Pervert Politics: Trumpism’s Body Obsessions

Death & destruction from the sky all day. We're playing for keeps. Our warfighters have maximum authorities granted personally by POTUS & yours truly.Our rules of engagement are bold, precise designed to unleash American power, not shackle it. This was never meant to be a fair fight. And it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they are down

This is how Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth addressed the country on Wednesday in a press conference about the ongoing war with Iran. It was a lurid, machismo-driven appearance that almost smelled of bloodlust through the screen. As Morning Joe’s Mika Brzezinski described it, it was “a childish litany of accomplishments…a lot of rhetoric about death and destruction and power and no real reasoning about what the immediate threat was.”

Hegseth’s focus on the imagery of pain and ruin echoed Trump’s State of the Union last week, in which the president repeatedly described the bodily suffering of various individuals, including U.S. servicemembers. Trump offered the image of West Virginia National Guardsman Andrew Wolfe, the victim of a November shooting in D.C., in his hospital bed with “blood all over.” He detailed the injuries of Eric Slover, a member of the strike force that seized Maduro earlier this year, by saying, “He absorbed four agonizing shots, shredding his leg into pieces.”

Throughout the speech, one was left with the clear sense that Trump was at his most animated when describing the bloodied and mangled bodies of other people. This obsession with the body—and particularly with the body as the subject of serious injury, even death—is a hallmark of right-wing politics in America. 

I’ve written in the past about how Hegseth’s vision of the American military is preoccupied with an ideal of the male form—one that’s a kind of modern mishmash of Spartan imagery and homoerotic fascist machismo. But that is only one facet of the Trumpian right’s fixation on the body. Another example is the now well-known phenomenon of Mar-A-Lago Face, wherein the women of the right doctor their appearances with filler, cosmetic surgeries, and absurd excesses of makeup. My colleague Samantha Hancox-Li has astutely observed that the prevalence of steroid use and plastic surgery on the right constitutes its own form of gender-affirming care in an era of reactionary fantasies. 

What matters here to me is that the body is the primary subject of Trumpian politics. This is true both in the affirmative sense of right-wing aesthetics and in the punitive sense of managing the bodies of others to display power and contempt. I detailed this when I compared Kristi Noem’s CECOT photo op last year to a lynching postcard. Noem utilized the shaved, barely-clothed bodies of the prisoners as her backdrop. It was an act that took voyeuristic pleasure in the domination and brutalization of others’ bodies and turned their subjugation into both a political and entertainment product. 

When Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed by DHS, people on the right quickly memed their deaths to glorify state violence against the left. Again, their bodies, and the manipulations thereof, serve as the primary object on which to enact politics. 

If the Trumpian right glorifies in some alterations, they clearly demonize others. The discussion of trans individuals remains centrally focused on the lurid details of their bodies, particularly their genitalia. Just today, Rep. Nancy Mace used a portion of her time questioning Governor Tim Walz at a hearing of the House Oversight Committee to ask “what is a woman?” It’s a favorite rhetorical device on the anti-trans right, one that invariably leads to discussions of vaginas and wombs. More broadly, the anti-trans movement has relied on propaganda about widespread, invasive surgeries being conducted on minors. Mace and many other right-wing figures, including Elon Musk, constantly frame transitioning as “mutilation.” 

I should stress here that the right-wing talking point that gender-affirming care harms children is wrong. Rather, the fixation of genitalia and mutilation important in and of itself. 

But “mutilation,” as the right sees it, can also be celebrated as a marker of service and dedication to the nation. Injured soldiers, like Wolfe and Slover, are not merely honored for their sacrifice, but held up as totems of literal blood-sacrifice to the cause. Let’s return to Trump’s State of the Union:

It was unbelievable what’s happened to [Slover’s] legs. Everybody in the back of the helicopter knew because they saw the blood pouring down the aisle

And violence against beautiful women can operate as a source of populist rage, especially as their image serves as a symbol of feminine virtues. Their disfigurement and death becomes a kind of bloody mix of ethnonationalist fury and libidinal angst. At another point in his speech, Trump recounted the murder of Iryna Zarutska, a 23 year-old Ukrainian refugee:

We are honored to be joined tonight by a woman who’s been through hell, Anna Zarutska. In 2022, she and her beautiful daughter—so beautiful, what a beautiful young woman—Iryna fled war-torn, war-torn Ukraine to live with relatives near Charlotte, North Carolina. And by the way, what’s going on with Charlotte? Last summer, 23-year-old Iryna was riding home on the train when a deranged monster who had been arrested over a dozen times and was released through no cash bail, stood up and viciously slashed a knife through her neck and body. No one will ever forget. There were people on that train. No one will ever forget the expression of terror on Iryna's face as she looked up at her attacker in the last seconds of her life. She died instantly.

What’s inescapable through all of this is the sense of the human form—particularly as a subject of violence or abuse—as a source of inextricably political and sexual excitement. Yes, this is especially true of Trump, but it’s a generalized phenomenon on the right. 

There is, everywhere, a sense that our current leaders are aroused: aroused by one another, as in the case of Noem and her sordid alleged affair with Corey Lewandowksi; aroused by war against America’s enemies; aroused by doing violence to the political opposition, especially as ICE is doing; aroused by domination and the thought of domination; aroused by resistance; aroused by their anger; and, perhaps ironically, aroused by their own internal revulsions. 

So we are treated to our president, who is also an adjudicated sex offender, giving semi-erotic rants about violent crime and wounded soldiers. We are forced to endure the mentally pubescent antics of a Secretary of “War” who boasts about the death and destruction created by his rippling “war fighters.” We must endure the spectacle of women like Kristi Noem and Nancy Mace, doctored to fit a ghoulish notion of femininity, as they parade bodies for our scorn and entertainment. 

It is a fitting culmination for Trumpism. After all, this is the man who worked tirelessly to portray himself in tabloid media as a figure of robust sexual desire and achievement. This is the man who ran beauty pageants that he used as opportunities to sexually harass the teenage participants. This is the man who sent Jeffrey Epstein this birthday letter about their “secret” knowledge. 

America’s current descent into lawless, violent, unaccountable government is at least a little bit a story of psychosexual unmooring. Republicans were once the party of prudes. Now their politics are, in every way, an exercise in perversion. 

Featured image is Beheading of Saint Dorothea, by Hans Baldung Grien