Trump and Putin, wannabe macho men

Is Donald Trump man enough to accept a diminutive ex-comedian’s invitation to visit the frontlines in Ukraine? Or will he betray his macho image and ignore Volodymyr Zelensky‘s offer?

The Ukrainian president extended the invitation on Feb. 17 while answering questions at the Munich Security Conference. He had already invited Trump to visit Ukraine in recent months, but this was the first time Zelensky suggested that the two of them observe the fighting up close.

“And if Mr. Trump comes,” Zelensky told the Munich audience, “I am ready to go to the front with him. I think that if we are going to have a conversation about how to end the war, we need to show the decision-makers what this war means. Not what they write about on Instagram, but a real war.”

Zelensky is right, of course. If Trump intends to end the war in 24 hours, as he’s promised to do, it might behoove him to take a look at the corpses and trenches and ruined buildings in southeastern Ukraine.

Unfortunately, Trump is unlikely to accept Zelensky’s offer. In failing to do so, however, he will effectively have fallen into the gender trap that Zelensky unwittingly set for him. After all, “real men” fight and look death squarely in the eye. They don’t just talk tough; they are tough. They don’t just insult and humiliate their opponents verbally; like Chuck Norris, Clint Eastwood and Arnold Schwarzenegger, they break the rules and kick some serious butt.

A real man would never decline to visit the front and order his minions to rain destruction on civilians or murder his opponents, especially those withering away in prison colonies. He’d never wimp out. He’d be there, leading the charge, guns blazing, even before being invited. At the very least, a real man would visit field hospitals and watch surgeons amputate limbs.

In declining to visit the front, Trump will have exposed himself as a macho fraud capable only of sexually harassing women, receiving “beautiful letters” from North Korean tyrant Kim Jong Un, and, in an inversion of Teddy Roosevelt, speaking loudly and carrying a small stick.

It may be some comfort for Trump to know that his friend and admirer, Russia’s illegitimate president Vladimir Putin, is no different from him in this respect. Putin assiduously avoids the front. Unlike Trump, who dared Covid-19 to infect him (while having access to the best medical care in the world), Putin hid in a deep bunker for two years, insisting that visitors be quarantined for 14 days and placing his interlocutors at the opposite end of enormous tables.

Putin’s cowardly behavior was especially striking given that he had carefully cultivated a hyper-masculine image for the better part of his reign. Putin had himself photographed bare-chested, posing with rifles, practicing judo, brandishing knives. Two attractive Russian ladies even sang “I want a man just like Putin.”

Putin knew that, in a deeply patriarchal society such as Russia, playing the macho could endow him with popularity and legitimacy. Unfortunately for him, he appears not to have calculated that hyper-masculine vigor works only as long as one is and looks vigorous. Today’s portly Putin with his bloated face doesn’t quite convey the same killer instinct that yesterday’s lean and mean Putin did. He may take some solace from the fact that the overweight, hamburger-chomping, orange-faced Trump would be even less likely to convey vitality and strength in Russia.

In sum, Trump and Putin are macho wannabes who are made for each other. When push comes to shove and the opportunity to do some real fighting comes along, they run. Unsurprisingly, according to the Washington Post’s Catherine Belton, “Putin’s administration ordered a group of Russian political strategists to use social media and fake news articles to push the theme that Zelensky ‘is hysterical and weak’” — that is, to ascribe to him the very stereotypically female characteristics that define Putin!

Ironically, little Zelensky comes across as the true man. His one concession to outward masculinity is the combat fatigues he wears, but, unlike Trump and Putin, he regularly visits the front and meets with soldiers. Indeed, his greatest act of courage occurred in the days after the full-scale Russian invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, when he stayed in Kyiv and turned down offers of refuge in the West. One suspects that Trump would have taken the first flight out of Kyiv and that Putin would have stayed hidden in some distant bunker.

Zelensky is not, as his many critics point out, without his faults. But in demonstrating that manhood is not about being a macho and acting tough, but about being courageous, compassionate and responsible, the ex-comedian may be setting a new standard for men in Eastern Europe. That, and victory over Russia, may prove to be his greatest accomplishments.

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”