It takes a certain kind of nerve to declare yourself the authority on masculinity when your most memorable recent act was fleeing to Cancun while your constituents lost power in a deadly winter storm.
Ted Cruz has that kind of nerve.
This week the Texas senator questioned the masculinity of James Talarico, a Democratic candidate for his Senate seat. “If you were making a list of a thousand adjectives to describe this guy, masculine would not be one of them,” Cruz said. “If a stiff breeze came by, it would blow him over like a feather.” Talarico, apparently, is also guilty of running a vegan campaign and opposing oil and gas. These are, in Cruz’s framing, disqualifying traits. A man who doesn’t eat meat and cares about the environment is not a real man. Noted.
Cruz graduated from Harvard. He presumably knows what an adjective is. Whether Harvard is comfortable with how he’s deploying the knowledge is a separate question.
Enter Mary Trump.
The clinical psychologist and presidential niece has a Substack newsletter called Trump Trolls Trump, in which she catalogues the week’s events with the specific weariness of someone who knows exactly how these people operate because she grew up around them. This week she trained her sights on the masculinity debate – and made one observation that cut through everything else.
“Apparently we are supposed to believe Ted Cruz is now the nation’s foremost authority on masculinity,” she wrote. “Personally, I do not care. It seems like an odd qualification for public office. What are they going to do? Arm wrestle? Challenge each other to duels? Fight in a cage match on the White House lawn?”
Then she got to it.
“But if we are defining masculinity, I would have thought one basic requirement would be defending your spouse when another man publicly attacks her.”
This is a reference with a very specific target. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump promoted a conspiracy theory suggesting Cruz’s father had helped assassinate John F. Kennedy. He then publicly attacked Cruz’s wife Heidi, essentially calling her ugly. Cruz, having endured all of this, subsequently endorsed Trump anyway. Whatever you think about any of that, “defending your spouse when another man attacks her” was not a phrase that featured prominently in the episode.
Mary Trump connected the dots: “What do I know? I grew up in a family with Donald Trump, who knows absolutely nothing about being a real man.”
The rest of her newsletter is, as ever, a detailed account of a week that somehow keeps getting stranger. Trump was booed at the NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden – as we reported at the time in our Trump NBA Finals piece – and responded to the footage with characteristic clarity. “I thought it was very good. Yeah. It was certainly amazing. It was, I think, mostly cheers.”
Those were boos. Several seconds of sustained boos, captured from multiple angles, in a city that has been rejecting him personally for decades. But if you’re Donald Trump, and you were on television, then everything was wonderful.
JD Vance appeared this week to address negotiations with Iran, and managed to suggest that a deal could happen “in the next week” but also “months from now.” Which is, as Mary Trump notes, quite a range. Trump has declared dozens of times that the war is already over. His vice president is not sure when it might end. His Secretary of Defense presumably knows even less.
Then there is the Reflecting Pool, which Trump has been calling the Reflecting Lake, and which he recently described in terms that revealed a somewhat idiosyncratic grasp of the physical world. “The almost 2,500 foot long. That’s taller than any building in the world, actually. There’s no building that’s 2,500 feet tall.” The Reflecting Pool is flat. It has no height. It is, by definition, a pool. But it is long, and Trump appears to find this deeply moving.
The before and after photos Trump shared on Truth Social comparing the pool during the Obama administration with the renovated version also caught attention – because the clouds in both photos appear to be in almost exactly the same positions despite being taken more than a decade apart. The birds appear to be flying in the same formation. The renovation reportedly cost thirteen million dollars. Digital editing was, perhaps, included in the budget.
And then there’s the economy. Inflation hit 4.2% in May, the third consecutive monthly increase and the highest level in more than three years. Under Biden, it finished at 2.9%. Trump ran on fixing inflation. A reporter asked him about the new figures.
“No. I love it. The numbers were great. You know what I really love? I love the inflation.”
He loves inflation.
Mary Trump’s suggested bumper sticker for 2026: “Donald Trump loves inflation.” It’s hard to argue with the logic.
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