Fox News’ Laura Ingraham offered up her own response Monday to Democratic Party research on the young male voters heavily credited with President Donald Trump’s 2024 win, boiling it down to: “Men don’t like liberals. OK?”

In a selective quote from a Politico article on the topic (which noted men’s dissatisfaction with both major parties), Ingraham read: “Participants described the Democratic Party as overly-scripted and cautious, while Republicans are seen as confident and unafraid to offend.”

“OK, newsflash,” Ingraham said. “Normal men like strength, patriotism and common sense, not this.”

She then cut to a clip of former Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris recounting the “coconut tree” story — an anecdote she shared during 2024 campaign about her mother’s reminder that she exists in a larger context that includes other people.

“Oh God, I almost forgot that one,” the anchor cracked before going on to conclude that “Alpha male Trump has driven Democrats absolutely bonkers.” (See the clip of the segment here.)

MAGA pundits talk about “alpha males” a lot, but experts say they miss an important point.

This isn’t the first (and unfortunately will likely not be the last) time we hear about “alpha” males in relation to the MAGAverse. Trump adviser Stephen Miller has said something eerily similar: “If you are a young man — it’s very important in election season — who’s looking to impress the ladies, to be the alpha, to be attractive ... The best thing you can do is wear your Trump support on your sleeve.”

The problem? This “alpha” talk (and the behavior it explicitly and implicitly endorses), at best, really narrows the field of how men believe they’re supposed to show up in the world. At worst, it leads to some deeply toxic, entitled and harmful behavior toward others.

“The term ‘alpha male’ originated from early research on captive wolf packs, but that research has since been revised and is no longer considered an accurate way of describing wild wolf social behavior,” Ciara Bogdanovic, psychotherapist and owner at Sagebrush Psychotherapy, told HuffPost.

While it’s “not a psychological term,” Bogdanovic notes that the phrase has grown to have its own pop-culture meaning that “often refers to a man who is seen as dominant, socially superior and in control of others.”

“The challenge with this narrative is that it can encourage people to equate masculinity with power over others rather than qualities like mutual respect, emotional maturity and empathy, which are all necessary components for a healthy relationship,” she continued, noting how often this term comes up in dating advice. “While confidence and leadership can be attractive, healthy long-term relationships require emotional safety, collaboration and mutual responsiveness to each other’s needs.”

This is similar to what Sophie Roos, a licensed sexologist, relationship therapist and author at Swedish relationship magazine Passionerad previously told HuffPost: “The biggest risk [of “alpha male” culture] is that men are forced into a hard and macho character, which they aren’t even comfortable with themselves,” Roos said. “This [is] just because they think that’s what’s expected from them.”

“If you think you always need to be emotionally disconnected toward your soft sides and dominant, you’ll never be able to create a happy long-term relationship in which you both feel good — so that’s a big problem right now where young men are tricked into this trap into becoming someone neither they [nor] women like.”

The “liberal vs. conservative” jabs distract from the bigger masculinity crisis in the room.

Big, broad conclusions about politics, attraction and what “normal” people want seldom hold up under scrutiny. A lot of times, it just depends. But experts are quick to champion a bit more nuance in the conversation — particularly when it comes to men and masculinity in 2026.

Sabrina Zohar, a dating coach, podcaster and author of “Why Am I Like This?” can, of course, diagnose the issue with someone leaning on the “alpha male” language and ideals so hard: “The alpha thing sells because it promises men a result. Be this, say this, stand like this and you’ll get chosen. And it does move the needle on attention,” she said. “You can perform your way to a first date. You cannot perform your way into someone actually knowing you, and the alpha stuff is all performance. It’s a full suit of armor.”

However, she does coach a lot of men (making up 60% of the people she works with) and isn’t interested in “dunking” on the people who fall into this performance cycle — “because the reason the pitch works is the actual story here.”

For Zohar, who cites the work from poet, essayist and Mythopoetic Men’s Movement leader Robert Bly’s “Iron John” as instrumental in her approach to masculinity with clients, there’s a benefit to understanding the displacement and isolation that ultimately attracts men to these “manosphere”-like movements.

“[Bly’s] idea was every man has a ‘wild man’ in him: Deep, instinctive, alive, not tame. And that cultures used to build things around that energy so it could go somewhere useful,” Zohar said.

These rituals of “initiation, older men mentoring younger ones, grief that got done in the open instead of swallowed, physical brotherhood,” Zohar said, were meaningful ways for men to connect with one another (and their role in the world). And the loss of those traditions, third spaces and the lack of social permission to be in true community with other men can be something men don’t even realize they’re grieving.

The counterpart to the “wild man” — which Bly called “the savage man” ― is, according to Zohar, “what’s left when a man has that same drive but no elders, no ritual, nobody who ever showed him how to hold it.”

And, ultimately, even those comments from the Democratic Party’s research that led to Ingraham’s initial “men don’t like liberals” conclusion might tell us something way more real and profound about how men feel about themselves in the era of the “male loneliness epidemic.”

Zohar said she finds that the way the Democratic and Republican parties are characterized could even be seen as men struggling with “picking between two personalities” when neither feels like a true or authentic fit.