The most divorced men in history

Thirteen months into the second Trump administration, we’ve seen a litany of wild behaviors with a rationale of little more than punishment behind them. There’s Elon Musk’s comment about “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” We watched the massive DOGE cuts to federal grants and the seizure of the U.S. Institute of Peace in the opening months after Trump’s return. Later came the apparently AI-generated nonsensical tariffs. Earlier this year, the world witnessed the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro, president of Venezuela. And on the last day of February, the president delivered a new war of aggression on Iran with no preparation, no approval by Congress, and no clear goal. We are in a new political space.

And that’s not even counting the expanding attempts to convert commercial warehouses into concentration camps, or the street violence in the U.S. against noncitizens and citizens alike. The grimmer soundings of U.S. history definitely echo through some of these actions. But a new recklessness and fury has been injected into old tactics. It’s certainly a quantitative expansion of abuses, but it also feels like a qualitative one.

So many elected and appointed political types in charge right now—and a number of public figures who have been neither elected nor appointed but who support the president—also fit a certain mold. There’s a commonality here I want to write about today. I’m going to look at this theme a little through a scientific lens, as well as a more subjective, impressionistic one. For the purposes of this episode, let’s call men I’m talking about the most divorced men in history.

What do I mean by “divorced guys”? I mean that they all have the energy of the man who won’t stop talking about the woman who left him and what a monster she is, with the clear implication that her mistreatment of him was entirely undeserved.

Several examples of this personality type exist in the right-wing influencer universe. In some cases, as with incels, the guys haven’t even been left by a partner yet, but they already speak about punishing women or restricting their rights as if the other sex has already betrayed them. In other cases, as represented by Andrew Tate, the men advocate the active physical and psychological abuse of women as a group as a means to power in a physical hierarchy in which men are supposed to dominate by default.

But the heart of divorced-guy syndrome in the U.S. today is the Trump administration. I mean that metaphorically, in which we see variations on the “divorced guy” energy of the podcasters, blaming women or assigning them very subservient roles. But I also mean it literally. The administration is filled with people who’ve had literal and often bitter divorces, and who seem to be tapping into some kind of primordial hatred of women that fuels their current work. Think Donald Trump. Or Russell Vought. Or RFK Jr. Or Pete Hegseth. I have no idea whether their issues actually rose out of their relationships with their moms, but they have played out through adult relations with women that have often ended in divorce.

Patient zero

With JD Vance, we don’t have to wonder if it started with his mom, because it definitely started with his mom, whose addiction and abdication from reliable parenting scarred him. He’s apparently a seething sponge of rage and willing to inflict infinite harm on his own community, the country, and the world because he’s still consumed by fury and self-loathing.

Along with Vance, you might think—wait! Steven Miller is not yet divorced. He and his wife seem to be together, and united in their willingness to say horrific things. But like Vance, Miller’s wounds came earlier in life. Jean Guerrero’s book Hatemonger reported that in college, Miller had a connection with a Latina girl named Sara, who appears to have tolerated him for a time before cutting him off.

Why does this matter? I would like to propose that the seething root of resentment that typically fuels these men is hatred of women. We are also witnessing tidal waves of racism and homophobia and disdain for the poor, but I have come to wonder if misogyny might not only sit alongside the rest but might even undergird the whole thing.

Patient zero in their hate, more often than not, is a woman each resents. The later targets might well be people who want simply to be treated as human that they refuse to treat as human because they need more targets for their fury. So instead, they come to feel they have been attacked by the actions or even the existence of minority groups. They direct their same kind of fury against those groups as they do the women they’re mad at.

The women they hate

In the political world, the targets these guys choose reveal what they’re up to. Hillary Clinton is perhaps the longest-lived punching bag for the U.S. right wing. (This is entirely separate from Democratic criticism of her. I’m talking about the Pizzagate and pedophilia accusations, the Benghazi obsessions, and conspiracy theory stuff.) The language on the Right about her embodies the rage the divorced guy has for his ex-wife.

Then there’s AOC, who represents the cute, smart girl who wouldn’t have anything to do with them in high school, or even college. Fox seemed to set the model for attacking her because she has charisma and her politics are farther left than all but a handful of representatives. But time and again, congressmen, Hill staffers, or political activists have stepped up to stoke the resentment.

And to be clear, when we’re talking about presidents, the U.S. has a long tradition of presidents with daddy issues, both Democratic and Republican presidents. But the divorced-guy-energy president is a newer phenomenon. At its heart lies a feeling of betrayal and a desire for revenge against whole groups who appear to be stand-ins for what began as a primordial rage against a woman. And just as with your corner bar divorced dad, it’s no accident that so much of what they accuse their opponents of are things they have done themselves.

Study says

I’m far from the first person to see divorced-guy-energy at the heart of the second Trump administration. Which is why I was fascinated by a journal article, “Beyond “Deaths of Despair”: Narratives of Distress and Risk-Taking Behaviors Among Rural Working-Class Men,” that recently appeared in the journal Rural Sociology. The author is Meleah Fekete, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Irsay Institute for Sociomedical Science Research at Indiana University.

Fekete looked at a group of 79 men in a rural Pennsylvania setting and identified a subgroup that engaged in risk-taking behaviors. What fascinated me was that in the interviews done with the men in the risk-taking group, their descriptions about why they turned to these behaviors tended not to focus on the very real shifting social conditions in their communities, but on the end of romantic relationships with women.

Fekete also discusses the established concept of “protest masculinity,” in which men no longer have access to a vision of manhood they once lived. In response to crisis, some men are able to redefine their idea of what being masculine meant. But others develop a reactive form of “protest masculinity,” in which they adopt aggressive and risk-taking behaviors. In the current study, when men were asked to explain those behaviors, they tended to focus on abandonment by a partner—usually a woman—and express resentment toward that partner.

This particular study is a small one, and the author is transparent about her article being less a definitive statement about this group of men than an interesting idea worthy of further research. One of her key questions is how this population might be reached to gain additional tools that would help them be more flexible and adapt.

The national landscape

To be clear, the extrapolation I’m going to make now from the study is not meant to be rigorously scientific. Fekete has made a preliminary finding. The men she identified were struggling, and she was looking at how and why and what could be done about it. But what fascinates me about the interviews she did is this link between feeling wronged and resentful, and this increase in risk-taking harmful behavior.

If we stretch this concept of risk-taking as one way to do reactive protest masculinity in response to abandonment by a partner, and without mercy to apply it to the current national political scene in the United States, two ideas emerge.

First, we have a kind of explanation for this wild careening from catastrophe to catastrophe, all generated needlessly, by the cabal of men currently running the United States federal government. Many people have observed the degree to which we’re seeing dangerous macho chest-thumping on a regular basis. But this idea of risk-taking as a kind of compulsive response to what’s perceived as an unjust or unfair treatment by women is interesting in a slightly different way. To make a big generalization, Fekete in her study has discovered a more rigorous equivalent of divorce-guy energy.

The other observation is that this could, as much as anything, be the source of Trump’s diehard support in some communities—the reason he can’t seem to displease a specific chunk of the electorate, no matter how ham-handed or cruel his actions. Many of his most devoted followers are small-bore divorce guys, adopting risky behaviors because they’re unable to shift to a new kind of masculinity in the face of economic or cultural change. (Some drink or take drugs; others buy Cybertrucks.)

But Trump takes hold of divorce-guy resentments and acts out the risky behavior on a previously unimagined scale, inflicting harm not on himself but on the national and global stage. The near-omnipotence of the president allows revenge fantasies in which unjust past rejection is meaningless because the divorce guy they’ve attached themselves to has almost infinite power. 

Not just the administration

This strange, controlling fury and resentment against women in particular is evident in Trump associates as well. Remember that Steve Bannon once described #metoo as an existential threat to the patriarchy, and thought that was a bad thing.

Elon Musk may be the single most divorced guy in history, and though he’s not an integral part of the current administration at this point, he bears significant responsibility for DOGE cuts and slashing USAID programs, which have already led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, and the total may reach one million lives lost before the end of this fiscal year.

Longtime close friend Jeffrey Epstein seems to have made a habit of courting this kind of divorce guy and cultivating their insecurities and resentment. It seems to be the unifying feature of the Epstein class, some of whose public transition to divorce guy happened as a direct result of spending time with him or women to whom Epstein connected them.

Epstein’s manipulation of the Epstein class embraced this underlying anger at women, tapping into and cultivating it among a group of people who normally wouldn’t embrace this kind of treatment of girls and women—not publicly, at least. We see a Yale professor recommending a student to Epstein based on her being a “v small goodlooking blonde.” And then there are people like Larry Summers, whom the Epstein files reveal as potentially aspiring to be a divorce guy.

The nihilism of Trumpism has always existed in the background but has made itself especially apparent in recent months. What would it mean if the divorced-guy energy the president and those around him display area is driven by a compulsion toward risk-taking? It would suggest that the kind of recklessness we’re seeing is unlikely to drop off, and in fact, might even increase. If he is hemmed in on one side, Trump may well make more egregious attacks on another front.

In addition, if the affinity regular divorced guys feel for Trump is due in part to identification with Trump being able to export the costs of risk-taking onto the country as a whole in dramatic ways, we also shouldn’t expect that support to stop easily or fade away on its own.

What can we do

I think there’s a way to reroute reactive protest masculinity that doesn’t turn the everyday divorce guys into infants, and holds them accountable for what they do. Even back when I was teaching self defense and violence prevention, various community-level programs existed where men would get together over sports or other activities and create social networks that could build on or share more positive ideas of what it means to be a man.

I think a hunger for this kind of solidarity is why so many people, men especially, desperately want someone like Graham Planter—who is running for the U.S. Senate as a Democrat from Maine—to be a viable candidate. There’s an idea that a stereotypical manly-man will be a more legitimate driver of votes for these divorce guys, that they will identify with him. And certainly, some polls are trending Platner’s way.

But Platner is no more powerful than many of the divorce guys are. And I suspect that it’s the risk-taking behavior that attracts them to Trump. Getting a Nazi tattoo might make him attractive as a risk-taker, but unless he’s enacting that risk-taking in the present, he may not keep their support.

And honestly, unconventional candidates may be one key to winning November races. But trying to appeal to voters on the same grounds that Trump does is a shaky proposition. Reinventing the ways that candidates can appeal to voters —the way that Zorhan Mamdani, for instance, wins over and persuades even Donald Trump to support his agenda while sticking to his stated values—can convey a different kind of strength, but one that’s just as powerful and perhaps more authentic.

It’s important to say that not all divorce guys are Trump followers. And not all guys who are divorced are divorce guys. And neither are all divorce guys working-class rural men. The latter just happens to be the group the researcher was looking at in this recent study.

In any case, the U.S. is unlikely to redefine masculinity nationwide before November. Which means opponents are unlikely to swipe Trump’s hardcore base away from him. But in doing honest outreach at the grass-roots level, the better goal may be to keep more voters from embracing that self-canceling kind of identification with nihilistic and overtly mercenary politicians.

To further democracy now and in the long run, it’s vital that communities and politicians give everyone ways to plug in that help them increase their power and their sense of agency. A vote is not just something to be coaxed away from someone grudgingly. It can be a byproduct of a process in which individuals realize they have a role to play, in which they can make a difference, and that their communities need them. Everything I’ve been encouraging readers of this newsletter to do for the last fifteen months is exactly that process—with the goal of not only finding your own way to plug in but creating networks where others might realize how valuable they are, too.

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