Who's your daddy? These days, who isn't?
Image: Hadley Chittum/The Washington Post
In his social media series 'Trump Was Born to be a Gay Man,' actor Bransen Gates lip-synchs to real recordings of President Donald Trump saying things that - with a few wrist flicks and come-hither eyes - gain an entirely new interpretation. Gates has acted out the president's monologues about his 'beautiful' flagpole, his declaration that he would 'kiss every man' in a 2020 rally audience and his assessment of Arnold Palmer's body. (He 'was all man,' said Trump in October.)
But the NATO summit late last month was a gimme.
In a bilateral meeting, Trump compared the situation between Iran and Israel to a schoolyard spat: 'Let them fight for about two, three minutes, then it's easy to stop them,' said the president. Secretary General of NATO Mark Rutte interjected.
'Daddy has to sometimes use strong language to get them to stop,' the NATO chief said.
Trump, later in a news conference, appeared tickled by his new nickname. 'He did it very affectionately, 'Daddy, you're my daddy,'' the president told reporters, an audio clip Gates later used in one of his Gay Trump videos.
And that's how Daddy Diplomacy was fathered.
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President Donald Trump thanks members of the Village People for performing during his January inauguration festivities.
Image: Aristide Economopoulos/The Washington Post
What distinguishes the dads from the daddies, other than paternity? In the LGBTQ+ community - and often outside of it, too - the term signifies an 'older man who's protective, experienced, usually a more dominant type,' Gates says. These are all associations that the president and his team probably saw as positive. But then: 'There's sort of this added layer of kink and role-play to it,' he added. 'In that context, it's both sort of about reclaiming power and performing fantasy.'
That may not have been what the president and his team had in mind when they put out a promotional video about the summit to the tune of the Usher song 'Daddy's Home.' (Some of the tamer lyrics: 'I know you've been waiting for this lovin' all day/ You know your daddy's home and it's time to play.') Soon, Trump's official campaign store began hawking 'Daddy' shirts with the president's mug shot.
It made Gates wonder whether Trump's supporters were aware of the term's salacious connotation and were embracing and reclaiming it, or whether they were taking it in a different metaphoric direction: that of paterfamilias. A Founding Daddy for a red America, perhaps.
That seemed to be how Jonathan Lindsey, a Republican state senator from Michigan's 17th District, interpreted it on June 25.
'A lot of people in America have come to think of President Trump as a sort of father figure,' said Lindsey, referencing the NATO incident to his colleagues. '... Maybe, in these resolutions going forward, we could have a little bit of recognition of, like, 'Daddy Trump.''
Then state Sen. Jeremy Moss (D), who is gay, took the floor.
'You don't want to know what daddy means in my community,' Moss quipped.
Let's take daddy back a few generations. The slang meaning of the word probably did not originate in the LGBTQ+ community, according to William Leap, an American University professor emeritus who is an expert in the field of 'lavender linguistics,' the study of queer language. He has seen references to it in 1930s compilations of 'hobo tramp underworld slang,' where it refers to Cadillacs, 'the preferred vehicle for people who like to steal cars,' Leap says.
'The lists that we have of gay men's vocabulary from the '20s, from the '30s and from the '40s do not list the word 'daddy,'' he says. 'It wasn't included in these kinds of documents until the '60s and '70s.'
It has taken on a number of meanings ever since.
Who's your daddy, 'Call Her Daddy.' Big daddy, leather daddy. Mack daddies, sugar daddies. These are just some of the flavours.
They've proliferated in pop culture with a lusty wink. In music, acts as varied as the Zombies, Sir Mix-a-Lot and Lana Del Rey sing or rap about rich, powerful daddies; and Daddies Yankee, Puff and Cherry Poppin' incorporated it into their stage personas. (The latter has been deemed one of the worst band names of all time.)
A 2018 'Saturday Night Live' sketch about the 'Westminster Daddy Show' spoofed the famous dog show, prancing attractive middle-aged men around an arena. Season 1 of 'Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt' featured a fake 1938 musical called 'Daddy's Boy!,' with song lyrics that wink at which kind of daddy, exactly, is its star: 'Brazen muscles/ Man you got 'em/ You're the tops/ And I'm the bottom.'
In 2004, Red Sox pitcher Pedro Martínez famously said: 'What can I say? Just tip my hat and call the Yankees my daddies,' making 'Who's your daddy?' a preferred taunt from Yankees fans.
Actors Pedro Pascal and Oscar Isaac are, according to popular internet consensus, daddies - and when Pascal was asked in a 2022 Vanity Fair lie-detector interview who the superior daddy was, he had a ready reply. Isaac may literally be a father, and therefore a daddy, but 'daddy is a state of mind,' Pascal said, giving the camera a knowing, magnetic stare, before addressing the viewer with: 'I'm your daddy.'
Actors Christopher Meloni and Idris Elba, meanwhile, could be thought of more as 'zaddies' - an honorific 'more tailored to like, the super-attractive, super-sexy older guys,' Gates says, though some define it as an especially sexy uber-daddy.
In politics, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were, and maybe still are, daddies. A daddy-in-training is New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, who Gates says 'hasn't aged into daddyhood' quite yet.
What all daddies have in common is the notion of or desire for a power imbalance - a dynamic at play in real and metaphoric, honorific paternal relationships. A father complex, to get a little Freudian.
'Stereotypically, the father is the disciplinarian or the authority figure, the boss,' says Peter Rudnytsky, a University of Florida English professor, a psychoanalyst and the author of 'Psychoanalysis and the Patriarchal Tradition: Augustine to Milton.'
The notion of Daddy Trump brings to mind 'the image of the primal father in Freud's theory, who rules all the sons and has all the women,' Rudnytsky says. Though, in Sigmund Freud's telling, from the 1913 text 'Totem and Taboo,' the sons eventually band together to kill and eat that daddy.
Calling Trump daddy - the authoritative, father-figure kind - did not originate from NATO.
Milo Yiannopoulos, a right-wing commentator who has espoused white-nationalist views, began calling Trump daddy in 2017. At an October 2024 rally, speaking before Trump took the stage, Tucker Carlson compared Americans to naughty little girls who have misbehaved.
'When Dad gets home, you know what he says? You've been a bad girl. You've been a bad little girl and you're getting a vigorous spanking right now,' Carlson told the crowd, in perhaps one of the creepiest moments of the campaign. 'And no, it's not going to hurt me more than it hurts you.'
'Daddy's Home' shirts featuring Trump and the White House began circulating on Etsy shortly after his November win.
In February, Susan Milligan wrote an extended comparison of both parties as parents, describing Republicans in the New Republic thusly: 'The Daddy party practices tough love, promising to protect Americans from outside threats while also expecting people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.'
On June 27, Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi wrote on X that 'the Israeli regime had NO CHOICE but to RUN to 'Daddy' to avoid being flattened by our Missiles.'
We seem to have entered a deeply submissive era. Everyone is being well-behaved for Daddy, lest they be spanked.
Columbia University quickly capitulated to Trump, changing its policies on student protests after the administration threatened to withhold funding. The law firm Paul Weiss agreed to provide $40 million in pro bono legal services to support Trump's agenda after threats to rescind some government contracts with the firm and its clients. Republicans who were once critical of Trump, like his own vice president, JD Vance, have bent a knee.
At the NATO summit, 'the sucking up was pretty over the top,' one European official told Politico, anonymously.
But power and wealth are not all that a true daddy possesses. To make a ruling on whether the president demonstrates all of the necessary daddy qualities, one must consult one of the most archetypal daddies of all: the leather daddy. It's a daddy the president is no doubt familiar with. After all, he loves the Village People.
'A daddy in the leather community is someone who has a role of nurturing, of caring, of providing for, of teaching, of protecting,' says Jason Elliott, Mr. Mid-Atlantic Leather 2025. It's 'less of a title and more of a responsibility and a privilege to be someone in the leather community who is called daddy.' Even though Elliott is the titleholder, he prefers the term 'leatherman,' reserving the honorific for his elders. (PSA: For nonbinary leatherpeople who are daddies, the term is 'thaddy.')
Asked about the NATO comment, Elliott speaks with the calculated prudence of a pageant titleholder.
'I find it ironic that someone whose administration is not nurturing, caring or respectful of the LGBTQ community currently is embracing a title that we hold in such high regard,' Elliott says. 'It's a lot to live up to. If someone's gonna be a daddy, they better be ready to live up to that.'
Trump, therefore, cannot be daddy. At least not among those Macho Men.
'When it comes to daddy, he may be somebody's,' Elliott says, 'but he is not mine.'
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