Yo, Miss! (No. 59)

You Can Hang Out With All The Boys

Trump won the 2024 Election with the help of the “bro vote,” and I am not just talking about the men who voted for him.

MAGA is a movement built on the fantasy of a time when the United States of America was ruled by an unchecked white supremacist patriarchy. It sells a vision of a preferred past where men (especially white men) held power without accountability and everyone else stayed in their assigned place.

That’s why “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People is a revealing anthem for Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters. The song, from the Village People’s album “Cruisin’,” is rife with double entendres that cemented its place as a gay anthem. But Trump, who has no interest in protecting or furthering LGBTQ+ rights (or any form of cultural progress for that matter), conveniently ignores this and has attached the song to his MAGA movement anyway. It’s fitting: Trump is a master manipulator, forcing people to buy into his warped reality, no matter how absurd the contradictions.

By co-opting “Y.M.C.A.,” Trump erases its cultural significance and instead projects his own vision onto it. MAGA is obsessed with glorifying toxic masculinity, even rewarding it with prized cabinet positions. It’s a movement obsessed with enforcing extreme heteronormativity and rigid gender roles—a worldview that stands in stark contrast to the joyful inclusivity the Village People represented.

The lyrics that probably resonate most with Trump are “Young man” (a pathetic ode to his own lost youth when he probably prowled New York City nightclubs with this song blaring) and “Young man, you can make your dreams real” (his empty MAGA promise to his faithful followers).

But, the line from “Y.M.C.A” that defines Trump and MAGA the most is this one:

“You can hang out with all the boys”

You can hang out with all the boys

That is the MAGA movement in a nutshell. Even though women supported and voted for Trump, this is fundamentally a movement rooted in protecting the boy’s club—preserving the white supremacist patriarchy on which the United States was built.

The trad wife movement, which helped galvanize many women voters for Trump, is a prime example of this dynamic. These women support policies and ideologies that aim to roll back decades of progress, stripping women of bodily autonomy and reinforcing a system where “the boys” make the rules.

MAGA is not just nostalgic—it’s actively working to reverse the progress of modernity and equality, clinging to a past that served only a select few. That’s why many heterosexual and liberal women are having trouble navigating this new Trump 2.0 reality and even some MAGA women who supported it are starting to question whether the movement is sexist as they find themselves excluded from the club.

By the way, Trump using “Y.M.C.A.” isn’t just ironic—it’s a blueprint for his entire playbook. MAGA loves to hijack symbols of progress and twist them into tools of nostalgia for a past that never actually existed. It’s the ultimate con: selling the illusion of inclusion while shutting out anyone who doesn’t fit their narrow vision. Just look at what they did with the American flag. It was once a unifying symbol of democracy for most of us. Now MAGA has tried to turn it into a partisan marker of their narrow and alienating version of “patriotism.”

Also, fun fact: the YMCA would likely be considered “woke” by MAGA standards. The first YMCA established to serve African American people was in 1853 - eight years before the American Civil War and ten years before the 13th Amendment officially abolished slavery in the United States. Its principal founder was a formerly enslaved man, Anthony Bowen.

In the end, "Y.M.C.A." becomes a fitting anthem for MAGA - not because of the song’s original meaning (or even what the YMCA provided for Americans), but because of how it is hollowed out. Just as the song’s deeper cultural significance is ignored in favor of its catchy refrain, MAGA offers a slick, simplistic promise to its followers—a promise of a return to "greatness"—while gutting the very ideals and values that could truly make America truly great.

This is MAGA Core 101: a cringe-inducing dance of denial and blind faith in a man who does not have most Americans’ best interests in mind.

That’s why, while Trump and his “young men” fist-pump their way back into the White House, the rest of us will keep marching forward.

We see clearly what he is doing, and we have seen this song and dance before throughout history.