Sen. Roger Marshall is a great man, a great senator and “one of the finest people in government,” according to President Trump. But the Kansas Republican failed to score Trump’s new favorite endorsement at a rally Monday night: a compliment about his looks.

For weeks, Trump has been promoting embattled Republican candidates not for their policies, but for their supposed handsomeness. The focus on physical attributes isn’t entirely out of the ordinary for Trump — he owned the Miss Universe beauty pageant for nearly two decades — but his recent pattern of complimenting male candidates’ appearances is a unique midterm campaign strategy.

At a rally in Kentucky on Saturday, Trump described sizing up Ohio Sen. Jon Husted.

“I never did that with a man before,” Trump said. “I examined his ass, and then I looked at his shoulders. I looked at his feet. I looked at his hand. I looked at his jawline. Studied him. He’s got a jawline.”Trump has made it clear he believes his comments are benefiting GOP candidates, even as polls show widespread discontent with Republicans’ handling of high prices and the ongoing war in Iran. He claimed, without citing a source, that Husted had “picked up like nine or 10 points” in the polls following his compliments.

He made the comments at a rally for House candidate Ed Gallrein, the “beautiful” former Navy SEAL who defeated Rep. Thomas Massie in a May Republican primary. “I looked at him, walked through the door of the Oval Office. I said, ‘That guy is Central Casting,’” Trump said of the 68-year-old Gallrein.

Trump has given men this kind of praise before, including former Vice President Mike Pence, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. But lately, the compliments have come more often and more effusively. At a Republican rally in Dalton, Georgia, on Friday, Trump said Rick Jackson, the party’s candidate for governor, isn’t just “very handsome.”He’s a “distinguished, beautiful looking guy.”Rep. Mike Collins, the GOP Senate nominee, is not only “Central Casting” but “a good-looking man.”“And he’s all man,” Trump added.

Trump’s focus on men’s looks — and, by extension, their masculinity — touches on a larger question in this year’s midterms: Which party is the party of real men? Democrats have been fighting on that terrain too. Several of the party’s Senate candidates have taken part in debates over modern masculinity, often using the vocabulary of online discussions about it. They include Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Sen. Jon Ossoff (Collins’s opponent in Georgia) and James Talarico in Texas.

El-Sayed has accused his Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, of having “beta energy.”Talarico has pushed back on claims from Texas Republicans that he is “Low T,” short for low testosterone. Official Democratic Party social media accounts have posted thirst-trap-style edits of Ossoff and El-Sayed that play up the candidates’ youth, energy and, of course, their looks.

Both parties’ interest in male attractiveness comes as polls show Republicans have lost their edge with young men, most of whom backed Trump in 2024. Some young men seem to share Trump’s fascination with the male form. This is the same group that pushed “looksmaxxing,” an online obsession with optimizing one’s face, to the top of social media feeds earlier this year. It’s unclear whether Trump is deliberately courting fans of looksmaxxing influencers like Clavicular, but it is clear that Marshall isn’t the only Republican to fall short of the president’s endorsement of his aesthetics.

Speaking in Dallas last month, Trump said that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Talarico’s Republican opponent in the Senate race, “may not be the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen.”“I’m sorry, Ken,” Trump apologized, before encouraging the attendees to cast their vote for Paxton, Central Casting or not.