Alpha Male has gained.
What occurs now?
Comic Brent Terhune has for years satirized the offended, working-class white man who rails in opposition to libtards and expresses unyielding devotion to Donald Trump. His monologues resound with right-wing rants and epitomize poisonous masculinity in a personality he calls Alpha Male. However the aggrieved American man now rides on a way of vindication in celebrating Trump’s return to the White Home. And Terhune wonders what meaning for his character and the nation.
“I think he’ll go from being a sore loser to a sore winner,” mentioned Terhune, who lives exterior Indianapolis in a blue-collar neighborhood. “Alpha Male will always exist. He was there before Trump. He doesn’t go away. He’s your dad, your cousin. We all feel misunderstood and betrayed at times. But he’s got to find a way to justify everything Trump and MAGA do. It’s a weird hurdle, and a way for me to get out my frustrations.”
Terhune — a former Boy Scout and a Catholic-school-raised liberal — abhors Trump and is nothing like his alter ego. Alpha Male, who wears a russet beard, wraparound sun shades and a backward ball cap, is enamored with the likes of Tucker Carlson and has no tolerance for gender research, crucial race idea or what he sees because the liberal radicalization of a rustic that has succumbed to snowflakes and bibliophiles.
The character is without delay emblematic and a caricature of the Joe Rogan demographic, bros and growing old bros, largely white however with a rising variety of Latinos, who revere Elon Musk and march to Trump’s crass, weaving rhetoric.
“His people will be encouraged,” Terhune mentioned of the president-elect, suggesting that essentially the most excessive of Trump’s followers will develop into extra of a menace to democracy, civil rights and gender equality than throughout his first time period.
“He’s an embodiment of who they are,” he mentioned. “They believe he hates the same things they do. They’re willing to excuse anything and everything for their guy. There’ll be no repercussions.”
Trump and his allies ran a high-testosterone, anti-immigrant, protect-the-economy marketing campaign that appealed to ranchers, mechanics, pastors, billionaires, school college students and the unconventional Proud Boys. Musk — who has 204 million followers on X — urged males to end up and vote, posting a militant reference on the day of the election: “The cavalry has arrived. Men are voting in record numbers. They now realize everything is at stake.”
Musk reposted an artist’s depiction during which he, muscle-bound and stripped to the waist, resembles the Hulk carrying an American flag. Rogan sits atop Musk’s shoulders lifting Trump towards the sky in a trinity that evokes each a savior complicated and hyper-masculinity.
Such imagery fits Alpha Male. Terhune’s character doesn’t apologize. He doesn’t equivocate. He represents, mentioned Terhune, who was profiled in The Instances final yr, males who really feel empowered by Trump’s showman brashness and the idea that he shares their rage and bewilderment at a left-wing, woke society that conspires to go away them behind.
Alpha Male was born out of what Terhune noticed because the hypocrisy of conservatives who espouse American beliefs, reminiscent of freedom of speech and faith, however assault anybody opposed their prescribed views. The character’s first look got here when Terhune posted “Redneck Burns Nikes” in response to then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick taking a knee in 2016 through the nationwide anthem to protest racism. That was adopted by Alpha Male diatribes on e-book banning, the Black “Little Mermaid,” Trump’s mug shot, ruminations on Hunter Biden’s laptop computer and swipes at President Biden, whom he calls “Papa Long Hugs.”
Brent Terhune channels his character Alpha Male in a video rant from his automobile in Greenwood, Ind.
(AJ Mast / For The Instances )
Alpha Male, whose movies have had tens of millions of views on social media, has develop into a manner for Terhune to grasp and navigate the nation’s divisions. The character is a humorous, if unsettling, mirror who at instances — like Archie Bunker earlier than him — earns a level of empathy. Terhune’s irony and satire could be so sly that some folks don’t get the joke, pondering that Alpha Male isn’t an act however the comedian’s true self.
“Is this satire or is this guy really as deranged as he sounds?” one man posted on Fb.
Like many liberals, Terhune, who spoke by cellphone from his house on the day after the election, was discovering it troublesome to reconcile the numerous ruptures and recriminations which have jolted the nation since Trump’s first marketing campaign eight years in the past.
Trump’s current victory is “a shocking but not so shocking revelation of where we are as a country,” mentioned Terhune, the son of a lunch woman and a father who trucked gasoline to building websites. “A lot of people were fed up with the last four years, but this says that people don’t think past themselves. It is their need to put party over country for perceived patriotism. I’m a straight white guy. I’ll probably be fine. But what about people who aren’t straight and white?”
By means of all of it, although, the main target of Terhune’s Alpha Male bits will keep on Trump and what he has formed. In a current video about Trump working at McDonald’s, Alpha Male says, “Mr. Trump doesn’t need to work there. He was just sticking it to lying Kamala Harris. … There’s no proof she even worked there. Hell, are we even sure she was the attorney general of Commie-fornia? No. Are we even sure she was vice president? No. Nobody knows. There’s no proof.”
In one other skit, Alpha Male is the driving force within the rubbish truck Trump rode in after Biden’s verbal gaffe suggesting that Trump’s supporters have been rubbish: “You done pissed me off, Joe, and if being a patriot is what they’re calling garbage these days, then, yeah, I am garbage cause I’m going to show up to the polls wearing a garbage bag to show you what us white trash can do.”
Alpha Male, typically tearing up when he recounts his many grievances, mythologizes Trump, a pacesetter who survived an murderer’s bullet, a military of prosecutors, 34 felony counts and infinite scandal.
After what authorities mentioned would have been a second assassination try in opposition to Trump at his golf course in Florida, Terhune reimagines the incident in a video during which Trump grabs a golf membership to deflect bullets: “The first one he sent flying went back to the shooter, knocked his Bud Light clean out of his hand and he took off scared. And he was running away and there was an envelope of cash that fell out of his pocket. You could see on it, it said, ‘Pay off from the Dumb-ocrats.’ It was then that the Secret Service finally got off their lazy asses and did something.”
That’s the sort of fervor — James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” performed on the Republican Nationwide Conference in July — that has surrounded Trump since he swaggered onto the nation’s political stage.
“He can do no wrong,” mentioned Terhune, mimicking his alter ego. “If you don’t like it, deal with it.”
For Tehrune, the one option to take care of it’s to maintain channeling Alpha Male’s deep effectively of suspicion and anger.