A holiday classic MAGAfied
On Thursday evening, a poorly photoshopped image of Norman Rockwell's 1943 Thanksgiving painting Freedom From Want popped up on Twitter. In the altered classic picture, the faces of the matriarch and patriarch have been replaced with pictures of a smug, toadlike Trump and a smirking JD Vance — while a map of the 2024 election substitutes for the turkey. At first blush, you have to assume it is a liberal meme poking fun at the President-elect and his running mate.
The original painting:
The MAGA 2024 reimagining:
The culprit
Then you notice the poster is JD Vance himself — complete with the gray checkmark Twitter assigns to the accounts of government officials. Your incredulity intensifies as It dawns on you that the increasingly weird Vance thinks presenting himself as Trump’s tradwife is a social media win.
Perhaps it is to the MAGAs — so far the tweet has received 138,000 likes. But for everyone else, including, I imagine, many swing voters who picked Trump, this amateurish meme is yet another example of Vance making things awkward.
It is hard to keep up with MAGA hypocrisy. These Puritans are scandalized by men in dresses reading books to happy children. Yet they celebrate a good Christian swanning up to the holiday table kitted out in women’s clothing. Damn it man, there are kids present.
The unmanly men promoting manliness
Sadly, this insult to constancy runs deeper than mere hypocrisy. JD Vance presumes to demand Americans hew to traditional views on virility and feminity. In his Appalachian orthodoxy, forged in an Ohio suburb, men wear the pants (literally and metaphorically) while women bake, procreate, and eschew cats. So what the hell is he saying here?
Vance may fancy himself the Moses of the tradwife movement, but when there is a chance to suck up to the boss, it's on with a dress. God only knows where Trump’s left hand is — and why Vance looks like it isn’t only the turkey getting stuffed.
Never in the history of the human race — or at least since dark-haired, gnomish Nazis celebrated tall blonds as the ideal German — has the rhetoric on masculinity been so at odds with the orators delivering the message.
The tassel-loafered desk warrior, Sen. Josh Hawley published his musings on the ideal man, Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs. It was an exercise in chutzpah. Who can forget how he earned his sobriquet, “The Running Man” by fleeing the Jan 6 insurrectionists he had encouraged to riot mere hours before?
Perhaps the dark-lashed, doe-eyed Vance is trying to get in good with the cackling doughboy, Tucker Carlson. This moon-faced calf celebrated his hots for the ideal man with a documentary paean to gym bods, The End of Men. Gay guys have described Carlson's homoerotic celebration as “pretty gay.” (Don’t miss the testicle tanning scene.)
Here’s the trailer.
I go through life without thinking much about the ideal man. I don’t watch shirtless videos showing me what I should look like if I want to be a real man. And I don’t read books explaining how much I must demean women to feel good about myself. I suppose that’s why my MAGA application was rejected.
