Donald Trump Jr. Has a New Magazine for Men. It’s Quite Something.

It’s been 11 years since photos of Donald Trump Jr. and his brother, Eric, wreathed with smiles in front of African wildlife they’d shot on safari, made a splash online. Since then, his father’s presidency won and lost, Trump Jr. has shot a whole hell of a lot more charismatic critters—and he’s not shy about it.

Look no further than his strangely captivating magazine, Field Ethos, launched last year. Trump Jr., who’s the publisher, and his staff repeatedly emphasize that they are “unapologetic” about killing animals. Six issues deep so far, the glossy magazine is a throwback: an emerging print publication in 2023? Paying photographers and writers to go to Alaska or Mongolia or Greece and report back, or tell a fond story about a favorite uncle’s rifle, or muse about why humans like hunting feral hogs? Creating a strong editorial voice, where the writers and editors become recurring characters in a gang of people you’re supposed to want to join, like Sassy in its salad days? What is Field Ethos trying to do? After a taste online—Field Ethos has a social media presence, posts select articles on its website, and, naturally, sells merch—I needed to know. I ordered all six issues.

The truth is, reading Field Ethos in print made me miss magazines. The way a staff creates a collective vibe, even if it is, at times, rancid to my taste; the visual cohesion of the product; the little bits of humor that make their way into the front-of-book sections, where an anonymous writer, usually someone low on the totem pole, gets to stick a little your-mom joke in a 75-word squib, while touting the merits of a rifle that costs thousands of dollars or a flask that costs over $100. It was great fun. What’s really happening in its pages was another matter.

There are, it’s worth noting, a lot of magazines about guns and hunting. The Outdoor Sportsman Group, which distributes this one, has many other titles: North American Whitetail, Bowhunter, Bowhunting, Gun Dog (“the magazine of upland bird & waterfowl dogs”), to name a few. But Field Ethos is for the guys who are already all in. The brand is “about representing our lifestyle honestly,” as COO Mike Schoby, who has a history of working for similar legacy publications, put it upon his hire. “Field Ethos doesn’t justify hunting solely for the sake of food,” he said. “It is a part of it, but we know there is much more. It is equally about the adventure, culture, camaraderie, and tradition. At our core we are about embracing toxic masculinity and rejecting the woke, P.C. culture.”

If you read enough Field Ethos, you see this message over and over again. Writers and editors will use the word conservationist to describe themselves, and speak solemnly about how hunting teaches kids—in Field Ethos articles, usually sons—patience and resilience, and keeps them away from their phones. (The desire to keep kids away from phones is, it seems to me, an issue with great untapped bipartisan appeal.) But mostly, what these guys want to talk about is fun. They are very drunk, all the time, doing dangerous and sunburnt things out there in the world. These are “campfire stories,” as Trump Jr. describes them in one publisher’s note. But for those on the outside, they can sound a bit more like tales told by a sauced guy who won’t leave you alone at the bar. Then again, Field Ethos—a magazine that printed an essay that approvingly described an old codger as having a “ten-apology punch card from metoo.org”—will probably love the fact that I said that.

As I tore through these magazines, alternatively delighted and horrified, I had some questions. As a nonhunter but a person with the internet, I’m familiar with the general type of guy who likes to figure out new ways to piss people off online. But I had little idea what Field Ethos’ particular definition of unapologetic (in reference to animal-killing) is supposed to mean. What does it mean when the magazine declares that hunting has gone “too woke”? I asked Jan Dizard, who’s written several books about hunting and American culture. “What’s been going on” in traditional hunting media and outdoor-life advocacy organizations, Dizard said, “has been a response that’s sometimes almost close to panic about the steady decline of hunting in the United States.” (Hunting, as a practice, has lost ground among Americans recently, even as gun ownership has dramatically increased.)

Dizard named changes in family structure, population movements away from rural areas, ever-increasing urban sprawl that eats up habitat, and “a greater solicitude and affection for wildlife” as contributing factors to that downturn in hunting participation. Legacy hunting and fishing magazines (what Dizard calls the “hook-and-bullet” press) have been trying to adapt by, among other things, becoming more inclusive—reaching out to women, minorities, and immigrants, and rejecting “the good old boy stuff, the toughness, the obsession with bullets and calibers and technical jargon.”

Field Ethos, while certainly worried about hunting’s decline, is not doing that. (See: a super-detailed article about the history of the Winchester Model 70 rifle that I emerged from bleary-eyed.) The magazine does have a few female staff and freelancers, but they tend to be classic “cool girls” who can hack it, succeeding in a male space without asking for what one female photographer called, in her post-article Q&A, “handouts.” In the men’s adventure stories, the women are side notes—the paramedic who appears like a gorgeous dream, descending from the rescue helicopter; the wives who are happy to be left at home to keep the show running while the men are in the field; the “kitchen gals cleaning up last night’s bar mess”; in one unsettling passage, the maternal TSA agent with “monstrous breasts” who let a cooler full of fish slide by in a writer’s carry-on baggage.

“Gone are the pulp magazines with the curvy damsels in distress on the covers,” the Field Ethos Instagram commented on a posted image of an old Man’s World cover. There’s a self-conscious historical flavor to Field Ethos, which has an actual descendant of Ernest Hemingway—Patrick Hemingway Adams, a great-grandson—writing for it. The ghost of Hemingway, and of other icons of 20^th-century manliness, haunts this magazine, which is sprinkled with articles about the history of guns, law enforcement, safaris, war, and adventure writing. Authors name-check dead explorers, adventure writers, and FBI agents I’ve never heard of: Frederick Selous, Frank Hamer, Jelly Bryce, Peter Capstick. I also learned that Johnny Cash once killed a bunch of condors when he drunkenly started a wildfire. Field Ethos loves that.

Actor Cole Hauser, who plays cowboy and Dutton family enforcer Rip Wheeler on Yellowstone, is friends with this crew, and appears in one travel story. This connection clarifies something to me, as an often-conflicted devotee of that show: Field Ethos is a new Western project, with everything that entails. It’s Western in the sense of being not only sometimes about the American West, but also about empire, frontier, and dominion. The latest issue contains a feature on homestead defense in Rhodesia during the Bush War, the history of which is a recent fixation of the online American right wing. “Field Ethos seems to have a thing with Rhodesia. Can you explain?” an anonymous questioner for the post-piece Q&A asks the author of this piece. “No, I can’t,” she replies. “But it’s one of those things you just go with because to know anything about the history of Rhodesia and not be more than mildly interested would be distinctly anti to what FE is about.”

Another thing Field Ethos is “about” is spending money. “While pathologizing guns has led to better understandings of their impact on public health,” writes historian Andrew McKevitt in an upcoming book, “it has made them more difficult to understand as objects of consumer desire.” Nothing has made me, a non-gun person, fully grasp this more than reading six issues of Field Ethos, a publication chock-full of gun-industry advertising and articles featuring expensive rifles, trucks, clothing, and accessories. I first learned the concept of a magazine being “aspirational” when I worked at a teen magazine, and we debated how pricey the fashion we recommended for purchase in our editorial pages should be. (The stuff the fashion editors liked was always way too rich for a teen girl’s wallet.) Field Ethos is betting that most readers will aspire to do as they do, and spend accordingly. I found myself overwhelmed with vicarious middle-aged budget panic while reading a piece about building out a Ram 2500 truck with extensive accessories for off-road adventuring, or seeing a casual recommendation that readers buy their wives a $700 Walther F-Series compact pistol for a birthday, because you would otherwise spend just about that much on “a BS birthday dinner, flowers and a night at an overpriced hotel.” And a piece by Trump Jr. recommending that every American own at least 12 types of guns had me red-faced—not just at the prospect of 260 million adults with that arsenal, but at the price tag. There aren’t numbers in this particular listicle, but I know what this would cost. I’ve been reading Field Ethos!

In a piece about how he justifies spending such big money on hunting, Allen Bolen, a particularly thoughtful and reflective voice within this braggadocious crew, postulates that in the course of his life, the joy and challenge of bowhunting has been a key motivator for seeking monetary success. “In my mind,” he writes, “earning money is just part of the hunt.” It’s a bootstraps sentiment, and a nostalgic one. Conservative media has answered the “masculinity crisis” in a few ways: Jordan Peterson’s speaking tours and bestsellers, Josh Hawley’s preachy book, Andrew Tate’s whole thing. Field Ethos, which uses the dying format of print magazines to offer a window into a glamorous, dirty, adrenalized world, is not self-help. But it’s not not self-help, either.