More Danes than Antique Romans

Thumb on pretzel, from AOL Lifestyle.

Former New York Times columnist David Brooks ("Before Manliness Lost its Virtue") has noticed that a lot of figures in the Trump administration have a thing about being manly in one way or another:

There is the slovenly “I don’t care what you think” manliness of Steve Bannon. There’s the look-at-me-I-can-curse manliness that Anthony Scaramucci learned from “Glengarry Glen Ross.” There is the affirmation-hungry “I long to be the man my father was” parody of manliness performed by Donald Trump. There are all those authentically manly Marine generals Trump hires to supplement his own.

The David Mamet reference is stolen from Kevin D. Williamson's admired National Review piece on the unlamented jerk Scaramucci (it really was pretty well done, though of course the subtext was that the White House's vulgarity proves that it's really a leftwing operation, because conservatives never say "fuck" when ladies are within hearing). I don't know why Brooks uses the hyphen construction in the second sentence instead of the quotation marks of the first and third.

As far as I know Trump only has one two authentically manly Marine generals to work with, John Kelly, who had to vacate Homeland Security so he could be Marine-in-charge in the West Wing (Flynn and McMaster, and Keith Kellogg of the National Security Council are all Army, and it's Admiral Mike Rogers who runs the NSA). The idea of "generals Trump hires to supplement his own" suggests that he also has some secret private generals as well, which is very weird, although it would explain that bizarre episode last week when he claimed that "his" generals had advised him to ban transsexual people from military service, though none of the generals in the administration knew anything about it: