There’s a laugh-out-loud moment in Donald Trump’s execrable business memoir, The Art of the Deal, where his ghostwriter has him praise an architect who realized, as Donald does, “that big can be beautiful.” It’s a curious line from a man who calls beauty queens fat — but then maybe he thinks everything and everyone besides women ought to be as big as possible: crowds, buildings, walls, wins and especially manly men. Tuesday night, at a West Virginia rally, he offered odd commentary on Gov. Jim Justice’s size:
It’s not his first time fixating on the Republican’s stature. Trump months ago lauded Justice as “definitely the biggest governor,” repeatedly referring to him as “Big Jim.”
Former Sen. Luther Strange of Alabama was also routinely embiggened in Trump’s endorsements, with the president falsely claiming that he was the first to call the guy “Big Luther.”
Where Trump and his own family are concerned, he’s always willing to add an inch to anyone’s height: A physician’s report listed him as 6 foot 3 when it’s obvious he’s actually 6 foot 2 or shorter, perhaps to circumvent a diagnosis of obesity. And during the 2016 election, he awkwardly introduced supporters to his son Eric, Trump’s largest adult son, by bellowing, “My boy! I love you! That’s my 6-6 boy!” (Eric is, by his own reckoning, 6 foot 5.)
Well, I’m just going to say it — with apologies, of course, to any gay men, straight women or whoever else identifies with this title: President Trump is a size queen.
Sexually speaking, a size queen is someone who tends to search out extra-large dicks, sometimes to the exclusion of any others, or as the sole criterion of attraction. I don’t intend to smear Trump with the kind of homophobic commentary some liberals can’t get enough of; I just think the term applies equally well to a short-fingered dipshit who has the audacity to brag about his “big, beautiful hands” — or the man who remarked, hours after the 9/11 attacks, that his Wall Street building had become the tallest in Lower Manhattan.
It’s as if he’s literally blind to any quality but massiveness, which is surely why he tried, through several failures, to erect the tallest skyscraper in the world — as well as why he denigrates his rivals as “Little,” or, somewhat more perplexingly, “Liddle” or “Liddle’.”
According to Patti Wood, a body language and communication expert, Trump’s size obsession is primal. “We associate size with power,” she writes in an email, and “in the U.S., we have voted more often for the larger candidate of the final two candidates for presidency — largest in terms of height and bulk,” taking these to be “alpha characteristics.” Trump’s dominant gestures often match his “big-league” talk, and that’s no accident, either, says Wood: “Research shows that in a debate, the person with the largest, most expansive gestures is perceived as more powerful, more confident. It’s clear Trump enjoys power and seeks to be alpha, to be the best, the winner.”
This, too, squares with the slang definition of a size queen. Responding to a letter from a man who felt overwhelmed by his compulsion to hook up with well-hung dudes, sexual health psychotherapist Joe Kort told Salon that it wasn’t merely a physical preference driving the behavior. “There’s a narrative, a non-sexual narrative, that’s gotten eroticized,” he said, positing that in this case, gigantic cocks had taken on symbolic value and were being used to assuage feelings of inadequacy, perhaps with regard to masculine norms. There can be no doubt that Trump considers size the only measure of virility, whether it’s a phallic glass tower or a gang of beefy bikers. Bigness fills a hole in his soul, and the sheer mass of his people and places is proof he somehow matters.
Then again, maybe I’m giving him too much credit. We’re talking about a guy almost too shallow for subtext, let alone a Freudian subconscious. What if Trump’s size-queenery is as simple as that of a 5-year-old who loves big trucks just because they’re, well, big? Too often we make the mistake of presuming that the president operates on any level beyond his mindless superlatives. In fact, he’s probably still pissed at Don Jr. for calling his junk “pretty substantial” instead of “the biggest, thickest, veiniest dong of all time.”
As for what to do with this information, I’m not really sure. Possibly the next congress could pass Medicare for All by naming it “The Most Enormous and Huge ‘Fuck You’ to Barack Hussein Obama Act.” Or someone could convince him that an undocumented immigrant holds the world record for the Largest Steak Ever Consumed in a Sitting and that he needs to break it, for America — which, if it didn’t give him a heart attack, would at least make him ill for a couple of days.
Point is, we need to be creative. The president is very dumb, and all he cares about is colossal stuff. There’s got to be a way to use this to our advantage. You know what they say: The bigger they are, the harder they fall.