A comic, Trump and Alpha Male walk into an election

Comic Brent Terhune at his home podcasting studio

Nov. 9, 2024 3 AM PT

Comic Brent Terhune created a character he calls Alpha Male to mock Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.
After Trump’s reelection, Terhune now wonders what’s next for his over-the-top character and the nation.

Alpha Male has won.

What happens now?

Comedian Brent Terhune has for years satirized the angry, working-class white man who rails against “libtards” and expresses unyielding devotion to Donald Trump. His monologues resound with right-wing rants and epitomize toxic masculinity in a character he calls Alpha Male. But the aggrieved American man now rides on a sense of vindication in celebrating Trump’s return to the White House. And Terhune wonders what that means for his character and the nation.

“I think he’ll go from being a sore loser to a sore winner,” said Terhune, who lives outside Indianapolis in a blue-collar neighborhood. “Alpha Male will always exist. He was there before Trump. He doesn’t go away. He’s your dad, your cousin. We all feel misunderstood and betrayed at times. But he’s got to find a way to justify everything Trump and MAGA do. It’s a weird hurdle, and a way for me to get out my frustrations.”

Terhune — a former Boy Scout and a Catholic-school-raised liberal — abhors Trump and is nothing like his alter ego. Alpha Male, who wears a russet beard, wraparound sunglasses and a backward ball cap, is enamored with the likes of Tucker Carlson and has no tolerance for gender studies, critical race theory or what he sees as the liberal radicalization of a country that has succumbed to snowflakes and bibliophiles.

The character is at once emblematic and a caricature of the Joe Rogan demographic, bros and aging bros, mostly white but with a growing number of Latinos, who revere Elon Musk and march to Trump’s crass, weaving rhetoric.

“His people will be encouraged,” Terhune said of the president-elect, suggesting that the most extreme of Trump’s followers will become more of a threat to democracy, civil rights and gender equality than during his first term.

“He’s an embodiment of who they are,” he said. “They believe he hates the same things they do. They’re willing to excuse anything and everything for their guy. There’ll be no repercussions.”

Trump and his allies ran a high-testosterone, anti-immigrant, protect-the-economy campaign that appealed to ranchers, mechanics, pastors, billionaires, college students and the radical Proud Boys. Musk — who has 204 million followers on X — urged men to turn out and vote, posting a militant reference on the day of the election: “The cavalry has arrived. Men are voting in record numbers. They now realize everything is at stake.”

Musk reposted an artist’s depiction in which he, muscle-bound and stripped to the waist, resembles the Hulk carrying an American flag. Rogan sits atop Musk’s shoulders lifting Trump toward the sky in a trinity that evokes both a savior complex and hyper-masculinity.

Such imagery suits Alpha Male. Terhune’s character does not apologize. He does not equivocate. He represents, said Terhune, who was profiled in The Times last year, men who feel empowered by Trump’s showman brashness and the belief that he shares their rage and bewilderment at a left-wing, woke society that conspires to leave them behind.

Alpha Male was born out of what Terhune saw as the hypocrisy of conservatives who espouse American ideals, such as freedom of speech and religion, but attack anyone opposed their prescribed views. The character’s first appearance came when Terhune posted “Redneck Burns Nikes” in reaction to then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick taking a knee in 2016 during the national anthem to protest racism. That was followed by Alpha Male diatribes on book banning, the Black “Little Mermaid,” Trump’s mug shot, ruminations on Hunter Biden’s laptop and swipes at President Biden, whom he calls “Papa Long Hugs.”

Brent Terhune channels Alpha Male in a video rant in his car in Greenwood, IN. (Photo by AJ Mast/For the LA Times)

Alpha Male, whose videos have had millions of views on social media, has become a way for Terhune to understand and navigate the nation’s divisions. The character is a funny, if unsettling, mirror who at times — like Archie Bunker before him — earns a degree of empathy. Terhune’s irony and satire can be so sly that some people don’t get the joke, thinking that Alpha Male is not an act but the comic’s true self.

“Is this satire or is this guy really as deranged as he sounds?” one man posted on Facebook.

Like many liberals, Terhune, who spoke by phone from his home on the day after the election, was finding it difficult to reconcile the many ruptures and recriminations that have jolted the country since Trump’s first campaign eight years ago.

Trump’s recent victory is “a shocking but not so shocking revelation of where we are as a country,” said Terhune, the son of a lunch lady and a father who trucked fuel to construction sites. “A lot of people were fed up with the last four years, but this says that people don’t think past themselves. It is their need to put party over country for perceived patriotism. I’m a straight white guy. I’ll probably be fine. But what about people who aren’t straight and white?”

Through it all, though, the focus of Terhune’s Alpha Male bits will stay on Trump and what he has shaped. In a recent video about Trump working at McDonald’s, Alpha Male says, “Mr. Trump doesn’t need to work there. He was just sticking it to lying Kamala Harris. ... There’s no proof she even worked there. Hell, are we even sure she was the attorney general of Commie-fornia? No. Are we even sure she was vice president? No. Nobody knows. There’s no proof.”

In another skit, Alpha Male is the driver in the garbage truck Trump rode in after Biden’s verbal gaffe suggesting that Trump’s supporters were garbage: “You done pissed me off, Joe, and if being a patriot is what they’re calling garbage these days, then, yeah, I am garbage ‘cause I’m going to show up to the polls wearing a garbage bag to show you what us white trash can do.”

Alpha Male, sometimes tearing up when he recounts his many grievances, mythologizes Trump, a leader who survived an assassin’s bullet, an army of prosecutors, 34 felony counts and endless scandal.

After what authorities said would have been a second assassination attempt against Trump at his golf course in Florida, Terhune reimagines the incident in a video in which Trump grabs a golf club to deflect bullets: “The first one he sent flying went back to the shooter, knocked his Bud Light clean out of his hand and he took off scared. And he was running away and there was an envelope of cash that fell out of his pocket. You could see on it, it said, ‘Payoff from the Dumb-ocrats.’ It was then that the Secret Service finally got off their lazy asses and did something.”

That is the kind of fervor — James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” played at the Republican National Convention in July — that has surrounded Trump since he swaggered onto the nation’s political stage.

“He can do no wrong,” said Terhune, mimicking his alter ego. “If you don’t like it, deal with it.”

For Terhune, the only way to deal with it is to keep channeling Alpha Male’s deep well of suspicion and anger.