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4

He Said, He Said

The Feminization of James Comey

After he was fired by Trump, the now former head of the FBI James Comey was so rapidly feminized you would think he was J. Edgar Hoover. In June 2017 Laura Ingraham claimed that Comey is a “drama queen” who writes in an unmanly way. Charles Payne said Comey is “a lot more emotional than you would think the head of the FBI should be … and vindictive too.” Amy Holmes said the fired FBI director is “like a thirteen-year-old girl,” while a CNN commentator offered that Comey couldn’t “cowboy up, couldn’t man up.” Then there is this from the president’s son Donald Trump Jr.: “So if he was a ‘Stronger guy’ he might have actually followed procedure & the law? You were the director of the FBI, who are you kidding?”¹ This is not just a story of the once-mighty brought low, but of the particular techniques of feminization by which Donald Trump and his allies force people’s compliance or secure their destruction.

That Trump seeks to diminish or humiliate those around him is no secret. That such abjection often takes the form of feminization is also widely known. But how to counter it all? Recall Chris Christie’s account of a dinner with Trump and some others; Trump says, “There’s the menu, you guys order whatever you want,” then he says, “Chris, you and I are going to have the meatloaf.” Why didn’t Christie refuse to play the role of wife in Trump’s 1950s supper-club fantasy? He could have said no, I’ll have the steak. But he didn’t.

We do not know if Trump ordered for Comey at their now famous dinner in January 2017. But we do know that something similar occurred. Trump let the FBI director know that he had certain expectations of this man who served at his pleasure, and Comey, at least according to his critics in the media and in the Senate, did not protest enough. (Later, two years later, some of the same people will protest that Adam Schiff did not work hard enough to make the case for impeachment in the House before bringing it to the Senate, making it his fault that they voted against impeachment.)

During the Senate Intelligence Committee’s hearing, Comey’s feminization was apparent to women watching it. In a New York Times op-ed, Nicole Serratore said that it was like watching the interrogation of a woman who has accused a man of sexual harassment.² In fact, several of the questions, posed to Comey, were almost identical to those asked of Anita Hill at another famous Senate hearing about how best to respond to a boss’s improper overtures. Why did you keep coming into work even after you say he made you feel uncomfortable? Why did you take no action at the time? Are you sure he really meant that? You said you didn’t want to be left alone with him again but then you took his phone calls. In the words of Republican Senator Blunt, “So.… why didn’t you say, ‘I’m not taking that call. You need to talk to the Attorney General’?” Senator Feinstein also expressed surprise at Comey’s failure to live up to the demands of masculinity: “You’re big, you’re strong,” she said, “why didn’t you stop and say, ‘Mr. President, this is wrong—I cannot discuss that with you’?”

In all these questions, one key question is repeated: Why should we believe you?

The problem for Comey is that power consists in that question never being asked. Believability is a structural privilege that comes with straight white manhood. Its loss is an effect of feminization. So—what to do? How to respond? To answer is weakness. To not answer is weakness. He tried obliqueness. His mother did not raise him to crow about himself, he said, meaning thereby to certify his own good character. But, by invoking his mother, Comey risked the inference of “mommy’s boy.” This is weak tea as far as fending off feminization is concerned. And, once feminized, a man’s efforts to defend himself may start to sound, well, defensive; his insistence on his integrity is easily cast as selfabsorption; and his reliance on the testimony of old friends can seem needy. Gender has a slippery way of recoding everything. Before you know it, the authority that let you publicly chide Hillary Clinton for email carelessness is gone. Suddenly you have gone from being head of one of the most powerful security apparatuses in the world to being a showboat, as Trump said of Comey, using a 1950s supper-club word. It can happen to anyone. Just ask Sean Spicer, Jeff Sessions, or John Kelly.

Independence has been Comey’s accustomed position, granted him by institutional and sex-gender affiliations: head of the FBI and a straight white male in America. But, like so many men, he assumed his worth and independence were his because of his character, signs of his personal fortitude. So it is not surprising that Comey himself falls into the trap of describing what happened at that fateful January dinner as the result of his lacking, perhaps, a certain strength. When Trump said, “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty,” Comey did not yield, but neither did he overtly protest. As he said in his statement, “I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed. We simply looked at each other in silence.” Comey will later say that “maybe if I were stronger,” he would have done more. But silence ought to have been enough. Silence is usually associated in American political culture with masculinity, as in the phrase “the strong, silent type.” That strength is obscured, though, even from Comey himself, and with Diane Feinstein’s help, by his feminization. It is in the context of his feminization, then, that we should hear Comey’s reflection at the Senate hearing that perhaps he should have spoken up. For women, after all, silence means not strength but consent or submission (or so we are told daily by the men who pay women for their silence, via nondisclosure agreements).

If we think of gender not as a personal trait but as an apparatus of power, we can better understand the key role it played in Comey’s confusion at that dinner with Trump. Comey was confused because, as he reports, Trump asked Comey that night whether he wanted the job that Trump had already, twice earlier, told him was his. But Comey was also confused because Trump “invited me to dinner that night, saying he was going to invite my whole family, but decided to have just me this time, with the whole family coming the next time. It was unclear from the conversation who else would be at the dinner, although I assumed there would be others.” There would be no others, because the aim that night was to get Comey to be submissive. There was a carrot: his family might get invited to some future dinner at the White House! And there was a stick: did he want the job that was but wasn’t his? Trump did not get the submission he wanted, and so the aim ever since has been to demolish Comey. Recast as a “thirteen-year-old girl,” the former FBI director’s credibility is suddenly in question. He seems trapped in an alien maze of “he said, he said.”

This is surely why, at one point in his testimony, Comey found reason to mention his wife. This detail did not receive the attention it deserves. Business Insider went for the punchline but missed the joke, reporting that “in a rare moment of levity during former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday, Comey said that he wished he had skipped a private dinner with President Donald Trump in order to keep a date with his wife.”³ Why was it funny? Imagine skipping dinner with the president to keep a date with … your wife? Isn’t it obviously laughable? Except there is more to it: the bad joke allowed Comey to bring up his wife, and this he did as a way to reestablish the gender privilege he once took for granted. Having a wife, being a straight white man with a wife and children (six, no less), is still the most secure sign of credibility in American politics. No wonder Comey reached for it. But it did not work, not this time. It turns out gender really is constructed. And no one understands that better than those who most loudly reject that insight: selfproclaimed conservative supporters of Trump and the great feminizer-in-chief himself, all of them deeply invested in gender as an apparatus of power—as long as they are in charge of it.

Just a year later, we saw the apparatus of gender at work again, after the Helsinki summit between Trump and Putin. But this time it was the great feminizer-in-chief who was feminized: the popular press depicted Trump as subservient to his Russian master, a “pushover,” as retiring senator Jeff Flake put it.⁴ Feminist critics could relish this new development. But feminization boomerangs, and in the end resorting to it will only reinforce, not undo, the misogyny we live with every day. Although Trump’s feminization may satisfy critics in the short term, it also sets the stage for what will surely follow: a call to return things to “normal” by electing a real man in his place, one day. Let’s not join that old chorus.⁵

Besides, those of us who follow the gender politics of power know how malleable feminization is. Notably, Trump is one of the few who can make it work for him. If he almost never resorts to naming his wife, that is because stabilizing his gender is not his aim. His act, at his rallies, is a blend of male domination and female victimization. One minute, he promises to dominate others; the next, he complains of persecution. His voice alters from a guttural rumble that threatens (“Get him outta here!”) to a soprano that wheedles and lilts (“So I said to them, slow the testing down, please”). As we shall see in later essays in this volume, he is the voice of both Lisa Page and Peter Strzok when he simulates passionate scenes between them. When he mocks other women, he impersonates them with a voice so feminized that most American men could not risk it when speaking in public. This habitual ambi-gendering was made clear toward the end of Trump’s (first?) term when, sick with Covid-19, he was to be released from the hospital and considered appearing before his supporters in a dress shirt that he would rip off to reveal a Superman T-shirt underneath. “They’d love it!” he certainly imagined. In the end, he opted instead to rip off his face mask while standing atop a White House a balcony, and, just a few short days later, he channeled Evita from the same high perch for a short mini-rally of (some paid) supporters.

Such ambi-gendering is a source of Trump’s rhetorical and political power. It sets him up for his followers as both their defender and in need of their defending while inoculating him against the worst of feminization. It does nothing to destabilize the often punitive heteronormative sex-gender binary. The norm that others, like Comey, are punished for violating seems to be Trump’s for the taking. But if gender has a way of recoding everything, then it may yet be that Trump himself will one day find himself on the wrong side of its apparatus.