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The MAGA hats were flying like Frisbees. It was two weeks before Election Day. Charlie Kirk, the Millennial right-wing influencer, had been touring college campuses. On this particular Tuesday, he’d brought his provocations to the University of Georgia. Athens, where the school’s main campus is located, is an artsy town in a reliably blue county, with a famed alternative-music scene. (R.E.M., the B-52s, and Neutral Milk Hotel are among the many bands in the city’s lore.) But that afternoon, the courtyard outside the student center was a sea of red, with thunderous “U-S-A!” chants echoing off the buildings. Kirk had arrived on a mission: to pump up Gen Z about the return of Donald Trump. He was succeeding.

I was standing in the back of the crowd, watching hundreds of young guys with their arms outstretched, hollering for MAGA merch. Once a stigmatized cultural artifact, the red cap is now a status symbol. For a certain kind of bro, MAGA is bigger than politics. MAGA makes you manly.

MAGA, as this week affirmed, is also not an aberration. At its core, it remains a patriarchal club, but it cannot be brushed off as a passing freak show or a niche political sect. Donald Trump triumphed in the Electoral College, and when all the votes are counted, he will likely have captured the popular vote as well. Although it’s true that MAGA keeps growing more powerful, the reality is that it’s been part of mainstream culture for a while. Millions of Americans, particularly those who live on the coasts, have simply chosen to believe otherwise.

Democrats are performing all manner of autopsies, finger-pointing, and recriminations after Kamala Harris’s defeat. Many political trends will continue to undergo examination, especially the pronounced shift of Latino voters toward Trump. But among all the demographic findings is this particular and fascinating one: Young men are more conservative than they used to be. One analysis of ​​AP VoteCast data, for instance, showed that 56 percent of men ages 18–29 supported Trump this year, up 15 points from 2020.

Depending on where you live and with whom you interact, Trump’s success with young men in Tuesday’s election may have come as a shock. But the signs were there all along. Today, the top three U.S. podcasts on Spotify are The Joe Rogan Experience, The Tucker Carlson Show, and The Charlie Kirk Show. All three hosts endorsed Trump for president. These programs and their massive audiences transcend the narrow realm of politics. Together, they are male-voice megaphones in a metastasizing movement across America. In 2023, Steve Bannon described this coalition to me as “the Tucker-Rogan-Elon-Bannon-combo-platter right.” Trump has many people to thank for his victory—among them men, and especially young men with their AirPods in.

Trump can often be a repetitive bore when speaking in public, but one of his more interesting interviews this year was a conversation with dude-philosopher Theo Von. As my colleague Helen Lewis wrote, Trump’s “discussion of drug and alcohol addiction on Theo Von’s This Past Weekend podcast demonstrated perhaps the most interest Trump has ever shown in another human being.” (Trump’s older brother, Fred Trump Jr., died of complications from alcoholism at the age of 42.) Similarly, five days before the election, Trump took the stage with Carlson for a live one-on-one interview. The two bro’d out in an arena near Phoenix, and that night, Trump was especially freewheeling—and uncharacteristically reflective about the movement he leads. (Trump looks poised to win Arizona after losing it in 2020.)

It’s not just one type of talkative bro who has boosted Trump and made him more palatable to the average American. Trump has steadily assembled a crew of extremely influential and successful men who are loyal to him. Carlson is the preppy debate-club bro. Rogan is the stoner bro. Elon Musk is the tech bro. Bill Ackman is the finance bro. Jason Aldean is the country-music bro. Harrison Butker is the NFL bro. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the crunchy-conspiracist bro. Hulk Hogan is the throwback entertainer bro. Kid Rock is the “American Bad Ass” bro. And that’s hardly an exhaustive list. Each of these bros brings his own bro-y fandom to the MAGA movement and helps, in his own way, to legitimize Trump and whitewash his misdeeds. Some of these men, such as Kennedy and Musk, may even play a role in the coming administration.

My colleague Spencer Kornhaber wrote this week that Democrats are losing the culture war. He’s right, but Trumpism extends even beyond politics and pop culture. I’ve been thinking a lot about that day I spent at the University of Georgia. Students I spoke with told me that some frat houses off campus make no secret of their Trump support, but it seemed less about specific policies and more about attitude. That’s long been the open secret to Trump: a feeling, a vibe, not a statistic. Even Kirk’s “free speech” exercises, which he’s staged at colleges nationwide for a while now, are only nominally about actual political debate. In essence, they are public performances that boil down to four words: Come at me, bro! Perhaps there is something in all of this that is less about fighting and more about acceptance—especially in a culture that treats bro as a pejorative.

These Trump bros do not all deserve sympathy. But there’s good reason to try to actually understand this particular voting bloc, and why so many men were—and are—ready to go along with Trump.

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Why Democrats are losing the culture war The right’s new kingmaker

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Today’s News

A federal judge granted Special Counsel Jack Smith’s request to pause the election-subversion case against Trump after his presidential victory. The Department of Justice charged three men connected to a foiled Iranian assassination plot against Trump. Trump named his senior campaign adviser Susie Wiles as his White House chief of staff. She will be the first woman to hold the role.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The Strange History Behind the Anti-Semitic Dutch Soccer Attacks

By Franklin Foer

Among the bizarrest phenomena in the world of sports is Ajax, the most accomplished club in the storied history of Dutch soccer … Ajax fans tattoo the Star of David onto their forearms. In the moments before the opening kick of a match, they proudly shout at the top of their lungs, “Jews, Jews, Jews,” because—though most of them are not Jewish—philo-Semitism is part of their identity.

Last night, the club that describes itself as Jewish played against a club of actual Jews, Maccabi Tel Aviv. As Israeli fans left the stadium, after their club suffered a thumping defeat, they were ambushed by well-organized groups of thugs, in what the mayor of Amsterdam described as “anti-Semitic hit-and-run squads.”

Read the full article.

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Josh Barro: Democrats deserved to lose. The limits of Democratic optimism The strategist who predicted Trump’s multiracial coalition The “Stop the Steal” movement isn’t letting up. Quinta Jurecic: “Bye-bye, Jack Smith.” Don’t give up on America.

Culture Break

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Analyze. The comedian-to-campaign-influencer pipeline has muddled the genre of political comedy, Shirley Li writes.

Read. In Miss Kim Knows, Cho Nam-Joo captures both the universality of sexism and the specificity of women’s experiences, Rachel Vorona Cote writes.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Feminist fiction turns on an unresolvable tension: Writers must acknowledge patriarchy’s near-universal reach without paving over the acute specificity of women’s lives. What makes this difficult is that misogyny, though mean, is not clever; it deploys the same old tricks, over and over again. Yet not all women respond to sexism with identical emotional choreography. Even those who share the same culture will not always see one another’s experiences clearly; solidarity is not a given. This friction between collective struggle and individual personhood animates Miss Kim Knows, a new collection of eight stories from the South Korean author Cho Nam-Joo, translated by Jamie Chang.

Like her star-making novel, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, which was published in 2016, translated into English in 2020, and subsequently longlisted for a National Book Award, Miss Kim Knows focuses on the quotidian lives of Korean women. Most of the collection’s primary characters are middle-class working adults, although a few are elderly or nearing retirement, and the youngest is a newly minted fifth grader. Across these varied seasons of life, Cho’s characters contend with—and repudiate—the insidious influence of male-dominated social structures on their relationships, both intimate and professional. Characters break up with their boyfriends, or reject traditional domestic roles. A widow changes her name from Mallyeo, or “last girl”—chosen by her parents to summon boy children—to Dongju, “bronze bead,” a nickname bestowed by her beloved elder sister. Another woman, unjustly fired, refuses to leave quietly and instead seeks revenge on her workplace.

Decidedly a companion to Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, Miss Kim Knows is Cho’s third book to be translated into English (in 2019 she published the novel Saha, which is set in a corporatized dystopia). Again, Cho invokes the name Kim, in this case to refer to a key character in the title story, as well as other characters throughout the collection, both principal and peripheral. Kim, one of the most common last names in Korea, connotes, in her fiction, an everywoman. At first glance, the repetition of such a name might register as homogenizing, a slapdash effort to unify Korean women in their shared plight. As Cho takes pains to convey, sexism saturates nearly every corner of South Korean society: in the blatant preference for male children common especially among elder generations; in the widespread tolerance of sexual and physical violence against women; in workplace gender discrimination. Yet the might of Cho’s storytelling resides in her tender precision; her style is distinguished by keen attention to each character’s particular foibles and agitations.

[Read: The real reason South Koreans aren’t having babies]

In Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, the titular character develops a bizarre postpartum psychosis, which seems at first like a direct response to the exhaustion of new motherhood. Yet, as Cho emphasizes, Jiyoung’s illness is not a stand-alone phenomenon; rather, it marks a breaking point, a powerful psychological crack under the punishing exertion required to navigate a society built for men. Jiyoung begins to impersonate other women’s voices, “some of them … living, others … dead, all of them women she knew … Truly, flawlessly, completely, she became that person.” The metaphor performs a balancing act: Jiyoung is just one woman among millions, but sexism is so commonplace that she easily inhabits these other personas. This ethos of fellowship, without implying identical experience, underpins the Kim motif across the two works, and renders Cho’s fiction both sensitive and philosophically cogent.

When Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 was published in English, Cho described her motivations as explicitly political. As she explained in an interview with The New York Times, her goal was to make sexism in Korea “a public debate.” (She succeeded. A national conversation on gender blossomed after the novel’s publication; politicians and pop-culture figures alike championed it.) That righteous intent informs both narrative scope and tone: Kim Jiyoung is relentlessly diligent in its portrait of a woman undone by the ravages of her society. The reader takes leave of the novel bone-chilled, their stomach crackling with uneasy urgency, as if they held in their hands a feminist pamphlet, rather than a work of fiction.

Miss Kim Knows shares the political concerns of Cho’s first novel, but elaborates on them. This makes it a more emotionally refined work of literature, populated by more introspective characters. “I’m not doing anything productive, just taking step after step towards death each day. Does my life have meaning?” wonders the elderly narrator of “Under the Plum Tree,” the collection’s opening story, as she reflects on the quiet routineness of old age. This is a typical enough question to ask oneself, especially in the twilight of one’s life. But the anxiety in this case feels more specific: How does a woman abide, even enjoy, a life scaffolded by ideologies and traditions that diminish her?

Unlike Kim Jiyoung, the characters in Miss Kim Knows are, for the most part, not in crisis, at least not in the present. But neither are they satisfied, and Cho meticulously renders this discontent. When the narrator of “Dead Set” recalls her older brother’s domineering influence over their family affairs, it feels “like swallowing a very tiny, fragile fishbone every day.” Distressed by her only child’s pregnancy announcement, Hyogyeong, the narrator of “Night of Aurora” (the collection’s strongest, most full-bodied story) confesses that after years of grueling domestic ministry—maintained while also advancing a career outside the home—she’s looking forward to retirement. And yet she knows that, like many Korean grandmothers, she will be expected to devote herself to the care of another child, her own desires perpetually deferred.

[Read: Han Kang’s transgressive art]

The conflicts at the center of these stories reside in the characters’ inability, or outright refusal, to swallow their discomforts in the interest of preserving the peace. Across this collection, Cho’s characters search for agency and sometimes even find it. Still, these women understand their prescribed roles; they are sensitive to the expectations of the people who love them, or who depend on them. Many of their decisions—whether to leave a relationship, to deny a family member support, or to publish fiction based on experience as the victim of sibling abuse—emerge from painful processes of self-determination, and they arrive at them alone.

Meanwhile, the men who populate these stories have little sway over women’s choices. Some are rendered obsolete through death, others through distance. Many are troublesome—or worse—but the impediments they pose are not insuperable. “Dear Hyunnam Oppa,” a goodbye letter from an unnamed narrator to her ex-boyfriend, chronicles the latter’s manipulative, gaslighting abuse. But more important, it records the narrator’s assertions of hard-won truths: that her boyfriend corrupted her reality through derogation, lies, and systematic isolation; that she does not want to have children; that she prefers her meat grilled, rather than boiled.

“Dear Hyunnam Oppa” is the only story that foregrounds a breakup, but its cool appraisal of straight romantic partnerships—and its implication that women often gain little by them—abides throughout the collection. In Miss Kim Knows, heterosexual relationships are either actively dissolving or recalled with ambivalence. Though Cho avoids universal gestures, one thing her primary female characters have in common is that they are largely uninterested in finding romantic love. Instead, they cultivate other intimacies, which tend to flourish in the absence of men.

That tendency is evident in “Runaway,” which sees the narrator’s 72-year-old father abandon his family without warning. He leaves only a note to his wife with a firm directive: “Don’t come looking for me.” As it turns out, his departure yields few disadvantages: No longer mediated by the head of household’s stern, importunate presence, the narrator, her brothers, and their mother grow closer to one another. The narrator also breaks up with her long-term boyfriend, as if her father’s abrupt disappearance has undermined her attachment to conventional romantic arrangements. She begins a group text with her older brothers and renews the lease on her apartment, where she lives alone. She rejects the customary trajectory, in which a woman leaves home and forms a new allegiance to her husband, while also repairing ties in her family of origin. This fracture in the nuclear family ushers in a rush of oxygen.

The book withholds judgment of its characters’ actions. Instead, these stories are united by the implicit trust they place in their protagonists, as they suss out new frameworks for their relationships and, sometimes, their lives. In “Night of Aurora,” Hyogyeong is eager to fulfill her long-deferred dream of traveling to Canada to see the aurora borealis. But after her daughter, Jihye, has her baby, she makes clear that she expects her mother to prioritize caring for him.

Hyogyeong doesn’t want to look after her grandson. Moreover, she dismisses Jihye’s attempts to make her feel guilty. “You left me with Grandma and did whatever you wanted,” protests Jihye. “I’ve been hearing that all my life,” Hyogyeong replies. “The guilt trip doesn’t work on me anymore.”

Ultimately, Hyogyeong makes her Canadian pilgrimage, with nary a regret. Rewarded by the aurora’s splendor, she is overcome, and howls a tearful declaration to the polychromatic sky: “I don’t want to take care of [my grandson]! I really, really don’t want to! I won’t take him over the holidays. I won’t take him when he starts first grade.” It is not what another grandmother might choose, and it is not what her daughter wants. It is one woman’s desire, clarified and affirmed, in defiance of her only child.

Solidarity and self-determination can, at times, make for unwieldy bedfellows: When Hyogyeong honors her own desires, her daughter suffers the consequences. Yet the story’s denouement indicates that Hyogyeong and Jihye will mend their relationship; in fact, Hyogyeong’s epiphany begets Jihye’s own realization that she, too, does not wish to sacrifice her ambitions to domesticity. Her mother’s decision, like any progress, is painful in its demands. And though neither Jihye nor her mother realizes it at the time, Hyeogyeong’s act of self-interest is also an unintended gesture of encouragement toward her daughter, a signal that she, too, can make the choices that are right for herself alone.