Flamboyant virility has always tended to go hand in hand with authoritarian politics, which is driven by the need to possess and exploit bodies, minds, national resources, and more. It’s easy to laugh at the pectoral-baring performances of Mussolini and Vladimir Putin, and dismiss the rape jokes made by Jair Bolsonaro and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, but the strongman style of leadership responds to perceived threats to male authority by upholding patriarchal privilege and the rights of men to satisfy their “natural” male desires.

Trump announced his allegiance to this tradition early on. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and I wouldn’t lose voters,” he asserted in January 2016. In October of that year, his assaultive approach to women became public through the leak of the 2005 Access Hollywood tape (“When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” Trump said). In spite of widespread predictions that the leak would be the end of the Trump campaign, it merely enhanced his macho profile.

The ethos of lawless masculinity is a lubricant of corruption, normalizing behaviors and redefining illegal or immoral acts as acceptable, from election fraud to sexual assault. These new norms attract collaborators who find it thrilling to be able to commit criminal acts with impunity. (Gosar used promises of blanket pardons to recruit participants for the January 6 coup attempt.)