Despite this summer’s celebrations of the 250th, US democracy looks fragile to some. But there are signs everywhere that what is actually insecure is the ongoing right-wing quest to control the levers of power. As Hannah Arendt, theorist of totalitarianism, astutely observed, “violence appears where power is in jeopardy.” And in the summer of 2026 we are seeing an abundance of evidence of that maxim, especially when it comes to MAGA’s strongman performances.
As much rhetoric on the right suggests, those performances rely not just on gender stereotypes but on the hard and fast line of the gender binary. It’s a line that MAGA spokespeople work hard to defend. Think of the President’s invocation of Theodore Roosevelt as the ultimate “he-man” on horseback during his speech at Mount Rushmore on the 4th of July. There, literally at the height of power, he felt compelled to proclaim the glory of the gender binary – proving the extent to which policing, and weaponizing, that boundary is key to the MAGA arsenal.
Nowhere to date has the insecurity of the he-man principle been more spectacularly on display during the Trump years than in June’s professional brawl on the White House lawn, organized to celebrate the commander-in-chief’s birthday.
When Josh Hokit looked into the camera after his Big, Beautiful UFC victory and spat out his now-infamous charge, “Michelle Obama is a man,” he set off an internet firestorm. That social media maelstrom tells us everything we need to know about the shaky grip Hokit and the whole gleeful MAGA band has on that which they prize most: white warrior masculinity.
Foxx News host Greg Gutfeld refused to condemn the remark on the grounds that Democrats routinely fail to call out conservative bashing. Hokit himself defended his affront by suggesting that he meant it as a complimentary reference to Mrs. Obama’s strength in the face of adversity.
To be sure, Michelle Obama Derangement Syndrome is alive and well on the right, feeding paranoia, racism, sexism, and transphobia. But what the Hokit case dramatically illustrates is that his rant has nothing to do with the former First Lady – and everything to do with the manifestly weak grasp Hokit has on his own masculinity.
I’m not talking about the fragility of gender here. Hokit’s hold on masculinity is more precarious than fragile, more teetering than weak, more defensive than aggressive. Because as decades of research on gender has shown, there is nothing natural or self-evident about the gender binary. It is not found in nature. Nor, as historian Beans Velocci argues, is it necessarily coherent or firmly established. It has to be performed, consolidated, and stabilized in practically every social space we find ourselves. For these reasons, fighters like Hokit must consistently assert their masculinity in opposition to what they perceive as threats to it.
Research also shows that men react to threats to their gender identity with extreme forms of masculinity – what sociologists have called “the overcompensation thesis.” In politics today we see case after case of those who continuously re-assert and re-affirm their identity as men, typically as white heterosexual men, against a variety of others who appear to throw their masculinity into question.
For without the assurance that such comparison is intended to provide – without the specter of the “she-man” – there is no white warrior masculinity to tout. And without the re-assurances of the viewing audience (Hokit’s follow-up query, “Am I right, America?”), there is no “there” there at all.
The Obamas have been out of power for ten years and two Trump presidencies. Yet at the height of Hokit’s triumph in the ring and at the epicenter of the White House as a symbolic venue – at a time and place, in other words, where the raging bulls of white MAGA masculinity were surely in ascendance – Hokit needed to throw doubt on Michelle Obama’s gender identity precisely in order to shore up his own.
Because even when all the forces in the world are arrayed in his favor, his masculinity is apparently at risk and his status as a MAGA warrior, accordingly endangered. And given Hokit’s Mexican parentage on his mother’s side, the whiteness of MAGA masculinity is also in peril.
Well over a month after the incident, Vice President J.D. Vance was still defending Hokit’s provocation as a joke – more evidence of the way that perceived threats to normative masculinity persistently disarm the right.
As we continue to commemorate the 250th we should, perversely, thank Josh Hokit for reminding us of the ultimately weak and defensive hold that MAGA itself has on the nation. And we should seize upon all the spaces where white warrior patriotism seems to perform its way into a semblance of all-encompassing power.
We can and should take back those spaces, whether they are political or cultural, in the name of American justice, equality, freedom, independence, and democracy. Make no mistake: gender-based violence is real. But it may aid us in combating it if we are better able to appreciate the defensive posture MAGA men operate from.
As we do so we should remember that like Josh himself, the creeping authoritarianism on display across America which expresses itself through the burlesque of smackdown wrestling is not just crass and self-serving. It is ultimately on the backfoot, due in part to the precarious foundations of the gender binary as it operates in the world.
Such is the case even and especially when dominance over others appears to be secure. Violence occurs when power is in jeopardy. This clear-eyed view, which emboldens us to discern opportunities made available by skepticism about the stability of gender identity, may be the best hope for democracy we have in the summer of 2026.