Salon’s Amanda Marcotte has often stressed that many MAGA try to curry favor with President Donald Trump not only by aggressively promoting his policies, but also, by altering their appearances and trying to look a certain way. “Mar-a-Lago face,” according to Marcotte, includes heavy, caked-on makeup, a lot of bronzer, a fake tan, full lips, and in some cases, plastic surgery. MAGA women often express their devotion to Trump with both their physical appearances and their combative defenses of his policies.
More analysis of the role far-right women are playing in Trump’s second presidency is coming from journalist Virginia Heffernan, who co-hosts the podcast “What Rough Beast” with colleague Stephen Metcalf.
In an article published by The New Republic on August 4, Heffernan zeros in on four MAGA women in particular and their roles in pushing Trump’s policies: U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and Education Secretary Linda McMahon.
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“Good news for the Women’s Marchers of 2017: The future did turn out to be female,” Heffernan argues. “Less good news: The females now in power are far-right and bloodthirsty. Having appointed more women to Cabinet-level positions than any other Republican president, Donald Trump now has a quartet of harpies fronting the (Trump) Administration’s most vicious bloodsports. Like middle-aged Manson girls, Pam Bondi, Tulsi Gabbard, Linda McMahon, and Kristi Noem take orders from a supremely nasty felon. But they have vile streaks all their own. The vileness blends their private and public actions in a filthy smoothie.”
Heffernan stresses that Bondi, Gabbard, McMahon and Noem repeatedly show the extremes they’re willing to embrace in service of Trump.
“On the main stage,” the journalist/podcaster observes, “Attorney General Pam Bondi has proven a singularly dutiful and hollow-eyed Trump soldier. For Manson Family obsessives, she’s probably closest to Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme…. Gabbard, the newly minted gun fetishist who now speaks in Q drops, is concocting sham treason charges against Obama…. McMahon has been willfully destroying American education, imperiling the country’s future in plain sight.”
Heffernan continues, “And DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who believes habeas corpus means Trump can do whatever the hell he wants to immigrants, continues to vamp as the national avatar of constitutionally dubious raids, renditions, and detentions — in a $50,000 Rolex. As for their knack for striking Instagram poses — in concentration camps, on horseback and beaches, thumbs-upping with Trump, sometimes brandishing big guns — these women have been training their whole lives for MAGA shock theater. Bondi cut her teeth in blonded-and-bronzed Fox appearances; Gabbard on social media and in a flamboyant cult in which adherents evidently ate the leader’s toenails; McMahon as a heel in what Roland Barthes called pro-wrestling’s ‘spectacle of suffering’; and Kristi Noem in a teen beauty pageant.”
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Like Marcotte, Heffernan points out that MAGA women are careful to look a certain way.
The original Manson girls wore prairie dresses, shifts, and bare faces. Bondi, Gabbard, and Noem go for the trademark Trump-girl glam. But their cheugy hair and smeary MAGA makeup would just be a reprise of the (Hope)Hicks/(Kimberly) Guilfoyle lewk from Season 1, if their images weren’t now explicitly pressed into the service of so much disturbing political iconography…. Gabbard’s Instagram shows her thirstily clad in ammo — carrying the kind of assault rifle she used to oppose — at the Tactical Games, where ‘fitness meets firearms’…. MAGA makeup aside…. all of these women are wolfish.”
Heffernan adds, “When did Republican women, aged 44 to 76, become so savage? So proudly deviant?”
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Virginia Heffernan’s full article for The New Republic is available at this link.