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Unfortunately, if you have an authoritarian leadership style that consists of bullying and intimidating rivals and opponents, you can barely contain your resentment of women who challenge your authority, and you were elected not in spite of these factors but in part because of them, you’re more likely to double-down on the approach that brought you success than you are to abandon it.

That means responding to perceived threats with aggression, which is what we’re seeing from both the president and some of his followers. When white male protesters bring loaded, semi-automatic weapons to State Houses to protest government-imposed lockdowns—protests that Trump himself has encouraged—they are enacting a predictably gendered response to their loss of control.

Violence, or the threat of it, has long been a tactic used (primarily) by men who cannot achieve their goals through other means. It is also a way for them to assert power when they are feeling powerless. This dynamic contributes to domestic violence in intimate relationships but also to larger struggles around gender and power.

Feminists have been writing about this for decades. In her 1994 book The Stronger Women Get, The More Men Love Football: Sexism and the American Culture of Sports, Mariah Burton Nelson argued that as women have been competing with men on an increasingly equal basis in business, government, science, academia and art, men have been drawn into ever more passionate identification with aggressive sports such as football, hockey and ultimate fighting.