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.

Last June, the popular UFC fighter Sean Strickland surprised onlookers when, immediately following a victory, he ducked into the audience and took a photo with a bystander: Donald Trump. “President Trump, you’re the man, bro,” Strickland declared in his post-match interview with Joe Rogan. “It is a damn travesty what they’re doing to you. I’ll be donating to you, my man. Let’s get it done.” Video of the moment rocketed across social media, serving as an early indicator of Trump’s enduring strength with his base, despite his recent felony convictions.

Strickland went viral last week for a very different reason: opposition to the president and his plan to take over Gaza. “Man if Trump keeps this bs up I’m about to start waving a Palestinian flag,” the fighter posted on X. “American cities are shitholes and you wanna go spend billions on this dumpster fire. Did we make a mistake?! This ain’t America first.” Strickland’s lament racked up 159,000 likes and 13.2 million views.

Strickland is far from the only one expressing buyer’s remorse. A month after Trump’s inauguration, the honeymoon is over; some of his backers are waking up next to the man they voted for and wondering if they’ve made a terrible mistake. With every policy he implements and offhand remark he makes, Trump is falsifying the imaginary versions of himself that inspired many of his supporters.

In late January, Tucker Carlson, arguably the most influential media personality on the American right, interviewed Curt Mills, the executive director of The American Conservative, a generally pro-Trump publication. Basking in the glow of the inauguration, the two men enthused over what they described as Trump’s commitment to a new policy of American restraint on the world stage. “It is an actual choice,” Mills said. “We cannot do the border if we do the Middle East.” Carlson quickly concurred: “We have to reorient toward our own interests.” Eleven days after this conversation aired, Trump announced his Gaz-a-Lago gambit. Shortly after, Mills published and promoted a piece declaring, “Trump’s Apparent Gaza Scheme Endangers His Entire Legacy.”

In February 2023, the Trump-curious journalist Glenn Greenwald claimed that “the energy behind opposing American interventionism … is actually much more on the populist right than the populist left.” In February 2025, he is now asking, “How does Trump’s intensifying fixation on ‘taking over Gaza’ promote an America First foreign policy?”

[Read: Nobody wants Gaz-a-Lago]

And the problem is not just the Middle East. Again and again, the fantasies that fueled Trump’s candidacy are colliding with the reality of his presidency, and the result is already dispelling the illusions of many who advocated for him.

“Elon Musk is a danger to Trumpism,” wrote the pro-worker, pro-Trump commentator Sohrab Ahmari earlier this month, calling on Trump to fire his billionaire sidekick and arguing that “it is becoming obvious that the oligarchs, and Musk especially, are taking advantage of justified public outrage against wokeness and DEI to ram through wide-ranging economic changes whose benefits beyond their own circles are questionable at best.” (Trump has not fired Musk.)

On Monday, Zachary Levi, one of the few Hollywood celebrities who openly endorsed Trump, went on Fox to plead for the “truly good, working people that work for the government that are getting lost in the cracks” amid Musk’s purge of the civil service. And after Trump’s administration banned the Associated Press from the White House briefing room for refusing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, the heterodox Spectator columnist Bridget Phetasy had enough. “I voted against compelled speech,” she wrote on X. “You can’t just rename a body of water and demand everyone go along with it and call us liars if we don’t. Nope. Miss me with that shit.” Her post garnered 10,000 likes and 1.4 million views.

Of course, Trump was never a free-speech, pro-labor, anti-war paragon in the first place. Over the course of his political and business careers, he’s lobbed lawsuits at multiple media companies, reportedly stiffed contractors and customers, pushed tax cuts skewed toward the wealthy, and continued American drone strikes and arms sales in the Middle East. But the outrage of some influencers who believed he’d further their causes is a warning: As president, Trump is no longer the vessel into which people can pour their discontent with the status quo. With every disappointment, it will become harder for him to hold together the coalition that delivered him the narrowest popular-vote victory since Richard Nixon’s in 1968.

Every candidate runs to some extent on the idea of their presidency rather than its reality, promising to be all things to as many people as possible. The brilliance of Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can” slogan in 2008 was that it allowed voters to fill in the blanks afterward with whatever they most desired. But because Trump appears to have few, if any, core principles beyond retaining and expanding his own power, he was able to take this approach to the extreme. Voters knew he believed in nothing, which meant he could conceivably do anything, making him the perfect candidate upon whom to pin their wildest dreams. And because Trump was out of office for four years, his supporters had the unusual opportunity to spin self-serving—and often mutually exclusive—narratives around the former president’s plans without the inconvenience of having to explain his actual policies.

With Trump in the White House again, however, many of these pleasing fictions stand exposed. The president’s hobbling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and National Labor Relations Board has upset the promoters of his domestic agenda in the intelligentsia, while his Gaza proposal has left many of his neo-isolationist boosters scrambling—or sidestepping the subject entirely. The reality of Trump’s presidency can no longer sustain the fantasies that were projected onto his campaign.

[Read: Trump doesn’t believe anything. That’s why he wins.]

Frankly, those who fell for these mirages should have known better. Trump is no conventional politician. He relies on instincts forged in the worlds of show business and real estate—an entirely transactional actor with an unparalleled penchant for self-promotion and flimflam. Attempts to fit him into a traditional ideological box will always fail, because he has never met a box he couldn’t sell for parts to the highest bidder. Attempts to cast him as a staunch proponent of American restraint or opponent of corporate greed do not reflect his pre-political career, never fit his first-term policies, and don’t describe his current ones. Rather, these bids to pigeonhole and appropriate Trump are best seen as efforts by intellectuals to impose order on what they don’t understand, or opportunistic attempts by ideologues to bootstrap their program to Trump’s ascendant brand.

There is a certain sadness to this state of affairs. Many voters were desperate for a straightforward alternative to what they saw as the stale establishmentarian liberalism of the Biden-Harris administration. So they projected its opposite, as they understood it, onto their only other viable option—and Trump, ever attuned to the needs of his audience, was more than happy to humor their hopes. But in actuality, the 2024 election was not a traditional binary choice between two coherently opposed political alternatives, the electoral equivalent of the Yankees versus the Red Sox. It was the Yankees versus a flaming tennis ball launched into orbit by a Tesla rocket—a choice not between two teams but between completely different sports. Many voters who thought they knew the rules to the game and that they would turn out the winners are now discovering that they didn’t and won’t.

This is why the more Trump’s presidency progresses, the more support he will lose. Back in November, Phetasy, the Spectator columnist, said that she was “voting for Donald Trump, but not really for Donald Trump—I’m voting against the left and many of the things that they stand for.” In 2024, Trump benefited from this dynamic. But come the 2026 midterms, he will have provided voters like her, who have been burned by their illusions, with something new to vote against. The problem with running as the candidate of people’s dreams is that, eventually, they wake up.

The South African retained his middleweight belt with a unanimous decision over a bloodied Strickland in Sydney.

Nassourdine Imavov stakes title-fight claim with defeat of former UFC champion Israel Adesanya in Saudi Arabia.