Joseph Cummins is the author of Anything for a Vote: Dirty Tricks, Cheap Shots and October Surprises in U.S. Presidential Campaigns.



If there’s one thing America’s presidential candidates have always loved, it’s attacking their opponents with slurs that cast aspersions on their manhood. These past few weeks have brought the tradition to a new level of unmanning. The ever-more-fascinating Republican primary season has seen Marco Rubio belittling the size of Donald Trump’s penis, with Trump avowing in front of millions during last week’s debate: “I guarantee you there’s no problem.” Earlier that day, after Mitt Romney had denounced him as a “phony” and a “fraud,” Trump told a crowd in Portland, Maine: “I backed Mitt Romney [in 2012]. He was begging for my endorsement. I could have said ‘Mitt, drop to your knees.’ He would have dropped to his knees.”

Well, at least Trump didn’t pull out his penis—“the demon rod,” as St. Augustine called it, in a nice turn of phrase—and show it to us, which is what Lyndon Johnson did when journalists asked him why America was in Vietnam. “That’s why,” Johnson reportedly said.


Who knows what tonight's GOP debate will bring? People sometimes forget how deeply personal, how ferociously angry, how bizarrely sexual American political contests can get when top dogs start barking. During the election of 1800, James Callender, a hack writer hired by Thomas Jefferson and his Republicans, attacked Federalist President John Adams as “a hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” (Callender’s reward for that nicely chosen “which” was eight months in jail under the Alien and Sedition Acts.)

In 1835, former Congressman Davy Crockett went after the putative Democratic presidential candidate Martin Van Buren as being “laced up in corsets, such as women in a town wear, and if possible tighter than the best of them. It would be difficult to say from his personal appearance, whether he was a man or a woman, but for his large red and gray whiskers.” And when Van Buren got elected despite this, and ran again as the incumbent in 1840, a Pennsylvania Congressman named Charles Ogle made a three-day speech in the House of Representatives during the course of which he claimed that Van Buren—whom he considered a luxury-loving fop—had constructed on the White House grounds a pair of “clever sized hills” that resembled “an Amazon’s bosom, with a miniature knoll on its apex, to denote the nipple.” (Thousands of copies of the speech were printed and distributed; it helped the Whig William Henry Harrison win the election.)

Gay slurs went over big in the mid-19th century, as they do today. The 1856 Democratic presidential candidate James Buchanan was long rumored by his opponents to play for the other team, possibly because of his close friendship with his longtime roommate Sen William Rufus King of Alabama. Andrew Jackson (a manly man if there ever was one) called Buchanan “Aunt Nancy,” and the nickname stuck. House Speaker Henry Clay liked to taunt Buchanan to his face, lisping: “I wish I had a more ladylike manner of expressing myself.”

Of course, one of the great American presidential manliness taunters in American history was Teddy Roosevelt. Henry James called him “a monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding noise,” and he is the presidential candidate whose bombast most resembles that of Donald Trump. During the election of 1904, he called the president of Venezuela “a villainous little monkey” and tagged his Democratic opponent, Judge Alton Parker, “that neutral-tinted individual”—the “low-energy” charge of its time. In 1912, during the historic election that split the Republican Party and handed the presidency to Woodrow Wilson and the Democrats (sound familiar?), Roosevelt (who would run as a Progressive “Bull Moose” Republican) showed up at the contested convention wearing a sombrero, smoking a cigar and calling President William Howard Taft a “rat in a corner.” (Unmanned, Taft could only respond weakly that Roosevelt was “neurotic.”) During that same fractious election, after letters came to light that seemed to indicate that the married Woodrow Wilson might be having an affair, Teddy sneered: “It wouldn’t work. You can’t cast a man as Romeo who looks and acts so much like an apothecary clerk.”

Speaking of affairs, interestingly enough, no one has accused an opponent of actual bad behavior this year; perhaps that will have to wait for the general election. Being president can really louse up your extracurricular love life, though. Kennedy passed a plaintive note to an aide during his 1960 campaign against Richard Nixon, wondering: “I suppose if I win—my poon days are over?” They weren’t for Kennedy, as we know, but he was the last president to get away with it.

But wait. Social scientists have discovered that physically posturing like an alpha—spreading one’s arms or legs wide, growling aggressively—can increase testosterone and lower cortisol (the stress hormone) in both men and women. Donald Trump is a master at posturing of this sort, hinting at his virility in ways that make people feel more than a little squirmy, particularly when it comes to his daughter Ivanka, whom he has suggested, jokingly of course, that he would like to date.

Perhaps Trump is on to something. Raise your testosterone, lower your stress, and you get the benefits of an affair without complications that could ruin your chance at the presidency. If we have a contested Republican convention this summer, Trump may come swaggering in pumped up on naturally occurring testosterone from a primary trail littered with crude jokes. If that’s the case, move over Teddy Roosevelt—we may be able to crown a new king of emasculation before you can say, “Little Marco.”

Of course, with Hillary Clinton as the likely Democratic nominee, if Trump makes it to the general election, he’ll be faced with an entirely new problem in presidential politics: How do you “unman” a woman? So far, for Trump, the answer to that question has been a two-step process. He insinuates Clinton is more manly than feminine: He’s made sarcastic remarks about her “pantsuits,” hinted that she’s a lesbian and remarked on the length of her “disgusting” bathroom break during the Democratic debate in December. And then, with comments like “She goes home, goes to sleep. I’m telling you. She doesn’t have the strength. She doesn’t have the stamina,” he unmans her.