To a certain kind of guy, Donald Trump epitomizes masculine cool. He’s ostentatiously wealthy. He’s married to his third model wife. He gets prime seats at UFC fights, goes on popular podcasts, and does more or less whatever he wants without consequences.

That certain kind of guy who sees Trump as a masculine ideal? That guy is a teenage boy.

Much has been written about Trump’s widening appeal to men, and to young men in particular. MAGA, the story goes, is making masculinity great again. But the version of manhood on display not just from Trump but from many of his closest advisers and appointees isn’t the kind of traditional manhood championed by his vice president, J. D. Vance; it’s a manhood imagined by adolescent boys. (Although of course, plenty of adolescent boys do not look up to Trump.) And at his core, Trump is an adolescent president, surrounded by adolescent flunkies, cheered into office by adolescent men.

[Tom Nichols: Donald Trump, the most unmanly president]

Adolescence, the transition period from childhood into adulthood, is a time of rapid brain development. The frontal cortex, the part of the brain that regulates impulse control and future planning, is last to mature. Lawrence Steinberg, a psychology professor at Temple University and widely recognized expert on adolescent development, explained adolescence to me as “a developmental mismatch between the development of the brain systems that are used for self-control and self-regulation, and the development of the brain systems that respond to reward and that generate emotions and perhaps lead to impulsive behavior.” Picture that reward response as an upside-down U: It grows as a child does, hitting its apex around 19 or 20, and then decreases in adulthood. This, Steinberg says, is part of why adolescents (and adolescent boys in particular) are such notorious risk takers: That reward center is so arousable in middle to late adolescence that it overrides the system regulating self-control—a system that is itself slower to develop.

Adolescence has not historically been a developmental stage we culturally valorize. In the MAGA movement, though, an adolescent way of moving through the world—high-risk, low-regulation, near-total disinhibition—characterizes leaders and thrills followers.

Cultures differ in how they distinguish between manhood and boyhood, but the reward-seeking, risk-eschewing, low-self-control aspects of adolescence transcend countries and cultures, Steinberg said. In the United States, manhood in a traditional sense has been distinguished from boyhood and adolescence partly by virtue and obligation: Boys may be boys and teenagers may run around thrill-seeking, but real men are expected to provide for themselves and their families, protect those they love, and demonstrate a kind of moral fortitude that justifies their familial and social authority.

There are all kinds of problems with this traditional model, and feminists like myself are among the first to point them out. The masculinity of MAGA, though, is far worse: It rejects commitment and virtue, but still demands power and respect—it is, as Jamelle Bouie put it in The New York Times, “the masculinity of someone unburdened by duty, obligation or real responsibility.”

We don’t see this sort of masculinity only from Trump. Pete Hegseth, who was confirmed as defense secretary by the narrowest margin in history, says he wants a military full of men who are uninhibited “warriors,” free of any attempt to impose moral order on the teen and 20-something men who generally do the nation’s fighting. His book The War on Warriors argues that while “our warriors” were “busy killing Islamists in shithole countries,” liberals insisting on diversity initiatives were ruining the country and lawyers insisting that soldiers abide by the rules of war were ruining the military. During Hegseth’s confirmation hearings, when Senator Angus King asked him if the Geneva Conventions should be observed, Hegseth dodged. “We don’t need burdensome rules of engagement that make it impossible for us to win these wars,” he said. In his telling, “warriors” should operate with pure aggression; restraint is weakness.

He evinces a similar lack of continence in his personal life. Hegseth is currently married to the woman he impregnated while still married to his second wife, who herself was the mistress he married after cheating on his first wife. Life is complicated, and marriage more complicated still. But a series of extramarital affairs—something that also characterizes the president’s personal life—is not typically the mark of a respectable, responsible adult man.

Elon Musk, more keyboard warrior than hardened soldier, is cut from similar cloth. He, too, has fathered many children with many different women. And he, too, seeks power without responsibility. He has put himself in charge of reforming the entirety of the federal government, one of the largest and most complex bureaucracies in the world, despite not growing up in the U.S. and having no government experience. Arrogance is one word for this; delusion is perhaps another. His effort has so far been an abject disaster. But it’s easy to see a teenager’s bravado in his actions—the lack of self-control and self-awareness, the inability to grasp what one may be incapable of doing.

Musk is notorious for sharing edgelord memes on X, the kinds of things that might be passed around by teenage boys. He also has a remarkably juvenile sense of humor. For example, he edited the X bio of the Canadian Broadcast Corporation to say it is 69 percent government-funded (69, get it?). He recently changed his name on the same platform to “Harry Bolz.” His Department of Government Efficiency is itself named after an internet meme about a shiba inu. He proposed “a literal dick-measuring contest” with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He bought Twitter and turned it into X after being annoyed by its moderation policies, which he compared to censorship, but once in charge, he experienced serial emotional meltdowns over content he didn’t like, some of which he then censored. He has gone on sprees of banning accounts that offended him in some way, while allowing white supremacists and Nazis to proliferate on the site. He often communicates on X using video-game jargon, the lingua franca of teenage boys.

[Tom Nichols: The great manliness flip-flop]

Stephen Miller, the Trump whisperer who has long shaped much of his boss’s immigration policy, was an actual adolescent when he ran for high-school student government and asked, “Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?!” (In defense of adolescents, his peers booed him offstage). As a fully grown adult, he may no longer be the leader of the “Mom, Make My Bed” caucus, but he remains just as petulant, and seems just as tickled by the teenage penchant for provocation. At a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden, he echoed the notorious Nazi slogan “Germany for Germans only” when he bellowed, “America for Americans only!” He has also been instrumental in slamming the door shut not just to migrants, but to refugees—even though Miller’s own grandfather sought refuge in the U.S. from the anti-Jewish pogroms of Eastern Europe.  

As these psychologically adolescent men work together, they fuel one another’s worst impulses. Much of Steinberg’s work is research on juvenile offenders; adolescent boys and young men, according to crime statistics, commit a hugely disproportionate number of crimes. “And they commit their crimes in groups, disproportionately,” Steinberg said. “When they’re with their buddies, their tendency to engage in reckless and risky behavior is amplified.” This is both a result of peer-pressure dynamics—kids who might not otherwise behave badly are pushed to by friends—and a kind of mutually escalating group dynamic.

The realities of human group behavior, so magnified in adolescence, mean that the teen spirit of the Trump administration may animate even those men who might not have otherwise behaved similarly. Zuckerberg, with his gold chain and Shaggy haircut, seems to have embraced dressing like a teenager at roughly the same time that his politics shifted rightward. He attended Trump’s inauguration last month, and blamed former Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg for the company’s efforts to create a more inclusive workplace. Zuckerberg’s image has, until now, been fairly straitlaced, standard-issue nerdy, and moderately liberal. But he recently went on über-bro Joe Rogan’s podcast to complain that the corporate world was “pretty culturally neutered” and getting too far from the “masculine energy” and “aggression” men need to thrive.

Perhaps this midlife return to the trappings of adolescence was an inevitable evolution for a Millennial man whose success came so early and so spectacularly, catapulting him into the world of serious adults before he was completely ready. But it’s also not difficult to speculate that our immature cultural moment—spurred on by Trump’s reelection—–is what turned Zuckerberg, whom Musk not so long ago derided as “Zuck the cuck,” from a naive techno-optimist 20-something into a middle-aged man in a gold chain opining about masculine energy.

As each of us moves through the world, we engage in a regular internal, often unconscious calculus of risk versus reward. Young adults overindex on the potential for good stuff to result from the risks they take, and underindex on potential adverse consequences. This kind of impulsiveness also seems evident in the early acts of the Trump administration. When Trump is given the freedom to speak off-the-cuff, he often makes pronouncements that his team later has to walk back, as he recently did when saying that the Palestinians should leave Gaza so that the Strip might be turned into a Riviera of luxury condos. It wasn’t that the thought just popped into his head—Trump’s statement had sufficient detail to suggest that it was something he had discussed before his press conference—but it seemed clear enough that, to the president, the risks of announcing a half-baked plan (not to mention the risks of the plan itself) paled in comparison to the potential payoffs, which largely amounted to attention.

The skills of adult life—emotional continence, more accurate risk perception, self-control, greater precision in future forecasting—are developed in adolescence through physical changes in the brain and body systems, but also through guidance and experience. As anyone who ever had a great but demanding high-school athletic coach can tell you, many teenagers (and most children) have a seemingly inherent desire for authority figures to help contain them as they live with underdeveloped brains and raging hormones. Adulthood in America has been pushed back: Young people are marrying later, procreating later, and buying their homes later, if they do any of those things at all. It’s perhaps not a coincidence that in this era of extended adolescence, a great many unmoored men are, like teenage boys looking to the coach for guidance, seeking straight-talking male authority figures to teach them how to be men. They’re apparently finding these father figures on YouTube, podcasts, and social media—and in the MAGA movement.

Take the author Jordan Peterson. Peterson is notorious for his misogyny and conservatism, but much of his work is focused on self-improvement—and specifically on how young men can impose discipline on their lives. “Parents, universities and the elders of society have utterly failed to give many young men realistic and demanding practical wisdom on how to live,” David Brooks said in explaining his appeal. “Peterson has filled the gap.” Peterson tells young men to stand up straight. He orders them to make their beds. He says to turn off the porn, get a job, and take responsibility for their life. A slew of other leading male podcasters—Andrew Huberman, Tim Ferriss, even Joe Rogan—take similar self-improvement tacks. And young men eat it up. They seem hungry for betterment, but also for an authoritative figure to just tell them what to do.

Some have turned their sights to Trump. The president embodies both the aspirational adulthood that is the stuff of teenage fantasies (private jets, models, two Big Macs for dinner), and the punishing father who men wise enough to understand their own need for greater discipline imagine will whip everyone into shape. At a Trump rally in Georgia, Tucker Carlson offered this disciplinarian-daddy vision of Trump’s return to the White House: “Dad comes home,” Carlson told the crowd. “He’s pissed. Dad is pissed. And 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.’” The crowd broke into a chant of “Daddy’s home!” Mel Gibson used the same metaphor after Trump visited a fire-ravaged Los Angeles. “It’s like Daddy arrived and he’s taking his belt off,” he said. The phrase is so ubiquitous in MAGA circles that Roseanne Barr, donning blond dreadlocks and heavily reliant on Auto-Tune, recorded a postelection rap titled “Daddy’s Home.” You can buy Daddy’s Home T-shirts with Trump on them at Walmart.

[From the January 2025 issue: Misogyny comes roaring back]

The reality of governance by teen boy, though, may be less “Daddy’s home” and more Lord of the Flies. Steinberg, the psychology professor, was clear that he couldn’t diagnose Trump, Trump’s lackeys, or anyone else he hadn’t examined. But he told me, “Maybe what characterizes Trump more than anything else is the very heightened reward-seeking. He just has to get rewards from everything he does. And that may generate very strong impulses that he follows.” Whatever self-control the president does possess may simply be insufficient to tamp down those impulses.

The kind of behavior Trump demonstrates, Steinberg said, is unusual. “You need to distinguish between the people who are behaving this way where we would kind of expect it, although maybe not as extreme as this”—actual teenagers—“and people who keep behaving this way long after we would have expected them to have matured,” he said. “The chances that these people are going to mature in ways that we see as normal development, I think, are very small. They would have reached adult levels of maturity by the time they’ve reached their late 20s or early 30s, and if they haven’t, I think they’re probably not going to.”

What does this mean for the nation Trump leads? Steinberg was careful, again, to emphasize that he isn’t in the business of diagnosing strangers, and that Trump is not in fact an adolescent boy. But, he said, “if I asked the average person, ‘Do you think it’s a good idea to have a 17-year-old running the country?,’ I don’t think most people would say yes. If I said, ‘Do you think it’s a good idea to have an adult who acts like a 17-year-old running the country?,’ I think they’d say that sounds like a pretty bad idea also.”

Yet a majority of voters cast their ballots for Trump, so all of us are now finding out just how bad of an idea it is.