Opinion | Simone Biles and the MAGAverse’s Fetish of Toughness

There’s something about Simone Biles that apparently triggers the MAGA-verse.

After the world’s preeminent gymnast dropped out of Olympic competition this week, right-wing Trump ally Charlie Kirk lashed out at her as a “selfish sociopath” and a “shame to the country.”

“We are raising a generation of weak people like Simone Biles,” said Kirk, who appears in television ads for pain-relief supplements.

He was hardly alone.

“Sorry, Simone Biles, The Olympics Isn’t About You, It’s About Winning For America,” proclaimed The Federalist. Radio host Clay Travis insisted that “she should apologize to her teammates for quitting on them at the moment they needed her the most.” Piers Morgan felt the need to similarly pile on: “I don’t think it’s remotely courageous, heroic or inspiring to quit,” Piers wrote in the Daily Mail.

Conservative writer Amber Athey joined the chorus, insisting that “a true champion is someone who perseveres even when the competition gets tough.”

Questioning whether Biles is a “true champion” seemed an odd shot to take, considering that the 24-year-old Black woman won four gold medals and a bronze in the last Olympics—tying the record for most gymnastics medals won by a woman at a single Games. That was on top of the 19 gold medals, three silver medals and two bronze medals she has won in other world competitions. In the 2019 world championships, she became the first U.S. gymnast to win five gold medals.

American conservatives used to take pride in this sort of thing. But somehow, Simone Biles has become a symbol of everything the right now loathes. Thereby hangs a tale.

The attempt to politicize sports is not, of course, new. Donald Trump sought to weaponize peaceful protests against police violence, tweeting out dozens of attacks on NFL players: “If a player wants the privilege of making millions of dollars in the NFL, or other leagues, he or she should not be allowed to disrespect our Great American Flag (or Country) and should stand for the National Anthem,” Trump tweeted at one point. “If not, YOU’RE FIRED. Find something else to do!”

In a highly choreographed media event, former Vice President Mike Pence walked out of an NFL game after players knelt during the national anthem. The MAGA-verse’s backlash against both the NFL and the NBA intensified after teams and players publicly embraced Black Lives Matter in the wake of the George Floyd killing. The message to athletes—most of them Black—was keep your politics to yourself.

More recently, the attacks have extended to the U.S. Women’s Soccer team. Last weekend, Trump encouraged the crowd at his weekend rally to boo the American team for losing a match because of “wokeism.”

In and of itself that was bizarre—what possible effect could Megan Rapinoe’s activism have had on her goal-scoring?—but this is what makes the attacks on Biles so odd.

At least on the surface, there was no tangible flashpoint in the culture war here. The assault on the gymnast wasn’t sparked by any act of protest on her part; and there is no discernible “conservative” principle involved in her concerns for her mental health.

But if the attacks lack a coherent idea, they share an increasingly familiar posture. Despite all the rhetoric about individual freedom, the real fetish on the right is toughness.

Men who show emotion, especially those who cry, are weak. Young women who fail to perform are “quitters.” All that matters is strength, winning and a weird obsession with machismo. Just look at Trump’s rebuke on Wednesday of the “RINOs” he accused of helping Democrats get the infrastructure deal passed: “It is a loser for the USA, a terrible deal, and makes the Republicans look weak, foolish, and dumb.” Not responsive to constituents or committed to bipartisanship but weak.

This might sound familiar.

“What is good?” asked Friedrich Nietzsche. “Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.”

What is evil? “Whatever springs from weakness.” (If the German philosopher were alive, he’d almost certainly have a show on Fox News.)

This is a recurring theme for Trumpists like Sebastian Gorka, who has insisted that “the Left and the NeverTrumpers alike who hate the former president hate him because he is a man’s man, and an old school leader in every sense of the phrase.”

Describing Trump as a “man’s man,” might be a stretch beyond the reaches of parody, but the attitude reflects the shift of the right from a movement ostensibly about ideas and values, to one invested in “owning the libs” and enforcing racial and gender standards.

In this brave new world of faux-toughness, Biles as an individual simply does not matter—she is merely an instrument of national greatness, with her actual humanity regarded as an inconvenient afterthought.

That’s why her critics spend so little time dealing with the role that stress, pressure and a history of sexual abuse likely played in Biles’ decision, because that would mean having to think of her as a person, and for critics like Charlie Kirk and the others, that is utterly irrelevant.

This is also the new ethos on the right. Adam Serwer has famously noted that in Trump’s America, ‘the cruelty is the point.”

But in late-stage Trumpism, it is not just the cruelty: The lack of empathy is also the point. Insensitivity is cultivated; compassion is derided as weakness.

So, we are left with this moment of high absurdity, in which a symbol of human excellence and American greatness is being mocked by bloated white man-children for being “weak.”

They have decided that Simone Biles represents everything they oppose.

How revealing is that?