A very Trump constituency

That bitter divorced men would be a core Trump constituency is as inevitable as car dealers being a core Trump constituency:

Joshua Divens describes the end of his marriage as the “largest failure of my life.” A law-enforcement officer from a small town in Ohio, Divens married his first wife at age 19; they stayed together through more than 20 years and four attempts at marriage counseling. In 2018, Divens told his wife he wanted a divorce and filed for a dissolution — a process by which spouses come to an agreement on ending the relationship without getting the court involved. He says she responded by filing papers herself. “I got served at work, which was embarrassing,” he tells me. “It was just downhill from there.”

The couple share a son, who’s now 8 years old, and it rankled Divens that his ex-wife filed for primary custody. “I said, ‘I don’t care about the house, I’ll split the pension. The only thing I’m not negotiating on is 50-50 custody.’” Divens says their split became a “knock-down drag out in court.” The rancor spilled into other areas of his personal life; Divens says several of the couple’s mutual friends cut him off.

The divorce process may have driven him away from his community, but it also drove him closer to one person: Donald Trump. “It was kind of like a microcosm of what I felt like was being done to Trump” at the time. “I was accused of having multiple affairs. None of it happened.” He compares the rumors he says his social circle spread about him with accusations that the former reality-TV star colluded with Russia during the 2016 election, or that he bragged about sexual assault in the Access Hollywood tape. (Trump wasn’t saying he forcibly grabbed women’s genitals, Divens insists. He was saying they let you do it.)

Christ. Although pretty much the entire Republican Party at least has to pretend to believe this at this point.

When guys like Divens and Trump stand up for themselves, he argues, outsiders will “totally flip your world and demonize you.”

Trump has long polled significantly better with men than women and has recently made inroads with even the youngest male voters, fueling a historic 51 percent polling gap between Gen-Z women and men. But according to an analysis of polling from the conservative American Enterprise Institute, his pull may actually be strongest with divorcés like Divens. While divorced men have been trending right for at least the past two decades, the poll found some 56 percent of divorced men now support Trump — more than single men, married men, and women of any relationship status. Daniel Cox, who conducted the poll, tells me that the divorce divide started widening in the mid-2010s, around the time of Trump’s first presidential campaign and changes in how we handle sexual assault and harassment. “Politicians like Trump are saying men are getting the raw end of the deal here after the Me Too movement, and giving voice to some of the pain and challenges men are facing,” he says. “You have an undercurrent of resentment that leads them to try to leverage it for political purposes.”

Whether they agreed with Trump’s policies or just related to him on a personal level, the experiences of the five divorced men I spoke with seemed to deepen their beliefs in a visceral, almost intimate way that is difficult for a bad debate performance or a splashy campaign ad to dislodge. Today, six years after his split, Divens supports Trump on nearly every issue, from the economy to foreign affairs to immigration. (“In my mind, having a secure border is an exact example of setting up a boundary,” he told me, borrowing the vocabulary of his new favorite psychologist, Jordan Peterson.)

It’s all depressing, not least the last sentence.

Speaking of Extreme Divorced Dad Energy, Elon Musk’s origin story as a Republican supervillain is highly related:

For Musk, transgender issues are deeply personal. His transgender daughter publicly cut ties with him in April 2022, months before he sent money to Miller’s group. 

Then 18 years old, she said in a California court petition to change her name that she no longer wished to be related to Musk “in any way, shape or form.”

People close to Musk said his estrangement from his daughter, which he blames on “woke” indoctrination, led to his political awakening as a Republican.

In an interview with psychologist Jordan Peterson earlier this year, Musk said he signed documents approving puberty blockers for his child, then a minor, during the pandemic without fully understanding the ramifications.

“And so, I lost my son, essentially,” he said. “So I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that, and we’re making some progress.”

Musk’s daughter has said on her Threads account that she has no regrets about transitioning. “I absolutely knew what I was getting into and medical transitioning helped stop any further irreversible damage that male puberty could cause,” she said in a July post. 

She has described Musk as an absentee father who mocked her femininity and queerness. “I want to make one thing absolutely clear,” she said. “I disowned him, not the other way around.” 

I’ve seen people say that Musk only acts like a bigoted crank because he wants Republicans to win to get a tax cut. But Republicans were the party of upper-class tax cuts long before he became a vocal MAGA guy. The much more likely explanation is that he’s telling the truth when he says he became a Republican out of transphobic resentment, and the path from there to fervent opposition to immigration etc. is very, very short.