President Donald Trump has lately been telling a story about James Talarico that comes with its own setting, action and reliable third-act catastrophe. The Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas, Trump says, goes to barbecues, forces down meat and then slips behind a tent to vomit. The tent is a surprisingly durable detail. The menu changes.

At an Oct. 2 rally in Mobile, Alabama, Trump described Talarico as a vegan who was now “eating meat like a pig.” After every barbecue, he claimed, the candidate retreats behind a tent and “throws up all over the place.” In Nebraska, the offending meat had become steak. By San Antonio, Trump had incorporated Talarico’s recent absence from the campaign trail into the plot: The candidate, who said he had the flu, was supposedly sick from eating meat “for political reasons.” The president seems particularly taken with this little drama. He has returned to it repeatedly, refining the details like a comedian workshopping a bit.

The premise is that Talarico is a secret vegan. 

Just for the record: He isn’t. The story ties back to 2022, when Talarico advocated reducing meat consumption and announced that his state House campaign would purchase vegan products from local businesses. He did not announce that he had become vegan himself. Since then, he has been photographed eating chicken, steak and a turkey leg. His campaign has repeatedly denied the accusation. 

Ordinarily, one might expect the turkey leg to settle things.

Instead, Trump has supplied an imaginary sequel to every public meal.

At his San Antonio rally, the president turned to Talarico’s Republican opponent, Attorney General Ken Paxton, and offered an assessment: “I have a feeling Ken likes meat.” He then launched into praise of Texas’ exceptionally tough men and strong women, invoking Davy Crockett and the other heroes of the Alamo. It was a remarkably efficient progression from barbecue to regurgitation to virility to American legend. However, Americans have long used a man’s dinner to make assumptions about his character.

A few years ago, I wrote about the meat-and-potatoes man, that sturdy fixture of sitcoms, country music and nostalgic Americana. In an episode of “The Andy Griffith Show,” Andy confronts a French menu and simply asks for steak and a baked potato. Barney, determined to appear worldly, accidentally orders snails and brains. Andy’s plainspoken certainty is the point. He knows what he wants, and he doesn’t particularly care whether anybody else approves.

Where meat-and-potatoes masculinity once suggested a certain rugged, if slightly hayseed, self-assuredness, its latest incarnation is curiously obedient.

Consider Trump’s fondness for distributing Florsheim leather oxfords to the men in his orbit. The president has reportedly taken to guessing their shoe sizes and ordering pairs accordingly. Some recipients apparently feel obliged to wear them, lest they offend the boss. The old meat-and-potatoes man knew what he liked and ordered it without apology. His successors are walking around in matching shoes because someone else likes them.

And that’s before anyone sits down to dinner.

Several senior administration figures have embraced the “meat and ferments” diet promoted by physician Sean O’Mara: grass-fed beef, sauerkraut, kimchi and relatively little room for improvisation. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has praised its supposed effects on his visceral fat. His wife, Cheryl Hines, has described the embarrassment of bringing his pungent sauerkraut into restaurants. Picture the leather shoes pinching beneath the table, the fermented cabbage making itself known above it. These men are all, supposedly, very, very manly.

The meat-and-potatoes man has become the man with a meat protocol. What once signaled a cheerful lack of fuss now demands a highly specific menu, bodily surveillance and an almost devotional attention to what enters the digestive tract. It is not so much dinner as a program.

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There is something genuinely romantic about the self-sufficient cowboy who can build a fire and cook a well-seasoned steak beneath a blanket of stars. But the romance depends on his independence. If Trump decided tomorrow that everyone should trade their Florsheims for Stetsons, one suspects Washington would experience a sudden proliferation of cowboy hats. What ought to resemble John Wayne riding into the sunset would begin to look more like the Kens in “Barbie,” each earnestly serenading his respective date with the same Matchbox Twenty song. One man strumming a guitar by firelight can be charming. An entire beach of men performing the exact same romantic gesture becomes cringeworthy. What was supposed to be a spontaneous expression of rugged individuality has become something closer to choreography.

Which brings us back to Talarico. It is not enough for him to eat meat. He must eat Texas barbecue. More than that, he must actually enjoy it. And even that is insufficient. In Trump’s version, the evidence of fraud is waiting just beyond the camera’s view, behind the tent. 

There, in a scene of the president’s own invention, Talarico can always be caught dropping the act.

Food has embarrassed politicians before. In 1976, Gerald Ford famously bit into a tamale without removing its corn husk during a visit to San Antonio. Ford committed an observable mistake. Talarico’s supposed misstep takes place somewhere nobody can see it. Once, a candidate could be judged for eating the local specialty incorrectly. Now he can be accused of eating it correctly and not meaning it.

The trouble with masculinity as a group project is that it rarely remains confined to the group. When belonging depends on following an increasingly elaborate set of rules, there is a temptation to start enforcing them. And those expectations have a way of extending beyond men themselves, toward how women should dress, behave and exercise autonomy. The performance acquires an audience, and then the audience is expected to participate.

The idealized American man is, after all, supposed to be a self-assured loner: the pioneer charting his own course, the cowboy slipping into the night to find a lost horse, the man who simply does what needs doing. 

Instead, this version of manhood seems to require an extraordinary amount of coaching. I keep thinking of “The Birdcage,” in which Robin Williams’ Armand attempts to teach Nathan Lane’s Albert how to walk like John Wayne. The more deliberately Albert performs masculinity, the more conspicuous the performance becomes.

Of course Trump imagines Talarico disappearing behind the barbecue tent to drop the act. For a political culture increasingly invested in prescribing how a man should dress, eat and behave, the idea of someone secretly abandoning the performance must be familiar. Maintaining it looks exhausting.

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For more than a year, journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan had been trying — and largely failing — to raise awareness about the very strange story of Donald Trump and his aide Natalie Harp. Shortly after the 2024 election, the New York Times journalists published a profile of the lithe blonde in her early 30s, complete with photos of her gazing at Trump adoringly, explaining how she left him love letters with language like, “You are all that matters to me.” On Aug. 16, Haberman was still trying to raise the issue during an appearance on MS NOW, describing Harp as Trump’s “human binky.”

But in the end, it was Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., who woke up much of the public to this disturbing relationship by mentioning Harp on the campaign trail. “He doesn’t want to do the job,” the senator said of Trump, the sleeves of his blue shirt rolled up. “He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”

The defensive reaction from the White House was so over-the-top that it backfired, drawing more attention to the relationship. 

But a mystery remained. Haberman, Swan and many others had been talking about Harp, but it wasn’t until Ossoff said something that the White House truly lost their minds. 

The reaction likely had little to do with Ossoff’s comments, as elegantly as they were constructed. No, this recoil was more about the messenger than the message. At 39, Ossoff isn’t just young. He is strikingly handsome. The boyish good looks of his early career have matured into something closer to the old-fashioned allure of a 1960s-era movie star, such as Gregory Peck or Warren Beatty. Broad-chested, with great hair and a winning smile, Ossoff has a cool demeanor, good sense of humor and moral seriousness in a proportion that’s rare in politics — and that hasn’t really been seen since Barack Obama. Ossoff, in other words, can get it.

I’m talking about votes. 

Put another way, Ossoff is everything the 80-year-old president wishes he were, but isn’t. Harp’s presence is a touchy, daily reminder to both Trump and his staff of the president’s thick catalog failings as a human being. Having a young, handsome, talented man mock Trump for his emotional support aide had to have stung with a special precision. No one needs to tell the president or his staff that Ossoff feels just fine about himself — and doesn’t need a full-time emotional support aide to follow him around, praising his every move.

Considering how much the White House communications staff is extremely online, they are also likely to know that Ossoff has become quite the thirst trap, even among young women and gay men who otherwise aren’t especially political on social media. As Grace Panetta of The 19th recently explained, the senator is a reliable, if unwitting, model for light-hearted crush content, much like what creators generate in tribute to movie stars like Timothée Chalamet or Tom Holland.  

“Take a scroll through Instagram and TikTok, and you’ll see fan edit-style videos of Ossoff at campaign rallies and in Senate hearings,” Panetta wrote. Women jokingly call out Ossoff’s “slutty Atticus Finch cosplay” or predict that Ossoff will be “a hot president in my lifetime.” It’s reached the point where a reporter from TMZ asked Ossoff if he has “BDE,” which is not short for Big Dictionary Energy, despite the senator very much seeming like he’d be a fan of Oxford’s quintessential publication. 

Ossoff’s sex appeal doesn’t just offer a striking contrast with Trump’s oversized suits and comical combover. He’s also very different than men in the Republican ranks who are closer to his own age and, like himself, are widely seen as potential 2028 presidential candidates. At 42, Vice President JD Vance is also the subject a lot of online content. But most of it portrays him in a comically unflattering manner, with tiny dead eyes, oversized cheeks and a maniacal grin. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, 55, isn’t mocked for his looks, but he is often portrayed as a sad sack, a man too slow-witted and spineless to be much use beyond his role as Trump’s patsy. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, 46, is blessed with good looks that even three breakfast gin-and-tonics can’t take away. But with the help of Colin Jost on “Saturday Night Live,” he is mostly viewed like an overgrown frat boy crushing beer cans on his forehead. None come even close to the dreamboat treatment Ossoff receives. 

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This disparate treatment is especially amusing because the MAGA movement has insisted for years that they are bringing back a more virile masculinity — supposedly to cure all the allegedly poisonous feminism inflicted upon America by those WNBA-loving Democrats. No doubt there are some people impressed by all the workout videos posted by MAGA leaders, though that audience probably doesn’t have much crossover with people who get second dates. But what all the chest-thumping and push-up contests of the right really communicates is overcompensation rather than reclaiming some “lost” masculinity.

Beneath the right’s meltdown over Ossoff’s relatively tame comment about Harp was a molten layer of male insecurity. Steven Cheung, the volatile White House communications director, tweeted, “Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics.” White House spokesman David Ingle called the senator a “cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid.” Both unwisely lobbed these insults from X accounts featuring photos of themselves. The handy comparison left the observer to contemplate how, with MAGA, it’s typically true that every accusation is itself a confession. Similarly, Trump compared Ossoff to Pee-wee Herman, a reference to a film that is older than the senator and only served to underscore how old and out of touch the president is. 

MAGA’s belief that masculinity is on the decline is more a reflection of their personal fears and resentments than an accurate picture of the world. Men who can just act normal continue to do fine, or as much as one can in this economy. As with many of the thirst-trap Democrats that are rising stars, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan Senate hopeful Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a large part of Ossoff’s charm is that he possesses an easy masculinity, one comfortable with women’s equality. MAGA influencers may deny it, but men who actually like and respect women tend to be more attractive to women and gay men.

Being chill with women’s power projects confidence. Insecure men are the ones who demand that women are forced into subservient roles, just so men can feel bigger. It speaks to an internal belief that they can’t win without cheating. That’s loser energy, not the Big Dictionary Energy being given off by Ossoff and this new crop of young, vigorous Democratic men. 

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