The diminishment of males—every age, race, and ethnicity—is now another thing for American society to worry about. Of Boys and Men, a new book by Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution, looks at how boys and men are struggling in the United States. He argues that males are much more likely than females to feel socially excluded, and if they don’t remarry after divorce, they are much less likely to thrive. We’ve known for a while that girls in the United States are outperforming boys in most academic disciplines, earning 57% of bachelor degrees in 2020. Reeves covers the whole of America’s “male malaise” problem, which he says that nothing short of structural and societal change will be able to rectify.

It’s good to have constructive, nonpartisan thinking on this issue and not just the Tucker Carlson/Josh Hawley/Jordan Peterson “crisis of masculinity” blame game against the American left. And we especially need these ideas when the life expectancy of American men has dropped to its lowest in nearly three decades. That is indeed tragic. But then so is the fact that men’s problems continue to cause much needless suffering for women and children. In “Wayward Sons: The Emerging Gender Gap in Labor Markets and Education” (2o13), economists David Autor and Melanie Wasserman argue that “the absence of stable fathers from children’s lives has particularly significant adverse consequences for boys’ psychosocial development and educational achievement.” Thus we have a vicious cycle: fathers don’t participate (either pay or play) in the raising of their sons, sons within cash-strapped female-headed households have emotional and social adaptation problems, and the conservative right blames mothers and the mothering left for these “male fragility” problems that begin with economic and societal conditions.

Most of the issues that have been called a “crisis” for women can be addressed with equal pay for equal work (in 2022, women earned an average of 84% of what men earned) and protection from sexual abuse. But when men are in crisis, it’s because they don’t have what they feel entitled to (breadwinner status, blanket respect, being perceived as strong and macho). But before we can ever get to the structural and societal change that Reeves is advocating in his book, we have the more immediate problem that many of these fragile men who are said to be struggling so mightily are nonetheless the executives running things that affect the lives of millions. This is critically the case in New York City.

Gina Belafonte of the New York Times recently splashed vinegar on our wounds by comparing the mayoral quality of New York’s Eric Adams to that of Boston’s Michelle Wu. First of all: Unfair! Boston uses the phrase “metro area,” but there is no metro area, just towns that you enter via rotaries. The population difference nullifies any legitimate comparison. But New York City does have a serious problem with Adams, whose only qualification to run things is having been a cop who worked the New York City government patronage system to get increasingly higher-paying jobs—and this system-working got him high enough (Brooklyn Borough President) that his Tito’s drinking pals said he’d be stupid not to go for the gold.

My brother’s high school criticism of people he considered soulless was “He’s all surface.” Eric Adams appears to be only surface. You can tell he’s been dying to stand at a podium in front of City Hall wearing a double breasted pinstripe suit with a diamond stud in his ear in the same way that Emily in Paris was dying to wear a beret in front of the Eiffel Tower. Our diamond stud has no plan for New York’s lack of affordable housing and underfunded public schools, for the trash and rats, for the menacing mentally ill people on the streets and in the subway, for the flagrant, dangerous traffic abuses by cars, motorbikes, and e-bikes. He has no plan for the retail storefronts in all parts of the city left to idle decay. And on top of everything, he appears to still live in Fort Lee, N.J.

Adams is a disaster, but he is also a Small Man. I don’t mean height or size. Donald Trump slammed ex-Mayor Michael Bloomberg about his height, but Trump is a Small Man and Bloomberg is not (although he wasn’t a great mayor). Next to someone like Robert Reich, the Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, Trump is a Very Small Man. In a world where the biggest movie star is a towering, massively muscled former wrestler, “Small” would seem the ultimate putdown. In lieu of defining “Small Man,” let me say that there’s a broad sliding scale of Small Man morality, and the king of the Smalls stands (or perhaps sits) at the toxic extreme: Vladimir Putin, the Small Man holding the world hostage because his conception of leadership has no reverse. Putin’s advisors told him that an invasion of Ukraine would be successful, and he used their bogus data to justify sending World War II-style streams of tanks into a neighboring country, where things have not gone as planned.

Before Russia’s invasion, Putin’s iconic Small Man prop was his 20-foot-long oval conference table with the three pedestals. An Italian furniture company made the piece in 1995 at the behest of Boris Yeltsin, the Russian Federation’s first president, but the table has served Putin as an intimidation device. When French President Emmanuel Macron made a fruitless visit to avert the war, Putin sat him in the Siberia of the opposite end, just as he had done with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. That exaggerated distance from the bored and slouching Putin became a symbol of Russia’s growing estrangement from the West. You half-expected a dragon to land between him and the hapless emissary, not sure of which one to breathe on.

Putin’s Small Man venality is like the layers of an onion: you’re expecting something more operatic of the evil deeper down, but you never get to it. The Russian leader seemed especially small in denying Mikhail Gorbachev a state funeral last month. The thing I remember from Werner Herzog’s 2018 documentary on Gorbachev is Chopin’s Funeral March playing at all those state funerals after Brezhnev died. They went one after another like bulbs on a dud string of Christmas lights. And here comes Gorbachev with his 1960s fedora and Jacques Tati raincoat—showing the world that Russia had at least one decent man. He loved his wife dearly and was the antithesis of Putin.

Putin’s shadow casts particular shade on any lesser Small Man. That’s what happened to Trump when he continually prostrated himself before his kleptocracy idol. We may never know if the Kremlin has any kompromat on Trump or if at any point in his life he was cultivated as a Russian asset, but we’ve seen with our own eyes how submissively he behaves around the former KGB operative. At their joint news conference in Helsinki, Finland, on July 16, 2018, Putin gave Trump a soccer ball, supposedly to commemorate the United States co-hosting the World Cup in 2026. But everyone could see that the ball symbolized Putin’s win over Trump—a Small Man outmaneuvering an even smaller one. One day later, Trump refused to acknowledge Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Men who are already small shrink infinitesimally around Putin. Macron’s misguided meeting did nothing to deescalate Putin’s plans for Ukraine, while for Macron it knocked off a critical few centimètres. Macron had already endured a couple tense, Small-on-Small handshake encounters with Donald Trump. At the May 25, 2017, NATO Summit, Trump gripped Macron’s hand for a good five seconds. People said that the French president’s knuckles turned white and that Trump appeared to twist his arm. Two months later on Bastille Day, Trump staged an encore where he shook Macron’s hand for 29 seconds to much media fanfare. It was a typical Trump bully move inflicted on a man who is physically much smaller. In his 1997 Playboy profile, Mark Bowden described Trump’s handshake technique as “leaning forward with his fingers held together stiffly and pointing slightly downward, as if to spear the offending hand.” However he does it, the gesture shows Trump’s understanding of a handshake as an opportunity for aggression and a denial of reciprocity.

There are so many examples of Trump as Small Man that you need to sort by category. For basic cowardice, two come to mind. One is John R. O’Donnell’s anecdote in Trumped! that the future president sailed on his 282-foot yacht, Trump Princess, only once, during its 1988 maiden voyage from the Azores to the New York harbor: “It so terrified him when they weighed anchor—the movement convinced him it was sinking—that he would never sleep on it.” Another is the August 18, 2015, Time Magazine photo shoot where Trump was terrified of the 27-year-old bald eagle on his desk. When “Uncle Sam” flexed, Trump flinched.

For foolishness on a personal level, nothing comes near Trump standing on the Truman Balcony on August 21, 2017, looking up at the solar eclipse without wearing viewing glasses. For me, the pathos of this scene was amplified by the way Trump’s son Barron appeared to want to be rescued from the idiocy. The boy’s natural, pursed-lips expression has always reminded me of unfurled petals, and on the balcony that day he seemed like one of those sad Victorian illustrations of a flower with a child’s face.

For sheer gaucheness on a human level, there’s the burial of Ivana Trump, Trump’s first wife, near the first hole of Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J. It’s not known whether this was Trump’s idea, but people assume it was, since, as ProPublica reports, the gravesite could offer tax breaks for Trump’s business.

The worst of Trump’s Small Man behaviors by far are his public belittlements. His stock insult of “nasty woman” for any female who has rankled him is particularly vile. There is something sexually demeaning and degrading about “nasty” above and beyond viciousness or cruelty, and he intentionally exploits the vagueness as an open prompt for you to imagine the worst. His insults to veterans and the military are equally vile, especially what he said about John McCain in 2015: “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

In Trump’s wake, we have Small Men lackeys aplenty. Like Mike Pompeo (a onetime 300-pounder) defending Putin on Ukraine: “He was a KGB agent, for goodness’ sakes. He knows how to use power. We should respect that.” Small Man Ron DeSantis sent Venezuelan immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard to own the libs and is now asking for immigrants to come to Florida to clean up after Hurricane Ian. Lindsey Graham maintains human functions in the Small Man plantation of his mind. I would even venture that being a Small Man is possible when you’re a woman. Boris Johnson was a strapping specimen of Small Manhood, but within a couple weeks of taking office, Liz Truss tried to out-Small-Man him.

Small Men, of course, can suffer from a range of clinical behavioral problems—from antisocial personality disorder to sociopathic narcissism to malignant narcissism. Or they can simply lack strength of character. These types of people will always be with us. But in America at least, the real “crisis of masculinity” is that we continue to put men like this in positions of power. Which means that we are either being fooled into thinking certain expressions of masculinity are indicative of character, or else we no longer care whether our elected leaders lie, cheat, and steal every day of their lives as long as we come out of it with some form of material gain.

Back in 2013, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a professor of business psychology at University College London and Columbia University, looked at why so many incompetent men become leaders. He concluded that people

commonly misinterpret displays of confidence as a sign of competence, we are fooled into believing that men are better leaders than women. In other words, when it comes to leadership, the only advantage that men have over women (e.g., from Argentina to Norway and the USA to Japan) is the fact that manifestations of hubris—often masked as charisma or charm—are commonly mistaken for leadership potential, and that these occur much more frequently in men than in women.

Six years later, he didn’t see much progress: “We are still living in a world where most leaders are not evaluated objectively, and where discussions around the performance of leaders tend to be diluted to a matter of preferences, politics, or ideology.”

“Performance” is certainly the key word for Donald Trump. A decade before he was elected president, his primary way to make money was performing on The Apprentice. And when he got the chance to perform in the WWF’s cartoonish “Battle of the Billionaires” in 2007, Sharon Mazer, the author of Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle, explained that he “was taught very carefully his stunt with Vince McMahon”: Trump was to throw McMahon down and pretend to punch him. Instead, Trump “actually almost hurt Vince McMahon in throwing him down and punching him. He didn’t pull his punches. He wasn’t gentle.” She noted that professional wrestlers “have to work together to make the spectacle” and “have to be extraordinarily sensitive to each other’s bodies and spirits in the ring.”

So maybe that’s the real definition of a Small Man—someone who doesn’t work together with other people but only performs in service to himself. And when he performs to serve only himself, he hurts other people. In his New Yorker review of a new biography of Rudy Giuliani, Louis Menand suggests that running New York City “is famously a dead-end job.” I suppose I ought to concede that factor to the Small Man currently occupying Gracie Mansion. And I suppose that being mayor of New York can make a Small Man out of one who starts off relatively decent. So if you come into the mayoralty as a Small Man, as did Adams and Bill De Blasio, you are already underwater. And as far as Rudy is concerned, however much being mayor may have shrunk him in the 1990s, his leadership during and after 9/11 reversed that trend and sent him out in good standing. His descent from 2002 until now was all of his own making—two solid decades of Small Man coming to terms with his small soul. §