Thursday’s CBS Mornings featured a welcome profile by co-host Tony Dokoupil on why President-Elect Trump dominated the male vote in the 2024 presidential campaign. Dokoupil did nothing to lampoon or even mock men of all stripes who flocked to Trump for a variety of reasons, including feelings of abandonment by the left and the 21st century economy.
Dokoupil’s piece was so strong he ran clips of Kat Timpf, Tyrus, and Joe Rogan plus interviewed and gave a long runway to our friend Michael Knowles of the Daily Wire to educate CBS viewers.
Four teases were vague. Co-host Gayle King merely said in the first that Dokoupil would examine “why President-elect Donald Trump connected so well with so many male voters.” In the third, Dokoupil said he’d discuss “how Donald Trump won over so many men in the presidential election, what’s been called the bro vote, what it says about how some men see themselves.”
Dokoupil’s intro set the tone for the fantastic and illuminating piece for the liberal audience, including how the male vote gap was “very much not the gender gap that many expected to be talking about” (click “expand”):
DOKOUPIL: As Donald Trump prepares to walk back into the Oval Office, we are talking about some of the voters who sent them there, and specifically this morning, we are focusing on men. While Republicans made gains with almost with almost every single demographic in 2024 including women, it was young men under 30 and Latino men of all ages who broke the most for Donald Trump in what some have dubbed the bro vote. This is very much not the gender gap that many expected to be talking about, but it’s real, and the race is on now for Washington to do something about it. As Kamala Harris campaigned to be America’s first female president —
KAMALA HARRIS: When we fight — we win!
HARRIS RALLY CROWD: We win!
DOKOUPIL: With the support of some very powerful women behind her —
OPRAH WINFREY: We’re not going back.
DOKOUPIL: — the buzz leading up to the election was often about the female vote.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI [on ABC’s The View, 10/28/24]: Women will be the beacon in this election.
EMILY’s LIST PRESIDENT JESSICA MACKLER: Young women in particular have the ability to be determinative in this election.
DOKOUPIL: But men too, as it turned out, had some big motivations.
KAT TIMPF [on FNC’s Gutfeld!, 11/06/24]: A lot of men were just sick of being told that they’re terrible and there’s nothing they can do, and that’s, I think, the huge mistake that Democrats made, or one of — one of many.
Dokpupil went next to Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution, a place no one would or should consider conservative. Not a good sign, right?
Incredibly, Reeves relayed men “have come to believe that the progressive agenda on behalf of women has felt it necessary to somehow either dismiss or even denigrate men, and they’re over it” with Dokoupil describing Reeves’s book Of Boys and Men as concerned the sad fact that “many men have lost their place” “as the world has changed.”
Reeves continued:
There is something deeper going on here. There’s a survey recently that found that two-thirds of young men say that no one really knows them very well, fifteen percent of them don’t have a close friend. And what I hear a lot is just this sense of being unclear about why and how I am going to be necessary?
Dokoupil put even more meat on the bone, citing the fact that “inflation adjusted wages for most men lower today than in 1979 and men having a three times higher risk from deaths of despair by suicide or overdose.”
Reeves’s remarkable interview continued firing away with straight facts: “The unwillingness of anybody on the center left to just have a straightforward conversation about men’s mental health, about male employment, about male wages, has created a gigantic vacuum in our culture and in our politics.”
Dokoupil said that this “perceived void Republicans have filled with a little help from what some call the manosphere – reaching men through the worlds of sports, ultimate fighting, and podcast popular with guys,” citing clips of Hulk Hogan at the Republican National Convention and shots from podcasts helmed by the likes of Rogan and Patrick Bet-David.
Dokoupil and Reeves flipped on its head the notion of voters (and male ones, in particular) choosing candidates based on whom they’d have a beer with. Rather, they argued it’s selecting the one who “wants to have a drink with you.”
This folded into Dokoupil’s remarkable visit to The Daily Wire’s Nashville studios with Knowles explaining Trump simply “appealed to men” by “actually campaign[ing] to try to win their votes” with traditional gender norms whereas Vice President Kamala Harris deployed frauds such as Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff and then former President Obama to shame black men (click “expand”):
KNOWLES: Trump appealed to men because he appealed to men. He actually campaigned to try to win their votes.
DOKOUPIL: Michael Knowles is a conservative commentator with The Daily Wire and host of The Michael Knowles Show.
KNOWLES: And when Kamala was campaigning, such as it was, for young men, she sent out her husband to describe masculinity as toxic —
EMHOFF: You’ve got this trope out there that you’ve got to be tough and angry and lash out to be strong, just the opposite.
KNOWLES: — not a great way to win people over. She sent out Barack Obama to harangue Black men who didn’t want to vote for her.
OBAMA [on 10/10/24]: Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president.
KNOWLES: This is not the way to win the hearts and minds of young men.
DOKOUPIL: Knowles feels the left has utterly lost its way on gender.
KNOWLES: It’s no wonder that they’ve turned men away, but it’s no wonder that they’ve turned women away either. Because women don’t want girly men, women want men to be like men. There were distinctions between the roles of men and women in the past, that always had exceptions, but nevertheless were defined. Now in the name of equality, we seek to deny any distinction.
Dokoupil threw a bone to the other side by citing the repugnant Nick Fuentes, but said moments like Donald Trump talking about Arnold Palmer signified that “what the left may hear from Trump as insensitive or even worse…many on the right see as familiar and unfiltered.”
Knowles replied that “what men want and what women want, for that matter, is to just return to a kind of normal society where we can have our traditional way of life and not be constantly taken aback by all sorts of ideological matters and I think Trump, in his own way, offered that.”
“Trump is normal,” Dokoupil stated. Knowles concurred, replying “paradoxically so.”
As for what Democrats can do to respond, this was where Dokoupil fell short.
Dokoupil didn’t point out the absurdities of embracing transgenderism, so he stuck to the plight of the working class with soundbites from longtime Bernie Sanders adviser (and last-minute Democratic National Committee chair candidate) Faiz Shakir. Like a loyal progressive, Shakir chalked it up to merely a communications issue.
Dokoupil closed with a question to Reeves about “who’s to blame” for the pain men are feeling. Reeves unfortunately argued “[t]his is not the fault of feminism, this is not the fault of the women’s movement” while, at the same time, said groups should be going around claiming “men can’t have problems, because men are the problem.”
For conservatives, the reactions to the piece from King and featured co-host Vladimir Duthiers were priceless (click “expand”):
DUTHIERS: This was such fascinating piece, Tony.
KING: I like Mr. Reeves. I thought so, too, Tony.
DOKOUPIL: Yes, it is a real issue. It’s not surface stuff, and I know when you hear about men’s problems, you want to roll your eyes and play the world’s tiniest violin, but Richard is right. You don’t have to make a choice here. You can care about men who are suffering, and there are a lot of them that’s real —
KING: Yes.
DUTHIERS: Yes.
DOKOUPIL: — and also care about gaps in where women are.
KING: Well, you can’t deny that he made — Donald Trump made a connection to men. I love the guy who said Trump appealed to men because he appealed to men.
DOKOUPIL: You do have — you have to speak to people.
KING: Yes, yes, yes, yes.
DUTHIERS: That’s right.
DOKOUPIL: You really do.
DUTHIERS: And the question around men’s mental health is one that has never been addressed, and we were talking about it earlier, going back generations. It’s just now that there’s a focus on it, and men are saying, well, what about me?
DOKOUPIL: Yeah.
DUTHIERS: And no one is paying attention to that.
DOKOUPIL: Yeah.
KING: Vlad, you, like I said to Tony, I can’t wait to see your piece. He goes, it’s okay. I go, no, that was more than okay.
DUTHIERS: Yeah, that was an excellent piece.
DOKOUPIL: All right, thank you.
KING: That was more than okay.
DUTHIERS: And Richard Reeves and Michael Knowles as well.
KING: Yes.
DUTHIERS: They are really excellent voices to articulate this —
DOKOUPIL: Yeah.
KING: Yes.
DUTHIERS: — issue that is facing men in this country.
DOKOUPIL: Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.
KING: Really good.
To see the relevant CBS transcript from January 16, click here.
