Donald Trump and JR from Dallas: the petromasculinities
Cara Dagget, in her article "Petromasculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire" (2018), defines the term petromasculinity as a form of masculinity that associates the use of and nostalgia for fossil fuels with traditional masculine identities, authoritarianism, climate change denial, and certain sociocultural power dynamics. We already knew of Trump's unbridled interest in oil, but the attack on Venezuela to end the Maduro regime has further confirmed it, and for that reason, I maintain that it fits perfectly with that definition of petromasculinity, which, in turn, is fueled by a very American model.
In this sense, I can't get JR Ewing's image out of my head. DallasTrump is a kind of JR displaced from corporate melodrama to the global political stage, with whom he shares many things. First, they are united by their instrumental relationship with the law, since for both, the norm is not a binding framework but a flexible obstacle; it is complied with if convenient and violated if it hinders the objective. DallasJR negotiates, manipulates, or flouts corporate law without scruples; Trump, in politics, treats the law, both national and international (as we have already seen in the surgical operation against Maduro), as an extension of the balance of power. Legitimacy does not come from respecting the rules, but from winning.
Trump, like JR, is a white, cisheteronormative man and the epicenter of the misguided progress of an outdated oil society that is destroying nature. JR is a clear archetype of aggressive, fossil-fuel-based, capitalist masculinity, constructed as a character to embody power, cynicism, and dominance in the Texan context. Both wield power through an aggressive and performative masculinity that places them at the center of attention, while their women remain on the periphery of their desires, as both are inherently antifeminist. They do not seek to be fair or consistent, but rather dominant, unquestioned, and alpha males. The display of strength, the humiliation of the adversary, and the contempt for vulnerability are central to their ideology of making themselves the protagonists of everything around them. Both JR and Trump project an image of absolute self-sufficiency, in which acknowledging limitations is equated with a loss of virility.
They also share a common use of resentment as a vital resource. JR mobilizes family grievances and personal rivalries; Trump transforms social grievances, such as the loss of status for certain sectors, into political energy. In both cases, resentment must not be resolved, but rather kept alive, because it is the emotional fuel of their power.
Both function as cultural icons of a bygone era. JR is the television fantasy of 1980s oil power; Trump is its political reappearance in a context of climate crisis and the decline and decay of leftist policies. What JR was uninhibited fiction, Trump becomes real government, but with the same affective and ontological structure.
However, a clear temporal and historical difference exists between the two, a decisive one. JR is a product of an era of fossil fuel expansion that remains unchallenged, in which oil symbolized progress, abundance, and the future. Trump, on the other hand, operates in a time of recognized climate crisis, where his defense of oil is not proactive but reactive; he does not celebrate the future but attempts to delay the loss of a declining order—that of patriarchy and authoritarianism. This transforms his petromamasculinity into a form of aggressive nostalgia, absent in the television character. While Trump and JR share the same grammar of fossilized male power—that is, the aggressive and frenzied language of petromamasculinity—JR represents the cultural fantasy of a regime on the rise, while Trump embodies its political defense in a phase of rapid decay. This difference is not incidental, as it marks the shift from compensatory fiction to conflictive reality, from the television narrative to systemic damage on both small and large scales.