The Man Card: White Male Identity Politics from Nixon to Trump

"The Man Card" explores the right's five-decade mastery of white male identity politics. Ranging from Richard Nixon's tough-talking, law-and-order campaign in 1968 to Donald Trump's hyper-macho revival of the same fear-based appeals in 2020, the film shows how the right has mobilized dominant ideas about manhood and enacted a deliberate strategy to frame Democrats and liberals as soft, brand the Republican Party as the party of "real men," and position conservatives as defenders of white male power and authority in the face of demographic change and the ongoing struggle for racial, gender, and sexual equality.