As he faced an amphitheater filled with thousands of cheering supporters, Donald Trump had a complaint. Time magazine had recently named him “Person of the Year”, not “Man of the Year”.

Replaying a line he had used before, Trump led the crowd in a chant to boo “person” and cheer “man”. The yell in favor of man of the year was high-pitched, and dozens of pink “Women for Trump” signs shot into the air.

“That’s the women, too!” the president-elect observed, at his Friday night rally in Florida.

As his opponents continue to debate the many reasons for Trump’s stunning victory over Hillary Clinton – Russian interference, economic anxiety, too much emphasis on “identity politics” – Trump continues to pursue his own form of identity politics.

As the cheers at Friday’s rally suggested, his appeal to traditional gender roles seems to have broad support among white women as well as among men.

Election exit polls, though an imperfect measure, suggested that despite allegations that he had sexually assaulted at least a dozen women – allegations Trump vehemently denied – the majority of white women voted for him. That included 45% of college-educated white women.

In Orlando on Friday, Trump was not arguing that Time should never put a woman on its annual cover. But a man should be called man of the year, he told he crowd. For a woman? “Maybe you go woman of the year, person of the year.”

Time magazine changed the name of its man of the year feature to person of the year in 1999. Before that, it had named only a handful of women of the year.

In 1937, the year before it made Adolf Hitler man of the year, Time chose a “man and wife of the year”: the Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, Soong May-ling.

‘You were nasty, and mean, and you wanted to win, right?’

Trump’s victory lap through states he won has not brought forth a new policy agenda or even much new rhetoric. Instead, like an old crooner, he is reprising the hits.

On Friday night, an outdoor amphitheater that holds 10,000 people was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with Trump fans in Trump hats and red Trump shirts, waving Trump signs. The stage was decorated with at least 20 bedecked Christmas trees and a backdrop of a snowy winter wonderland.

“You people were vicious, violent,” Trump said approvingly to the crowd. “You were nasty, and mean, and you wanted to win, right?

“Now, you’re mellow, and you’re cool, and you’re not nearly as vicious or violent, right? Because we won.”



Trump started his speech nearly an hour and a half late, delayed in part by a private fundraiser hosted by the Tallahassee lobbyist Brian Ballard. Part of his speech was strangely intimate: an old friend, surprised by success, walking his buddies through exactly what he was feeling on the night of his victory.

He talked at length about how “we thought for about two or three hours we were going to lose”, and how his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, called him and said: “Pop, not looking good.”

He then described with glee watching CNN anchor John King’s shocked expression as it became clear that Trump would win after all.

Describing the obvious surprise and dismay of television anchors on election night, Trump said, hyperbolically, that they were “sweating and crying and throwing up all over the place”.

The map of his electoral victory, with Republican-won states turning red, he said, was “bloody, so red, so red, it’s beautiful. That blue got knocked to hell.”

As usual, Trump used the reporters covering the rally – who were seated at tables in a press pen entirely surrounded by cheering supporters – as props in his stage show.

Inexplicably, the song Memory, from Cats, was playing as the travelling press corps filed past the crowd about 30 minutes before his speech began. Decorative search lights tilted back and forth. A few supporters murmured to each other: “The travelling press!”

“Hi, fake news!” one man cooed softly. “Hi, fake news!”



Trump’s flaying of the “very dishonest” press is a favored ritual at his rallies, and at points the booing can sound almost cheerful. But the criticism had more of an edge on Friday night: after the rally, one Trump supporter threw an empty water bottle at CNN reporter Jeremy Diamond and called him “trash”, Diamond and other reporters tweeted.

“CNN sucks!” is one of the traditional anti-media chants at Trump rallies.

One-on-one, other Trump supporters were happy to chat. Tom Treser, 72, had brought one of his 15 grandchildren to the rally. A registered independent from Port Charlotte, Treser had voted for Trump. His 15-year-old grandson Triston was also a big Trump supporter.

The key to his support, Treser said, was that Trump is “not a politician”, not “beholden to anybody, he doesn’t owe anybody anything. He’s going to be able to do what he wants to do without fear of making anybody mad.”

“There’s absolutely nothing that he can do right now that’s gonna turn me off,” Treser said. “Like I said before, he’s not afraid to say what he wants to say.”