Updated at 9:30 a.m. ET on October 21, 2026

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“There are some reasons to be president,” Donald Trump mused at a rally in Georgia earlier this month. Take a wild guess what these might be. The cool armored car? Custody of the nuclear button? The opportunities for immense corruption? Wrong. The leader of the free world was referring to the joy of living in a house guarded by “big, strong, handsome soldiers.” Under Joe Biden, soldiers were not allowed to be hot, because of woke. Even worse, some of them were girls.

Yes, after two grinding years of governance, Trump is back in his happy place, out on the campaign trail, voicing whichever disconnected thoughts crackle and fizz through his frontal cortex. His favorite rhetorical theme lately is an unexpected one: the official presidential dreamboat rankings. In multiple rallies, Trump has gone on and on about the relative hotness of male politicians, soldiers, and even protesters. As a result, people on the internet have diagnosed him with a novel medical condition: gay dementia. After putting in a solid shift in the heterosexuality mines, has the former beauty-pageant proprietor now become so disinhibited that he can no longer repress his thirst for man-flesh?

A less salacious explanation might be that the president has always refined his speeches based on audience feedback, and he’s discovered that his hot-guy material absolutely kills. In 2024, he kept going on about “the late, great Hannibal Lecter” and whether being electrocuted is preferable to being eaten by a shark, simply because the crowds enjoyed those riffs. Today the MAGA faithful get a transgressive thrill from hearing a man put into office by Christian conservatives deliver homoerotic stylings on male beauty. Calling women hot would read as creepy, and might remind audiences of the sexual-assault allegations against Trump, or the locker-room gaucheness of “grab ’em by the pussy.” But lusting after men is good, clean fun, and after a decade pushing the limits of outrageous behavior, here is a taboo that Trump can harmlessly break. Which Democrat is going to mock a guy for being a little bit swishy? Stephen Miller will not dare whisper to his boss: Sir, you know that we keep snidely implying that James Talarico is secretly gay? Your obvious love of buff soldiers is giving—mixed messages.

Enough of the serious chin-stroking electoral analysis, though. You want to hear which men America’s greatest president considers to be stone-cold babes. Step forward, Jon Husted of Ohio, with your glorious, rippling glutes and your valiant crusade against energy-efficient dishwashers. At a campaign stop for the Republican senator in Dayton, Trump discovered that Husted used to be a star football player. Naturally, the president looked for evidence of this in Husted’s buttocks—the windows to the soul. As he later told a crowd in Youngstown: “I don’t do this with men very often.” (A lie.) “I started examining his body because I didn’t know he was a great athlete. And I looked and I watched up and down. I looked at his ass.” The crowd laughed, which encouraged Trump to add that he also admired Husted’s hands, which he said were “like claws.”

[Read: The king of queens]

Days later in Kentucky, Trump returned to the theme of Husted’s badonkadonk. “I examined his ass, and then I looked at his shoulders. I looked at his feet. I looked at his hand. I looked at his jawline,” he told the crowd. “I then patted him on the shoulder, and it was like a piece of steel. I’m still recovering.” The Ohio candidate had gained “nine or 10 points since I talked about that,” he said. (Also a lie.)

Trump has always had a weakness for a photogenic guy. He reportedly chose members of his Cabinet, such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, after seeing how good they looked on television. He’s long made a habit of singling out attractive men in his audiences, entreating the rest of the crowd to join in his appreciation. (“Get up here, please. I want to see,” he told a muscled young man at a Coast Guard ceremony this spring.) Back in February, the president described a “very powerful” steel-factory owner who was so grateful for his policies that “he said, ‘Sir, I want to kiss you so badly.’” In May, my colleague Ashley Parker chronicled some of the men whose looks Trump had favorably assessed. These included the president of Paraguay (“young and handsome”), military pilots (“perfect specimens”), and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (“under that beautiful exterior is a killer”).

The president’s homoerotic stylings have become more obvious, however, because he has so little else to talk about on the campaign trail. Crooked Hillary and Sleepy Joe have long since departed the scene, Shifty Schiff’s impeachment plans went nowhere, and the fake-news media have been replaced by MAGA toadies. With few enemies left (except his own terrible judgment) Trump is struggling to develop new material. Like many older people, he has retreated to his comfort zone, and his comfort zone is guarded by big, strapping men in uniform. “They’re always great-looking, these four-star guys. I don’t know if they get the job by their look,” he told a rally in Kansas this week. He also praised the rock singer Ted Nugent for having a son who was “a beautiful-looking guy.”

The president has ruminated so often on male beauty lately that it’s become very obvious that he has a type. His taste in men turns out to be somewhat basic—white, beefy, butch; think corn-fed midwestern fireman—and thoroughly partisan. At the same rally in Georgia where he enthused about the White House guards, Trump incorrectly declared that Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, was not a “good-looking man,” unlike his Republican challenger. “I actually think Mike Collins is a good-looking man—and he’s all man. He’s all man,” added Trump. “I’m not sure about Ossoff.” (Let me save you a click: Collins is a mulleted 59-year-old with a touch of latter-day Newt Gingrich about his facial features, whereas Ossoff is so cute that he clearly had to shave off his beard in order to be taken seriously.) Trump went on to declare that the GOP candidate for Georgia governor, Rick Jackson, was also a “very handsome, distinguished, beautiful-looking guy.” In Kansas, Trump expanded his hotness rankings to encompass the crowd. Describing one loyalist’s confrontation with a protester, he noted approvingly that “the MAGA guy beat the crap out of him. Not that that matters. Good-looking guy.”

Trump’s MAGA goggles do have some limits. Last month, he went through a phase of roasting Ken Paxton, devoting sections of multiple speeches to what a schlub he found the Republican Senate candidate in Texas to be. “He may not be the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen,” the president observed on September 9, adding the next day: “I’m not sure if I like your look. I’m not sure if I like the way you dress. I don’t like the way you talk.” Sad! Paxton, apparently, has a face not even a homoerotically inclined Republican president can love.

An enthusiasm for buff young men in uniforms (or out of them) has always been one of the hallmarks of authoritarianism—a form of governance enamored of strong male bodies, and the promise of violence that they contain, even when the rulers consider overt homosexuality degenerate. Mussolini’s Italy simultaneously exiled dozens of gay men to the island of San Domino and produced the jaw-droppingly campy naked statues at the Stadio dei Marmi in Rome. Many dictators end up mired in camp: Muammar Qaddafi had an all-female bodyguard troop. Turkmenistan’s Saparmurat Niyazov renamed April after his mother and built a gold statue of himself that rotated to face the sun. Emperor Bokassa I of the short-lived Central African empire tried to make his coronation ceremony an exact replica of the one held by Napoleon Bonaparte, but was hampered by having to hold it in a basketball stadium.

[Read: The surprising reason for the new homophobia]

Donald Trump’s simultaneous love for unchecked executive power and a well-turned male ankle is therefore part of a rich historical tradition. At the same time, it is also one of the many ways in which his political style represents a departure from typical American conservatism. From the 1970s onward, the Republicans were the party of the “moral majority” and “traditional values.” The idea that the party’s base is casually homophobic is still such conventional wisdom that J. D. Vance, a Millennial who very obviously had LGBTQ friends in his student years, now has to play-act as an old-school social conservative to show the depth of his political conversion. When a man at a rally in Texas shouted out that he loved Vance, the vice president replied: “I love you too, sir. In a totally platonic way, to be clear. I’m the vice president, not James Talarico.”

Vance does not seem to have grasped that his boss’s campiness is key to his political appeal—it’s the secret sauce that transforms nastiness into showbiz sass. Trump is politics’ answer to Joan Rivers, and his persona is influenced by all the flavors of American fakery: the carnival barker, the reality-TV host, the kayfabe world of professional wrestling. He looks like a man doing a drag performance as himself.

Trump’s embrace of camp also reflects his immunity to shame. I get the sense that Vance is crippled with embarrassment by the thought of that famous picture of him in eyeliner and a blond wig. His unease with gayness, campiness, and femininity reads as insecurity. By contrast, Trump loves Sunset Boulevard and doesn’t care who knows it. Hell, he even went to Liza Minnelli’s wedding. That authenticity and disinhibition mean he can get a crowd of white Christians in Kentucky to listen to his homoerotic ramblings—and applaud.

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Imagine that you make a business deal with a friend—someone you know and trust. Say you’re selling him some land. But when you turn up at his country club to complete the sale, your friend announces that you were offering such a good deal that his friends want to buy some of your land too. And they’re all here, so could you sign the deeds over immediately? That’s asking too much of you, so you hesitate. Still, your friend is a nice guy, and you know he wouldn’t screw you over. You agree.

When you get home, though, your friend texts to say that he feels bad about what happened. It’s fine, you reassure him. But then, a few days later, you find out that everyone who bought your land is laughing about what a fool you were to sell it so cheap. You find out that other people think that your friend has screwed you over. You call up your friend and say: Hey, this doesn’t feel right. His tone changes. He doesn’t want to speak to you anymore. And then you find out his country club has barred you.

After all that, might you not conclude that the transaction was a betrayal by your friend—and that your land sale was coerced, even though you ostensibly agreed to it? Consent is often treated as a binary concept, when reality is much more gray, and too often we act as though legal judgments and ethical ones must be the same.

Last month, a former Cornell University student referred to in legal papers as Jane Doe alleged that seven men had participated in an hours-long assault on her at a fraternity house in 2024. Thanks to reporting by outlets including The New York Times and The Cornell Daily Sun, the campus student newspaper, we now have a clearer picture of what happened on the night of October 19 that year. Around 11 p.m., the anonymous complainant left a bar and walked to the Chi Phi fraternity house. Jane Doe was already drunk, according to the lawsuit. There, she asserts, she met a male friend, Matthew Ingalls, and began a threesome with him and a buddy of his, Jonathan Newell. (The men are named in Doe’s lawsuit and their identities have been widely reported elsewhere.)

Read: Is college getting less safe for women?

She says that another man, Gillio Lopes, later came into the room and initiated sex with her. A photo included in the lawsuit indicates that, at 1:42 a.m., Newell sent a message to the fraternity’s Snapchat group promising “free pussy” in the alumni room. This announcement was greeted with the equivalent of high fives from several men. “I fucking love Chi Phi,” Ingalls replied, according to the image, and added, “like you can walk in and whip it out.” According to Doe’s lawsuit, multiple other members of Chi Phi entered the room: One of them kissed her, two others joined the group in snorting ketamine off her naked body, and a seventh participated in another threesome with her and Ingalls. (All seven men have denied wrongdoing; Ingalls told Cornell that he was sexually assaulted by Doe while incapacitated, according to messages reviewed by ABC News.) The lawsuit also targets Cornell, the fraternity, Doe’s own sorority, and the bar where Doe, then 20, was drinking before heading to the frat house.

Jane Doe did not arrive at the frat house that night with the intention of participating in an orgy; that much has not been disputed. The narrow legal question is therefore whether the various men involved obtained her further consent as the sexual scenario spiraled. (According to Doe, she did successfully refuse some of what the men were asking for, such as a foursome that she understood would involve anal sex, according to the district attorney’s statement on September 28 this year.) She says in her lawsuit that she consumed so much alcohol and ketamine that she was extremely disoriented, but under New York law, if a person is voluntarily intoxicated, then the mere fact of their intoxication does not make them unable to consent. Was the ketamine offered to her, or forced on her? That is a key question in assessing whether any of the men committed a crime.

What has made this case the subject of so much viral debate is that Doe herself did not initially understand what happened as rape, and her recent lawsuit includes allegations that she did not make in her sworn statement to police two years ago. The day after, Newell was sufficiently uncomfortable with what had happened that he messaged Doe to apologize. He should have acted to “shut it down and kick people out before it got way out of hand,” he wrote. Doe reassured him: “At the end of the day non [sic] of the sexual stuff was illegal and honestly i really liked being w u and matt.”

Some of the fraternity members quickly began to coordinate among themselves to defuse the situation. Another of the men present that night, Winston Lee, told Doe in a phone call that he had been advised not to speak to her, according to a recording obtained by ABC News. When Doe asked how so many men had gotten into the room, Lee told her that “there was nothing saying that like, um, anything was happening in that room or anything.” The group-chat image included in the lawsuit tells a different story: Lee had responded to the “free pussy” offer on Snapchat with the exultant words “CHI PHIII.”

Three days after the incident, Doe got checked for a urinary-tract infection, which she told the doctor had been acquired in a “traumatic way,” according to a transcript of her interview with investigators obtained by the Times. In that account, her perspective on what happened changed when unsettling rumors about a “gang bang” began to fly around campus. According to Doe’s account, she reassessed her experience after reading an allegation in an online forum that Chi Phi members had “gang r*ped a sophomore.” Around this time, she was disinvited from the Chi Phi Halloween party by the fraternity president, text messages indicate. She wrote to Ingalls, her supposed friend, to say, “The woman will always get the short end of the stick. Yall aren’t my friends. Yall are covering your asses.” On November 3, she texted Newell: “let’s be clear that 90% of what happened that night was not consensual.”

Doe reported the encounter to the campus police on November 8. Investigators interviewed her six days later, and turned her extensive testimony into a six-page sworn statement, which was submitted to the district attorney’s office. (The sworn statement does not describe what happened as a rape, whereas the longer interview transcript records Doe as saying, “I can say with 100% confidence I was raped.”) The DA declined to prosecute, arguing that “the facts as set forth in the statement objectively prevent the filing of criminal charges,” although his office also declined to review additional evidence collected by Cornell, according to the Times. Amid the publicity generated by Doe’s recent lawsuit, New York Governor Kathy Hochul appointed State Attorney General Letitia James as a special prosecutor to review the case. Cornell has hired former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates to review the university’s handling of the matter.

In January 2025, Doe made a Title IX complaint, prompting Cornell to conduct a thorough investigation, which included interviewing six of the men, according to the Times. The university expelled Ingalls and Newell and suspended Lopes and Lee. (All four admitted to having sexual contact with Doe, but all four maintain that it was consensual.) A fifth man, who Doe said had kissed her without consent, had graduated; Cornell barred him from campus for three years. The two men accused of entering the room and failing to intervene were asked to write “reflection papers.” (In the lawsuit, Doe incorrectly accuses Cornell of agreeing to let all of the men off easy if they agreed to write essays about the encounter.) The fraternity was also barred from campus.

Whether any of the men are guilty of rape is a matter for the New York court system. However, the evidence we have so far convicts them of being cruel, misogynistic jerks who deserve the punishments they have already received. Those Snapchat messages are both revealing and incriminating, because they demonstrate the emotional dynamics of the night more clearly than any witness statement ever could. These men saw Doe not as a fellow human being, but as a vending machine dispensing bro points they could cash in with their buddies.

The academic literature on multiple-perpetrator rape finds that, in the words of forensic psychologist Mackenzie Lambine, “sexual elements within juvenile group offending are often ‘coincidental’—secondary to the need for the group to exercise power over the victim, exert male dominance and develop relationship bonds.” Ingalls was supposed to be Doe’s friend, but the evidence now before us suggests that his loyalty was entirely to the fraternity. The persistent criticism of fraternities is that they foster unhealthy relationships among the powerful men of the future, by a system of interlaced kompromat and shared transgressions. This case does nothing to debunk that view.

Really, the whole of the Cornell story can be boiled down to Jane Doe’s realization that her male peers adhered to the old adage “Bros before hoes.” “I was a sex doll for all intents and purposes, which is sad,” she told police.

In rape cases, the traditional approach has been to pick apart the complainant’s actions. What was she wearing? Why did she let herself get so drunk? Why didn’t she fight back? Why did her story change? Online, you can easily find the view that Jane Doe is a regretful slut who maliciously decided to ruin seven men’s lives with a knowingly false criminal complaint. A slightly softer version of this is the claim that Doe reached for the identity of victim because the alternative was whore. The former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly thinks Doe must have consented, because she is “extremely beefy in her arms and her legs” and was therefore grateful for the validation of being desired. “An unambiguous case of consensual sex,” Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute declared, plugging an interview she had given about the “campus rape myth” to The Daily Wire. “Women shouldn’t expect coddling,” the USA Today columnist Ingrid Jacques wrote. “And regretting one’s bad decisions is a far cry from rape.” Jacques further wondered why the men involved were being held to a “higher standard” than Doe.

From the March 2014 issue: The dark power of fraternities

Were they, though? This is where the land-deal analogy is instructive: Doe thought she had signed up for mutually pleasurable group sex; she discovered later that she was just a prop in a bonding exercise among men. The bargain changed when she was in no state to renegotiate. Doe was heavily outnumbered when further sexual acts occurred beyond the initial threesome.

Heavily outnumbered, need I say, by men. The right has spent the past few years mocking the left for not understanding—in the context of, say, competitive sports—that sex differences exist. Now some conservatives are reflexively defending the Cornell 7 by playing cute and pretending that a sexual situation involving one woman and multiple men is a meeting of equals. Please. Our understanding of rape cannot be gender-neutral, even though women do indeed have agency and personal responsibility, just as men do. The scenario in which a drunk man is lured upstairs in a sorority house—where its sisters text the group chat offering “free dick” to anyone interested and send one another messages about what legends they are—does not exist outside porn.

What happened at Chi Phi that night might very well not satisfy a criminal standard of proof, but, as the conservative writer Natalia Bower notes, “we don’t have to call it rape to get mad at it.” To use an old-fashioned word, it was wrong. Tell your daughter, if you must, not to take ketamine with strangers or agree to a threesome in a frat house. But tell your son this, too: Don’t send messages to the group chat offering a drunk woman like a box of doughnuts. Don’t turn up to a frat-house room expecting anal sex with a woman you’re meeting for the first time, when she is already surrounded by other men. Jane Doe transgressed against historical standards of purity for women. The men at Chi Phi broke a code of human decency that ought to be eternal.