President Donald Trump has by no means had any hassle discovering ladies to enthusiastically embrace his agenda. Within the citizens, 45 % of ladies voted for him; non-college-educated white ladies and white evangelical ladies are amongst his most loyal supporters. On the White Home, ladies stand at his aspect as he speaks from the rostrum, sporting what has come to be often called “Republican” make-up and Mar-a-Lago face.
That’s even though each Trump and the MAGA motion are characterised by a vindictive, nostalgic, unapologetic misogyny. Some Trump supporters brazenly fantasize about how his inconceivable promise of bringing manufacturing jobs to the US may drive ladies out of the office and drive them to turn into solely wives and moms, whereas Trump himself has been discovered civilly chargeable for sexual assault.
This time round, probably the most seen ladies of Trump’s administration are Homeland Safety Secretary Kristi Noem and press secretary Karoline Leavitt. Noem has made a meal out of the spectacle of the Trump administration’s spree of lawless deportations, taking pictures video after video wearing full army gear and full make-up as she warns migrants that she plans to personally hunt them down and lock them up. In the meantime, Leavitt, who at 27 is the youngest press secretary ever appointed, presents a softer look, along with her blonde waves and form-fitting fits, whilst she berates the press from her podium and bars unfriendly shops from the pool as if she’s disciplining insolent youngsters.
The dichotomy Leavitt and Noem are constructing speaks to a well-known downside amongst conservative ladies in politics. As Rebecca Traister put it in 2024, “The questions going through the ladies of the American proper are tough. Are they purported to be cutthroat or cute? Chilly sufficient to kill a canine or heat sufficient to bake an apple pie?”
Leavitt and Noem are at present embodying two very completely different visions of MAGA femininity, every having chosen a unique path to the identical aim: determine how you can wield energy on behalf of and keep within the good graces of Donald Trump. They’re every strolling a deadly tightrope, staking their careers and reputations on furthering the political objectives of a person and motion that implicitly guarantees to ship them straight again into the kitchen. Whether or not they handle to succeed and make it via 4 years of the Trump administration stays to be seen.
Within the meantime, we’ll see their pictures broadcast endlessly in movies and images, displaying us their finest guesses at how a MAGA lady ought to current herself.
Kristi Noem’s costumed safety theater
Noem has spent a lot of her younger time period as Secretary of Homeland Protection in entrance of the digicam, typically to disturbing impact.
In March, Noem posted to X a video of herself touring CECOT, the notorious and human rights-violating El Salvador jail to which the Trump administration has been sending deportees in defiance of courtroom orders. In it, Noem stands, somber and polished, earlier than a cell crowded with silent, shirtless prisoners. The lads are crammed into the body behind her like residing props, as she warns, “Know that this facility is likely one of the instruments in our toolkit that we are going to use for those who commit crimes towards the American folks.”
The informal dehumanization of the prisoners behind her is as attribute of the actual aesthetic Noem is cultivating as her shiny blowout. On her social media feeds, she poses subsequent to ICE brokers on raids in uniform and full glam, as she refers back to the migrants she says ought to be deported as “dirtbags” and “the worst of the worst.”
Equally, in a collection of TV adverts that ran each domestically and internationally earlier this 12 months (paid for by the Division of Homeland Safety with a $200 million funds), Noem stands all made up in an influence go well with in entrance of a line of American flags, thanking Trump for securing the nation’s borders and as soon as once more warning undocumented immigrants towards getting into the US.
The picture she’s presenting is a form of glamazon sheriff, prepared to guard the previous West from marauders by any means mandatory, the lawbook be damned.
In different iconography, she nods to her earlier profession as a rancher, posing with a cowboy hat and a set glare on the horizon line. The picture she’s presenting is a form of glamazon sheriff, prepared to guard the previous West from marauders by any means mandatory, the lawbook be damned.
Noem has relied on elaborate costume work earlier than. In 2024, as governor of South Dakota — and rumored frontrunner for Trump’s VP slot — Noem launched a collection of adverts selling open jobs in South Dakota. One after one other, she donned the uniform of a freeway patrol officer, nurse, and welder, explaining with a playful wink to the digicam that she was simply filling in. “Freedom works right here” was the tagline.
It’s one of many methods Noem indicators that she is a politician in the identical mode as Trump: one who governs by spectacle as a lot as by coverage.
Frankfurt faculty thinker Walter Benjamin wrote that fascism transforms politics into aesthetics. Fairly than change the buildings that oppress the lots, Benjamin writes, the fascist merely gives the lots a spectacle that offers them the impression that their needs have been met. Noem’s flashy efficiency of safety theater tells her followers that she is holding them protected, whilst she strips migrants, chosen practically at random, of due course of and condemns them to a lifetime trapped in an El Salvador jail.
Noem didn’t all the time appear to be this, precisely: Her shifting aesthetic has been properly documented within the political press. When she first took nationwide workplace in 2011 as South Dakota’s consultant, she seemed like what she was: a strikingly fairly Midwestern mother, with a Rachel haircut and hoop earrings. She stored chopping her hair shorter over the subsequent few years, as many ladies politicians do — up till Trump took workplace in 2016.
Then, abruptly, Noem’s hair turned dramatically longer, sun-kissed with blonde highlights and curled into TV-friendly barrel ringlets. Her face appeared to reshape itself, taking over the excessive cheekbones and frozen brow attribute of Fox Information hosts.
Some of the telling points of Noem’s makeover was additionally one of the crucial notorious. In March 2024, Noem posted a prolonged infomercial-like video to Twitter thanking a Texas-based dentist’s workplace for adjusting her tooth. The entire thing a lot resembled an commercial that Noem was sued by a client advocacy group, though the case was later dismissed.
“I would like, when folks have a look at me, [for them] to listen to the phrases that I say, and never be distracted by one thing that I’m carrying or how I look, and even my look,” Noem stated within the video, by means of clarification for why she wished to “repair” her smile so badly. “I would like them to concentrate on my ideas and concepts.”
Noem appears to consider that with the intention to make her look much less disruptive — and her gender much less disqualifying — her femininity should truly be amplified. Becoming into Trump’s favored aesthetic is a baseline requirement. By disciplining her face and physique and tooth and hair to satisfy a near-parodic commonplace, Noem seems to be making an attempt to be so good at being a girl that she is granted the prospect to hold like one of many boys — to inhabit the masculine archetype of the sheriff at the very least among the time as a result of she seems to be so female doing it.
Notably, Noem has critics on the precise who don’t seem to suppose she’s absolutely pulled it off.
“Simply cease attempting to glamorize the mission and put your self in the midst of it as you cosplay ICE agent, which you’re not,” stated Megyn Kelly in April. Kelly continued: “She is an administrative coverage individual appointed by Trump as a result of she was very loyal to him. Tremendous, however cease with the glam.”
“Conservatives want a definite aesthetic, however this one isn’t it,” mused the right-wing tradition warrior Christopher Rufo in April. “Company head shouldn’t fake to be an operator, feels faux. The message is persuasive — arresting prison aliens — however the aesthetic attracts all the eye away from the content material. The subtext right here is that Noem doesn’t need you to note what she is doing, however to note *her.* This doesn’t advance the coverage. It’s self-importance.”
Noem’s spectacle, in Kelly and Rufo’s formulation, is an excessive amount of of a spectacle, too ham-handed, so false as to present itself away. Her over-the-top glamour makes it so female as to be unserious, even for many who approve of her message.
Nonetheless, Noem seems to be nailing the transient for her most essential viewers. “You’re not allowed to say she’s lovely,” introduced Trump of Noem approvingly final summer time, “so I’m not going to say it.”
Karoline Leavitt’s massive brass band
When Christopher Rufo decried Noem’s ICE picture op, he outlined what he thought the right aesthetic for the second ought to be. “A profitable American aesthetic can be ticker tape, brass bands, jets spraying the pink, white, and blue,” Rufo wrote. “It’s a sense of brilliant optimism.”
The girl within the Trump administration at present enjoying that brass band is press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Leavitt has not, as Noem has, wanted to redevelop a complete extant political and aesthetic model to suit the Trumpist mildew. She spent her school years writing pro-Trump editorials for her faculty’s newspaper, and her first internship after graduating was on the Trump White Home press workplace throughout his first administration. She constructed her public persona within the service of Trump, and he rewarded her with a really high-profile place in response.
If the frisson of Noem’s self-presentation comes from her army machismo performed towards her glamorous attractiveness, Leavitt’s comes from the authoritativeness she adopts on the press podium performed towards her palpable youth. Her voice nonetheless retains the flavour of a younger lady’s uncertainty, irrespective of how stridently she addresses the press corps or how flagrantly she lies. She appears extra snug filming TikTok-style movies for the White Home social media accounts, addressing the digicam with an influencer’s cheerful “Hey, guys!”
“Trump’s latest press secretary is radiant, blond and apple-cheeked — as if one in all Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonnas had been styled for a Fox Information hit,” wrote the Washington Submit of Leavitt in January. “Her supply is righteous, if a bit smug. God provides everybody items, Leavitt believes; hers is public talking. And for roughly a half hour, a few times every week, she delivers Trump’s phrase to a room stuffed with skilled skeptics.”
Leavitt’s rapport with the press could also be combative, however inside the media-hostile panorama of the Trump White Home, she’s nonetheless the great cop, which is maybe to say, the good woman. The Washington Submit notes that her workplace door is open to reporters and that she peppers her emails with “pleasant exclamation factors.” Nonetheless, “good cop” typically performs as junior associate. The massive, luxurious workplace that historically goes to the White Home press secretary is, within the present administration, occupied by (male) deputy chief of workers for communications Taylor Budowich. Leavitt’s workplace, down the corridor, is lower than half the scale, a problem of which she has by no means complained in public. If the snub hurts her ambition, she doesn’t present it.
One frequently-told anecdote about Leavitt sums up the basic conservative persona she’s enjoying with. Final summer time, she went on maternity go away from her position as Trump’s marketing campaign press secretary. Three days after giving delivery, holding her son in her arms, she turned on the tv in time to see an murderer’s bullet narrowly miss Trump’s head.
“I checked out my husband and stated, ‘Seems to be like I’m going again to work,’” Leavitt advised the right-wing weblog Conservateur final fall. (The husband in query is 32 years older than her.) The publication dubbed her a “Surprise Girl” for her determination to return to the workplace simply 4 days post-partum.
The heroic younger (white) mom is a basic Republican trope, and Leavitt’s blonde hair and blue eyes equip her to embody it to the fullest. Leavitt’s motherhood feminizes her work in the identical means that Noem’s makeover feminizes hers, making her unthreatening to an ideology that goals to undo the advances that allowed ladies to work within the first place. However the place Noem’s glamour carries troubling notes of self-importance for her critics, Leavitt’s motherhood may be positioned as selfless, conventional, Americana.
Strikingly, although, what retains developing in profiles of each Leavitt and Noem is the concept of “sacrifice,” as if their completely different modes of femininity provide every lady the prospect to showcase her submission to Trump. Leavitt gave up recuperation and time at dwelling alone along with her younger youngster to function Trump’s press secretary. Noem remolded her physique within the picture of the ladies with whom Trump surrounds himself. If they’re every attempting to play out a right-wing archetype, they achieve this earlier than Trump on bended knee.
What ought to a MAGA lady be? Overtly female, definitely. Formidable, maybe, however submissive, too. What’s most essential, all the time, is an unfailing loyalty to Trump.
That, ultimately, is the center of the spectacle of Noem’s militaristic movies and Leavitt’s scolding and lies. What they’re promoting is no matter they suppose that Trump thinks a girl ought to be.
