’ve no idea what gave them chase; it certainly couldn’t be morality or consequences.
After a short ceremonial wave at the crowds that is much closer to the British royal family than any American president, Trump’s sad little Odyssey shows Border Patrol picking up an extraterrestrial, before a gratuitous shot of Artemis II, and then finally pivots to a robot Chuck Schumer in a Congress filled with green portals.
The final scene is a Mothra-like creature chasing Trump and Vance, who are joyriding in a flying saucer. I’d say the viewer is left wondering if they've been eaten, but who cares. Trump’s Odyssey is basically how amazing he is and how the people he sees as humans are, in fact, not human. The simplicity of messaging affords the viewer no chance to get off message. This is for the dumbest of people to feel heard.
If the Odyssey is a tale of the actions of a complicated man, Trump’s short is a reminder of his weaknesses. It leaves me wondering why so many men have given themselves to the life of the stupid rather than simply reading a book.
People who fill their brains with stupidity end up going on an odyssey through the stupidest conspiracy theories, because our brains yearn to be used. Giving up your mind to a cult neither absolves you from the harm you do to society, nor the ways in which your mind will still yearn for engagement.
Trump’s rise is a symptom of a society in which men don’t want to think too deeply. Avoiding thoughts does not actually mean you will not feel things. Trump’s post of 44 AI stills plus this idiotic body caper shows that avoiding intellectual pursuits means your mind rots but your human need to express yourself continues, and so your output is idiotic. You cannot avoid yourself; why choose to bankrupt your soul since you are the one spending the vast majority of time with it? Even fools like Trump, who spread their stupidity globally, are stuck with themselves.
