Alpha Male has won.
What happens now?
Comedian Brent Terhune has for years satirized the angry, working-class white man who criticizes “libtards” and expresses unwavering devotion to Donald Trump. His monologues resonate with right-wing diatribes and embody toxic masculinity in a character he calls the Alpha Male. But the aggrieved American is now leaning on a sense of vindication as he celebrates Trump's return to the White House. And Terhune wonders what that means for his character and the nation.
“I think he's going to go from being a sore loser to a sore winner,” said Terhune, who lives outside Indianapolis in a blue-collar neighborhood. “The Alpha Male will always exist. He was there before Trump. He doesn't leave. He is your dad, your cousin. We all feel misunderstood and betrayed at times. But he has to find a way to justify everything Trump and MAGA do. “It’s a strange obstacle and a way to release my frustrations.”
Terhune, a former Boy Scout and Catholic-school-raised liberal, loathes Trump and is nothing like his alter ego. Alpha Male, who sports a reddish beard, wraparound sunglasses, and a backwards cap, is enamored of people like Tucker Carlson and has no tolerance for gender studies, critical race theory, or what he sees as the liberal radicalization of a country that has succumbed. to snowflakes and bibliophiles.
The character is both emblematic and a caricature of Joe Rogan's demographic, brothers and older brothers, mostly white but with a growing number of Latinos, who worship Elon Musk and march to the crass, interwoven rhetoric of Trump.
“His people will be encouraged,” Terhune said of the president-elect, suggesting that Trump's most extreme supporters will become a greater threat to democracy, civil rights and gender equality than during his first term.
“He is an embodiment of who they are,” she said. “They think he hates the same things they do. They are ready to excuse anything for their boy. “There will be no repercussions.”
Trump and his allies ran an anti-immigrant, high-testosterone, economic protection campaign that attracted ranchers, mechanics, pastors, billionaires, college students, and the radical Proud Boys. Musk, who has 204 million followers on X, urged men to get out and vote and posted a militant reference on Election Day: “The cavalry has arrived. Men are voting in record numbers. “Now they realize that everything is at stake.”
Musk reposted an artist's rendering in which he, muscular and stripped to the waist, resembles the Hulk carrying an American flag. Rogan sits on Musk's shoulders and lifts Trump into the sky in a trinity that evokes both a savior complex and hypermasculinity.
These images suit Alpha Male well. Terhune's character is unapologetic. You are not wrong. He represents, said Terhune, who was profiled in The Times last year, men who feel empowered by Trump's brashness and the belief that he shares their anger and bewilderment at a leftist, woke society conspiring to leave them behind. .
Alpha Male was born out of what Terhune saw as the hypocrisy of conservatives who embrace American ideals, such as freedom of speech and religion, but attack anyone who opposes their prescribed views. The character's first appearance came when Terhune posted “Redneck Burns Nikes” in reaction to the then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback. Colin Kaepernick kneeling in 2016 during the national anthem to protest racism. This was followed by rants from the Alpha Male about the book ban, the black “Little Mermaid,” Trump's mugshot, musings about Hunter Biden's laptop, and attacks on President Biden, whom he calls “Long Hugs Dad.”
Brent Terhune channels his Alpha Male character in a video from his car in Greenwood, Indiana.
(AJ Mast / For The Times)
Alpha Male, whose videos have had millions of views on social media, has become a way for Terhune to understand and navigate the nation's divisions. The character is a funny, if disturbing, mirror who sometimes, like Archie Bunker before him, gains a degree of empathy. Terhune's irony and satire can be so clever that some people don't get the joke, thinking that Alpha Male is not an act but the comic's true self.
“Is this satire or is this guy really as unhinged as he seems?” a man posted on Facebook.
Like many liberals, Terhune, who spoke by phone from home the day after the election, was having a hard time reconciling the numerous rifts and recriminations that have rocked the country since Trump's first campaign eight years ago.
Trump's recent victory is “a shocking, but not all that shocking, revelation of where we are as a country,” said Terhune, the son of a lunch lady and a father who trucked fuel to construction sites. “A lot of people were fed up with the last four years, but this means that people don't think beyond themselves. It's their need to put party before country out of perceived patriotism. I'm a straight white guy. I'll probably be fine. But what about people who are not white and heterosexual?
Through it all, though, the focus of Terhune's Alpha Male bits will remain on Trump and what he has shaped. In a recent video about Trump working at McDonald's, Alpha Male says: “Mr. Trump doesn't need to work there. He was just sticking to lying Kamala Harris. …There is no evidence that she even worked there. Hell, are we even sure she was the Communist attorney general? No. Are we even sure she was vice president? No. Nobody knows. “There is no evidence.”
In another parody, Alpha Male is the driver of the garbage truck Trump rode in after Biden's verbal gaffe suggesting Trump supporters were trash: “You pissed me off, Joe, and if being a patriot is what They call them trash these days, so, yes, I am trash because I am going to show up at the polls with a bag of trash to show them what we white people can do, trash.”
Alpha Male, sometimes crying as he recounts his many grievances, mythologizes Trump, a leader who survived an assassin's bullet, an army of prosecutors, 34 felony charges and an endless scandal.
After what authorities said would have been a second assassination attempt on Trump at his Florida golf course, Terhune reimagines the incident in a video in which Trump grabs a golf club to deflect bullets: “The first one he sent He flew back to the shooter, the Bud Light fell out of his hand and he ran away scared. And he was running away and an envelope with cash fell out of his pocket. You could see it said, “Fool's Pay.” “That’s when the Secret Service finally stood up and did something.”
That's the kind of fervor – James Brown's “It's a Man's Man's Man's World,” performed at the Republican National Convention in July – that has surrounded Trump since he strutted onto the nation's political stage.
“He can do no wrong,” Terhune said, imitating his alter ego. “If you don't like it, accept it.”
For Terhune, the only way to deal with this is to continue channeling Alpha Male's deep well of suspicion and anger.
