Trump and Hegseth want men to boost their manliness

The Guardian -  Two years after Donald Trump decisively won the vote of the American man, polls say male voters are increasingly disillusioned with an administration that has waged wars and enriched itself.

Ahead of the midterms, Trump’s strategy seems to be to find a way to get that masculine animus back, so the male populace will vote not with their heads or their hearts, but with their hogs. At least, that’s one way of understanding why, this summer, Trump’s secretaries of health and defense announced plans that could increase levels of testosterone, or simply “T”, in the civilian and military population.

In June, the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, announced the FDA was removing a limitation on testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) which stated that its safety and effectiveness “have not been established”. This was part of a suite of FDA changes that could make it much easier for men to be prescribed testosterone, potentially accelerating a boom in the number of men on TRT; already nearly 12m prescriptions were dispensed in 2025, from fewer than 1m in 2000.

A few weeks later the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, announced he was making testosterone screening compulsory for military service members over the age of 30, and offering voluntary screening for all members – part of an effort to forge what he calls a “High-T department of war”. Service members who are deemed to have low T will be offered state-sponsored replacement therapy.

Trump acolytes don’t only want to give men more testosterone, they are keen to castigate those who they think don’t have enough of it. Ken Paxton, campaigning for a Texas Senate seat that may decide the balance of power in Washington, has run ads casting his Democratic challenger, James Talarico, as “too low-T for Texas”. Trump’s most loyal adviser, Stephen Miller, called Talarico, a cisgendered heterosexual man, the “first transgender Senate candidate”.