That photograph, November 17 2024. Just four guys, hanging out on a private jet with their individual portions of McDonald’s. One of them, looking directly at the camera, fake-tanned and grinning, has recently been re-elected a Republican president of what is – at least for now – the world’s biggest superpower: it is a couple of months before he has his hands once more on the nuclear codes. Another is his son, a businessman, podcaster and big-game hunter, who regularly amplifies his father’s words like a carnival barker. Sitting alongside them is the richest man in the world, the top bro’s current top bro, the one with all the coolest gadgets, cars and space rockets. He’s come along for the ride, insulated from any potential humiliation by the serious padding of his billions.

Opposite him is a fourth guy, and he’s looking at the camera with a measure of unease in his eyes. He’s the scion of a famous American Democratic political family, from the days when America had a very different idea of itself – although his forebears, it must be admitted, had their bro moments themselves – but nonetheless that history still carries some meaning, and to be here is to burn certain aspects of his own legacy: the last shreds of toleration from his extended family, the remaining fragments of unstrained conviviality at Hollywood parties with his actress wife. The most amusing thing is, too – an irony not lost on his more relaxed companions – that this snared representative of the old regime is being compelled, almost literally, to eat his own words. For among his set of strongly held opinions, many of which fly in the face of scientific orthodoxy – his anti-vaccine views, his fulminations against fluoride – there is one, passionately held belief that could still command support across the political spectrum: his campaign against the over-processed food, excessive sugar and additives which he argues are making Americans sick. And soon he’ll have a chance to do something about it. Once, this guy thought he had a shot at becoming president himself, but in exchange for stepping out of the running and endorsing his rival’s campaign, he’s going to be given the job of Health Secretary. The problem is that, only a few days earlier, he said on a podcast that the fast food on this private jet was ‘just poison’, but here he is being photographed just about to tuck into a Big Mac and fries, with a Coca-Cola on the side.

Welcome to bro-world, where the best jokes are always at someone else’s expense, and every male group, large or small, can be divided into a shifting group of winners and losers. And in this particular Trump Force One foursome of Donald Trump, Donald Trump Junior, Elon Musk and Robert F Kennedy Junior, son of Bobby Kennedy, Robert gets to be the loser. He has to be: Donald’s too powerful, Donald Junior’s the dynastic heir, Elon’s too rich, and so that leaves Robert, with his queasy half-smile over his cooling fries. Maybe that’s why Donald Jr tweeted the picture, with the caption, ‘Make America Healthy Again Starts Tomorrow’. But don’t worry about him: it’s only here, in this moment, in this highly rarified group of top bros, that Robert has loser vibes. According to Forbes magazine, he’s worth around $15 million: peanuts next to Elon, yes, but still a winner when compared to the vast majority of Americans. Plus he’s a little crazy, which is a good thing for a bro to be. One time, years ago, he didn’t know quite what to do with the corpse of a bear he had in the trunk of his car, so he took it to Central Park and posed it on a bicycle.

What counts as winning now, among bros, in what is soon to be Trump’s America? Winning is making a lot of money. Winning is hating to lose face, but savouring the moment when anyone else does. Winning is watching the people who once said nasty things about you approach you with an overly warm handshake and the flicker of panic in their eyes. Winning is having a hot wife, with a bit on the side when you feel like it; doing smart stuff with crypto currency; avoiding tax; avoiding irony; avoiding guilt; avoiding any principles that get in the way of what you want to do; driving the kind of car that you fully expect and hope other men will envy; exchanging any facts you don’t like for assertions that you do; and rewarding your friends while punishing your enemies, even if you have to bend or snap the rules to do it. Above all, winning is looking after Number One.

A significant part of Trump’s electoral success in the presidential elections has been attributed to his conscious appeal to the ‘manosphere’, a loose affiliation of social media personalities, stand-up comedians, mixed martial arts fighters, pranksters and podcasters with a generalised suspicion of feminism and ‘woke’ philosophies. During his presidential campaign, Trump broke with previous election norms by seeking out podcasters such as Logan Paul and Theo Von, who command huge, mostly young, male audiences. These interactions, along with his three-hour interview with Joe Rogan, America’s number one podcaster – culminating in Rogan’s endorsement of Trump to his 14.5 million Spotify and 16.4 million YouTube followers – helped consolidate the male vote in his favour, particularly among younger voters.

In a curious way Trump’s rambling style, full of wild digressions and unrooted assertions, naturally resembles the kind of stoner dialogue that is popular in this style of podcast: more interested in taking a bunch of notions for a freewheeling ride than reaching any fixed resting-place. His pronouncements are relentlessly fluid, and therefore largely unaccountable, since there are simply too many ever to rein back sharply towards the truth: CNN counted 32 false claims that Trump made in his Rogan interview alone, from exaggerating the number of migrants that came into the US under the Biden administration to wildly overestimating the size of his own recent rally in Las Vegas. But then, in Trump’s world, what is truth? He perpetually claims it for himself, and deplores the alleged lack of it in his opponents. If the media says he’s lying, in Trump’s logic, then the media is lying. It’s the snow-globe approach to political debate: with each controversy the facts, whatever the facts were, are vigorously shaken up in a fresh blizzard of accusation and counter-accusation, and once the snow finally settles the truth is whatever the candidate you already like the most says it is.

What is revealing, now, are the previously wary male media figures who have found themselves decisively tugged towards Trump’s bro-world as if by some irresistible magnet. In 2020, Rogan – whose appeal has long been partly attributable to his eclectic ideology and broad platform – endorsed the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, the left-wing Democrat. In 2022, he firmly refused a suggestion that Trump should appear on his show with the words ‘No. He’s an existential threat to our democracy. I won’t help him. I won’t change the course of our country.’ Then in 2024, on the back of an interview with ‘the great and powerful Elon Musk’ – as Rogan described him – he posted on X on the eve of the election that his interviewee ‘makes what I think is the most compelling case for Trump, and I agree with him every step of the way.’

The ‘compelling case’ mostly consisted of Musk making grandiose assertions – ‘if we don’t elect Trump, I think we will see the end of democracy in America’ – while Rogan nodded in grieved agreement at the sheer insanity of the alternative. The concern that Rogan professed in 2022, that it was Trump who was the ‘existential threat’ to democracy, had vanished. The mob that descended on the Capitol on January 6 2021, which the former president had incited to ‘take back the country’, had receded into the mists of memory.

A similar trajectory was followed by the Canadian author and lecturer Jordan Peterson, who has previously described himself as a ‘classical liberal’, but who also endorsed Trump prior to November’s election, describing his victory as ‘testament to the enduring faith of the American people and their essential goodness’. This manifested itself, he suggested, by the voters’ rejection of ‘hedonistic and power-mad progressives.’ Peterson has spent years earnestly preaching the values of hard work, self-respect and the traditional family to a young male audience, often deploying Biblical narratives. It might therefore seem odd that he explicitly withholds the forceful charge of ‘hedonistic and power-mad’ from Trump, the former New York playboy and close associate of the late multi-millionaire sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein; the married man who paid hush money to the porn star Stormy Daniels allegedly to stay silent over an affair conducted when his wife Melania was pregnant; and the revenge-seeking presidential candidate who has told his supporters ‘I am your retribution’ and suggested that upon his return to office he may fire US attorneys who defy his orders to prosecute. Yet this is the paradox of the bro-world of which Trump is now the chief political representative: its unabashed readiness to exempt him, and its associate members, from the moral judgements which are applied so thickly, frequently and vehemently to other political players.

Despite its frequent use of morally-charged language, ethics are not the point of Trump and his informal entourage. Male solidarity is, including the acceptance of a broad range of masculine behaviour – particularly towards women – which traditional moral codes influenced by religion would once have found unacceptable. Loyalty among bros is cemented through appearances on one another’s podcasts, rallies and stage shows, and the sense that together they must passionately resist a vast, shifting, often female-influenced conspiracy of ‘establishment’ forces eager to take them down. When Channel 4’s Dispatches, in conjunction with the Times and the Sunday Times, accused Russell Brand of the rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse of four women between 2006 and 2013, Jordan Peterson was quick to cast doubt on the investigation, labelling it ‘convenient’. Elon Musk and the former Fox news host Tucker Carlson also sprang to Brand’s defence. Last September, Peterson appeared with the now born-again Brand at a ‘Rescue the Republic’ rally in support of Trump, organised by the evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein: the pair of them led the crowd in a surreal recitation of The Lord’s Prayer.

Some of those figures who have travelled from ‘classical liberal’ or left-wing positions to support Trump were first set on their trajectory by early collisions with the progressive left in one of its periodic high fevers on university campuses: Peterson faced vociferous student protests in Toronto in 2016 because he had objected to Canada’s gender-identity legislation and mandatory anti-bias training in universities; Weinstein, a Bernie Sanders-supporting biology professor, was assailed with charges of racism and threats to his security because he had made a measured objection to a staged protest in which white people were asked to absent themselves for a day from Evergreen State College, Washington. It is somewhat ironic, however, that such men – who once purported to defend a rational, evidence-based approach against the post-modern lunacy of the left – now find themselves supporting a right-wing president-elect famed for his baseless and impressionistic assertions.

On a much broader level, however, the radical departure from inclusivity and common sense on large swathes of the left has weakened the centre ground, and paved the way for the bro-culture which is now buoying up Trump. Historically successful mass movements have traditionally grown by welcoming potential supporters on the basis of equal fellowship. But the progressive left, particularly in the US, traded a vision of shared struggle – broadly based on demands for the fairer distribution of economic resources – for a hierarchical and censorious ‘identity politics’, in which people were crudely and permanently categorised by racial, sexual and gender identity, with ‘white men’ explicitly placed at the bottom and the term routinely deployed as a pejorative. Necessary and laudable aims, such as tackling racial discrimination or sexual assault and harassment, became translated into increasingly performative politics. Any deviation from an approved line on key issues, in particular an increasingly absolutist vision of trans rights, was often met not with reasoned debate but hysteria and cancellations. Minor social transgressions, such as a mildly foolish remark, could prove career-threatening events. While this new order on the left was often embraced in cultural institutions dominated by the more privileged, such as universities and publishing – whose denizens became expert in the sinuous signalling it demanded – it is perhaps hardly surprising that a growing proportion of blue-collar white men in the US rejected a version of the left that had apparently already rejected them. So too did increasing numbers of young Black and Hispanic men.

What these former Democratic voters and their Republican counterparts have now emboldened, however, has chilling implications not only for women – who are largely excluded from the inner circle that surrounds Trump – but also for men who still subscribe to the very different vision of desirable masculinity that largely prevailed in the US in the 20th century, when attributes such as modesty, chivalry and courtesy were considered necessary male virtues, in public at least. In the latter evaluation, Trump appears not as a political saviour, but a braggart and a creep. Since the 1970s, at least 27 women have openly accused him of sexual harassment, sexual assault or rape. His own attitude to consent was caught on tape in 2016, with his infamous remark, ‘when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy.’ In his campaign, he proudly owned his role in overturning legislation that protected US abortion rights, by his selection of Supreme Court judges: ‘I was able to kill Roe v Wade’; 14 states have now passed near-total abortion bans, ten of them with no exception for rape or incest survivors. A new, sexualised coarseness has crept into political discourse. At his final campaign rally, Trump railed against the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi as ‘an evil, sick, crazy bi –’ before ostentatiously halting, allowing some in the crowd to yell back ‘Bitch!’. Elon Musk ran an ad that dubbed Kamala Harris ‘the c-word’ before eventually revealing the word in question was ‘communist’, and recently referred to Angela Merkel, the German chancellor for 16 years, as ‘Angela Merkin’, the term for a pubic wig. The language of the vice president-elect, JD Vance in mocking ‘childless cat ladies’ finds its darker echo in the rhetoric of Andrew Tate, the strutting, relentlessly boastful, misogynistic influencer who has asserted that women who don’t want children are ‘miserable stupid bitches’: Tate, perhaps unsurprisingly, is an unashamed cheerleader for Trump.

The rise of bro-culture, all the way to the US presidency, is an unprecedented shift in America’s vision of itself and its projection upon the world stage. Both established diplomatic protocols and respect for statecraft are dissolving: in the interests of his embattled nation, the Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky must now navigate not only the capricious ego of Trump, but also that of Musk, to whom Trump recently passed the phone while Zelensky was on the line. The Ukrainian people’s courage in standing against Putin, demonstrated at enormous human cost, is casually disrespected: in early December Donald Trump Jr tweeted an image of Zelensky as the kid from ‘Home Alone 2’ asking Trump for directions, with the crying-laughing emoji; Musk responded in kind. What goes for people – that ‘winners’ are rich and self-interested – must hold true for countries too, right? On his podcast last month, Rogan began ranting against Ukrainian retaliation after three years of Russian attacks, saying ‘Fuck you people! You fucking people are about to start World War Three’. Musk, from his X base, freely meddles in Europe’s democracies, backing Nigel Farage’s populist Reform in the UK and Germany’s hard-right AfD.

Bro-culture’s disruptive, combative combination of corrosive levity and targeted vengefulness now threatens to destroy the very basis of the US: its encompassing ideal of an inherently dignified nation to which all citizens could subscribe. Many of Trump’s fiercest domestic opponents – including many of those who have defined themselves through bravery in military service – now see themselves as defenders of that endangered, unifying ideal of America, as set forth in the Constitution. John F Kelly, the US Marine Corps general who was Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, warned before the election that Trump met his definition of a ‘fascist’, having no conception of the rule of law or the Constitution. He confirmed to the New York Times that Trump had, as previously reported, characterised those US soldiers who died on French battlefields of the First World War as ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’. Yet it is Trump’s ‘band of brothers’, and not Kelly’s, with whom the West must now reckon. For the next four years, we’re all passengers on Trump Force One.