After literally fitting up President Obama as a candidate for Mt. Rushmore (“Obama was better than we imagined, better than the body politic deserved...”) Jim Nelson, editor-in-chief of men’s fashion magazine GQ (Gentleman’s Quarterly), followed up Friday with some fashionable Hillary hagiography and a side of Trump sexism: “The Trump Campaign Is Fueled by the Fear of a Female President.”
Nelson posed the question “why were his followers so drawn to that hot temper and fulminating rage?” and answered it: “...fear of a gynarchy. Rule by women.”
So you’ve got a pretend non-politician who pretend-rages for the benefit of people he doesn’t care about. That’s a guaranteed recipe for success. But still, why is that blindingly attractive to so many Americans? A lot’s been said about the lily-white appeal and racial Unterton of Trump’s campaign, and that’s there. But I think something else is in the air. Something, if the country would simply lie down on a couch in front of me, I could explain in a kind and Freudian way. Straight up: fear of a gynarchy. Rule by women. It’s no coincidence that in a year when the first female president loomed as historical reality, Republicans would gravitate toward the most swaggering, insecure alpha male ever to run for higher office.
Nelson employed his dog-level hearing to discern from Trump rallies and “Chris Christie’s venom” the sound of “a strange male whine that is disproportionate to any threat.”
For the hardest-core Hillary haters and knee-jerkiest Trumpers, this election is not about sovereignty or national security but about something more threatening: submission. Just as many aggrieved white males couldn’t bear to submit to a black leader under Obama, causing strange, finger-pointy, That man is from Kenya! anxieties, many now can’t imagine submitting to a powerful woman, and so must conjure a she-devil worthy of their hysteria. Lock her up!, the convention crowd roared, like some chant from a witch trial.
Fortunately, Nelson knows we as a country are better than that, and we shall soon hail Hillary as our political heroine.
It will all be okay, I want to say. Hillary will become president, she will be capable and wise, and exert sound and prudent judgment, all qualities Donald Trump couldn’t milk out of a vice president if you paid him. She’ll be part of our growing up, our maturing as a political culture, once we accept her. But we must submit to wisdom.
It's not the first time Nelson has bowed to Hillary Clinton. In September 2007, as the Democratic primary race between Obama and Clinton raged, Nelson caved into a threat and spiked an unflattering piece about the Hillary campaign:
Early this summer, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign for president learned that the men’s magazine GQ was working on a story the campaign was sure to hate: an account of infighting in Hillaryland.
So Clinton’s aides pulled a page from the book of Hollywood publicists and offered GQ a stark choice: Kill the piece, or lose access to planned celebrity coverboy Bill Clinton.
Despite internal protests, GQ editor Jim Nelson met the Clinton campaign’s demands, which had been delivered by Bill Clinton’s spokesman, Jay Carson, several sources familiar with the conversations said.
