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After Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton won the state’s Republican Senate primary this week, he delivered a run of insults directed at his general election opponent, Democratic Texas state Rep. James Talarico.
“He goes by a few names that you all may have heard of. Some people know him as tofu Talarico. Some people call him six-gender Jimmy. I’ve even heard some people call him James Talafreako,” he said to laughter and cheers. “And others refer to him simply as Low-T Talarico.”
Paxton also quickly released an ad that ends with an image of Talarico next to the words: “Radical Talarico: too low-T for Texas.”
What followed was an immediate, widespread barrage of attacks on Talarico’s manhood from the right. This tactic — the explicit, sometimes vulgar emphasis on masculinity as an electoral argument — is one highly visible way that President Trump has changed the Republican Party, and American politics in general, in the last decade.
A quick onslaught of insults
White House advisor Stephen Miller used “transgender” as an insult, telling Fox News that Talarico is the Democrats’ “first transgender Senate candidate.” Talarico is not transgender.
“He’s clearly transitioning into a female,” Miller said. “When Talarico goes in for a blood test, when he gets a physical, blood doesn’t come out. Soy milk comes out.”
Florida Republican congressional candidate Dan Weldon questioned Talarico’s masculinity by questioning his football knowledge: “It’s a huge problem for the Democrat Party that you take one look at the men they run for elected office and just know that they couldn’t name a single obscure wide receiver from the early 2000s.”
Fox host Jesse Watters taunted Talarico as a “gay vegan,” before quickly adding that Talarico is “not gay and not vegan, for the record.” (Talarico is neither vegan nor gay.)
Some of the insults refer to comments Talarico has made over the years. In a speech he gave while running for reelection to the state house in 2022, he talked about mitigating climate change, then added, “I am proud to say that our campaign has officially become a non-meat campaign, so we are only buying vegan products from our local vegan businesses.”
Talarico has since reiterated that he eats meat and nodded to Paxton’s various scandals in the process. “I’ve been eating barbecue since before Ken Paxton’s first indictment,” he said at a rally this week, referring to Paxton’s 2015 indictment on federal securities fraud charges.
“Six-gender Jimmy” refers to a 2021 comment where Talarico said “modern science acknowledges six biological variations based on chromosomes to argue that sex is a nuanced spectrum, not a strict binary.”
“I know there are two sexes, men and women,” he told CBS News this week in explaining that comment. “I also know there’s a very small percentage of people who have these chromosomal abnormalities, and I believe that they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.”
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It’s unclear how successful Paxton’s masculinity attacks will be. Brendan Steinhauser is a Texas Republican strategist who worked on the 2014 campaign of Sen. John Cornyn, whom Paxton defeated in the primary. He says the overt references to manhood might help win over some voters in the conservative state, where many value “traditional masculinity.”
“I think that rugged individualism, the kind of strong man who’s working hard and taking care of his family, does appeal to Texans across demographics and across genders,” Steinhauser said.
On the other hand, when prices are high and rising, voters may not particularly care about things like Talarico’s meat consumption, says Cliff Walker, who works at a Texas progressive strategy firm.
“For them to make a voting decision based on that messaging, I think that the universe of those folks is negligible,” he said.
He added that he thinks Paxton is trying to draw attention away from his list of scandals, including an affair, the 2015 securities fraud indictment and an impeachment in the Texas House for abusing his office. He was later acquitted by the Texas Senate.
“I think that the universe of people who look at these two men and think that somehow Ken Paxton is the model of manhood and is in a credible position to critique James, and for them to make a voting decision based on that messaging, I think the universe of those folks is negligible,” Walker said, later adding that he thinks Paxton is “grasping at straws.”
Both the Talarico and Paxton campaigns declined to comment on the record.
Trump’s legacy
While candidates tried to out-man each other long before Trump, he brought the manhood contests to new heights, both in touting his own masculinity and diminishing others’.
And Paxton’s attacks echo Trump. Paxton’s list of insults, for example, sounds like President Trump in his 2016 campaign, when he used emasculating nicknames for his opponents, calling now-Secretary-of-State Marco Rubio “Little Marco” and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush “Low-Energy Jeb.”
Trump’s overt macho posturing has permeated his entire political career, whether he’s been admiring military members, praising strongmen leaders, or donning hardhats on construction sites. In his speech firing up the crowd on January 6, 2021, he insulted Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp as being small and weak.
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Currently, an octagon is being built on the White House South Lawn for UFC Freedom 250, a June 14 cage-fighting event commemorating America’s 250th anniversary. (It also coincides with Trump’s 80th birthday and Flag Day.)
All of which can help explain how the attacks on Talarico have become so gendered, so fast.
Steinhauser, the Republican strategist, thinks Trump has not only changed how the GOP talks about men, but has inspired an effort to rewind modern views of gender roles.
“I think there is an attempt to sort of bring back a traditional view of masculinity and also to try and label certain men and certain types of men as weaker or as not real men,” he said.
“I think that there has been an effort within some elements of the Republican Party – not all or not even a majority – but there has been an effort by some Republican men to do that.”
Walker, the progressive strategist, agrees that Trump has overhauled the party’s gender attitudes and notes the proliferation of manosphere personalities, many of them Trump-aligned:
“There is Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson – I mean, there’s the whole cast of characters, Benny Johnson, I mean, there’s Matt Walsh. So much of their politics is focused on a sort of hypermasculinity,” he said. “These folks are very focused on that. And it’s a caricature of what being a man is.”
That manosphere has had a visible impact on political discourse, says Dan Cassino, a political scientist at Fairleigh Dickinson University who studies gender in politics. He points to the fact that the language around manhood has become so explicit – that testosterone levels are mentioned as a qualification for office.
“In the past, we haven’t had this sort of very explicit claim about masculinity using the language of online forums, using the language of the manosphere,” he said. “And you know, this is all red pill, black pill, incel stuff. And it’s a little terrifying that it’s leaking out into mainstream political dialogue.”
The harsh, immediate gendered attacks in the Texas U.S. Senate race are happening for complex reasons, but Cassino theorizes that it’s in part about the fact that Talarico is himself a man.
“The hierarchy is already under threat,” he said, noting economic problems that have dogged some working-class men. “And then if a white Christian man comes out and says, ‘No, actually, we should be more compassionate. We should not be maintaining these hierarchies where white men are on top of everything,’ that’s a huge threat because he is potentially a trusted messenger.”
