The unspoken rules of MAGA womanhood

President Donald Trump has never had any trouble finding women to enthusiastically embrace his agenda. In the electorate, 45 percent of women voted for him; non-college-educated white women and white evangelical women are among his most loyal supporters. At the White House, women stand at his side as he speaks from the podium, sporting what has come to be known as “Republican” makeup and Mar-a-Lago face. That’s despite the fact that both Trump and the MAGA movement are characterized by a vindictive, nostalgic, unapologetic misogyny. Some Trump supporters openly fantasize about how his improbable promise of bringing manufacturing jobs to the US might drive women out of the workplace and force them to become solely wives and mothers, while Trump himself has been found civilly liable for sexual assault. This time around, the most visible women of Trump’s administration are Homeland Security 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, shooting video after video dressed in full military gear and full makeup as she warns migrants that she plans to personally hunt them down and lock them up. Meanwhile, Leavitt, who at 27 is the youngest press secretary ever appointed, presents a softer look, with her blonde waves and form-fitting suits, even as she berates the press from her podium and bars unfriendly outlets from the pool as if she’s disciplining insolent teenagers. The dichotomy Leavitt and Noem are building speaks to a familiar problem among conservative women in politics. As Rebecca Traister put it in 2024, “The questions facing the women of the American right are tricky. Are they supposed to be cutthroat or cute? Cold enough to kill a dog or warm enough to bake an apple pie?” Leavitt and Noem are currently embodying two very different visions of MAGA femininity, each having selected a different path to the same goal: figure out how to wield power on behalf of and stay in the good graces of Donald Trump. They’re each walking a perilous tightrope, staking their careers and reputations on furthering the political goals of a man and movement that implicitly promises to send them straight back into the kitchen. Whether they manage to succeed and make it through four years of the Trump administration remains to be seen. In the meantime, we’ll see their images broadcast endlessly in videos and photographs, showing us their best guesses at how a MAGA woman should present herself. [Image: Kristi Noem in 2025. As secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security, Noem is one of the most visible women in the Trump administration. https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/gettyimages-2206555944.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] Kristi Noem’s costumed security theater Noem has spent much of her young term as Secretary of Homeland Defense in front of the camera, often to disturbing effect. In March, Noem posted to X a video of herself touring CECOT, the infamous and human rights-violating El Salvador prison to which the Trump administration has been sending deportees in defiance of court orders. In it, Noem stands, somber and polished, before a cell crowded with silent, shirtless prisoners. The men are crammed into the frame behind her like living props, as she warns, “Know that this facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.” [Media: https://twitter.com/Sec_Noem/status/1905034256826408982] The casual dehumanization of the prisoners behind her is as characteristic of the particular aesthetic Noem is cultivating as her glossy blowout. On her social media feeds, she poses next to ICE agents on raids in uniform and full glam, as she refers to the migrants she says should be deported as “dirtbags” and “the worst of the worst.” Similarly, in a series of TV ads that ran both domestically and internationally earlier this year (paid for by the Department of Homeland Security with a $200 million budget), Noem stands all made up in a power suit in front of a line of American flags, thanking Trump for securing the country’s borders and once again warning undocumented immigrants against entering the US. In other iconography, she nods to her previous career as a rancher, posing with a cowboy hat and a fixed glare at the horizon line. The image she’s presenting is a sort of glamazon sheriff, ready to protect the old West from marauders by any means necessary, the lawbook be damned. Noem has relied on elaborate costume work before. In 2024, as governor of South Dakota — and rumored frontrunner for Trump’s VP slot — Noem released a series of ads promoting open jobs in South Dakota. One after another, she donned the uniform of a highway patrol officer, nurse, and welder, explaining with a playful wink to the camera that she was just filling in. “Freedom works here” was the tagline. It’s one of the ways Noem signals that she is a politician in the same mode as Trump: one who governs by spectacle as much as by policy. Frankfurt school philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote that fascism transforms politics into aesthetics. Rather than change the structures that oppress the masses, Benjamin writes, the fascist merely offers the masses a spectacle that gives them the impression that their desires have been met. Noem’s flashy performance of security theater tells her followers that she is keeping them safe, even as she strips migrants, selected nearly at random, of due process and condemns them to a lifetime trapped in an El Salvador prison. Noem did not always look like this, exactly: Her shifting aesthetic has been well documented in the political press. When she first took national office in 2011 as South Dakota’s representative, she looked like what she was: a strikingly pretty Midwestern mom, with a Rachel haircut and hoop earrings. She kept cutting her hair shorter over the next few years, as many women politicians do — up until Trump took office in 2016. [Image: https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/gettyimages-108968143.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] [Image: https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-462646643.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] [Image: https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-896679868_43416c.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] [Image: https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1228218684.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] Then, abruptly, Noem’s hair became dramatically longer, sun-kissed with blonde highlights and curled into TV-friendly barrel ringlets. Her face seemed to reshape itself, taking on the high cheekbones and frozen forehead characteristic of Fox News hosts. One of the most telling aspects of Noem’s makeover was also one of the most infamous. In March 2024, Noem posted a lengthy infomercial-like video to Twitter thanking a Texas-based dentist’s office for adjusting her teeth. The whole thing so much resembled an advertisement that Noem was sued by a consumer advocacy group, although the case was later dismissed. “I want, when people look at me, [for them] to hear the words that I say, and not be distracted by something that I’m wearing or how I look, or even my appearance,” Noem said in the video, by way of explanation for why she wanted to “fix” her smile so badly. “I want them to focus on my thoughts and ideas.” Noem seems to believe that in order to make her appearance less disruptive — and her gender less disqualifying — her femininity must actually be amplified. Fitting into Trump’s favored aesthetic is a baseline requirement. By disciplining her face and body and teeth and hair to meet a near-parodic standard, Noem appears to be attempting to be so good at being a woman that she is granted the chance to hang like one of the boys — to inhabit the masculine archetype of the sheriff at least some of the time because she looks so feminine doing it. [Image: Kristi Noem holds the US flag riding a horse during the Monster Energy Team Challenge in 2020, when she was governor of South Dakota. https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-1226595257.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] Notably, Noem has critics on the right who don’t appear to think she’s fully pulled it off. “Just stop trying to glamorize the mission and put yourself in the middle of it as you cosplay ICE agent, which you’re not,” said Megyn Kelly in April. Kelly continued: “She is an administrative policy person appointed by Trump because she was very loyal to him. Fine, but stop with the glam.” “Conservatives need a distinct aesthetic, but this one isn’t it,” mused the right-wing culture warrior Christopher Rufo in April. “Agency head shouldn’t pretend to be an operator, feels fake. The message is persuasive — arresting criminal aliens — but the aesthetic draws all the attention away from the content. The subtext here is that Noem does not want you to notice what she is doing, but to notice *her.* This doesn’t advance the policy. It’s vanity.” Noem’s spectacle, in Kelly and Rufo’s formulation, is too much of a spectacle, too ham-handed, so false as to give itself away. Her over-the-top glamour makes it so feminine as to be unserious, even for those who approve of her message. Nonetheless, Noem appears to be nailing the brief for her most important audience. “You’re not allowed to say she’s beautiful,” announced Trump of Noem approvingly last summer, “so I’m not going to say it.” [Image: Press secretary Karoline Leavitt has berated the press from the podium in the past and sparred withe reporters. https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/gettyimages-2211470664.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] Karoline Leavitt’s big brass band When Christopher Rufo decried Noem’s ICE photo op, he outlined what he thought the correct aesthetic for the moment should be. “A successful American aesthetic would be ticker tape, brass bands, jets spraying the red, white, and blue,” Rufo wrote. “It’s a feeling of bright optimism.” The woman in the Trump administration currently playing that brass band is press secretary Karoline Leavitt. Leavitt has not, as Noem has, needed to redevelop a whole extant political and aesthetic style to fit the Trumpist mold. She spent her college years writing pro-Trump editorials for her school’s newspaper, and her first internship after graduating was at the Trump White House press office during his first administration. She built her public persona in the service of Trump, and he rewarded her with a very high-profile position in response. If the frisson of Noem’s self-presentation comes from her military machismo played against her glamorous good looks, Leavitt’s comes from the authoritativeness she adopts on the press podium played against her palpable youth. Her voice still retains the flavor of a young woman’s uncertainty, no matter how stridently she addresses the press corps or how flagrantly she lies. She seems more comfortable filming TikTok-style videos for the White House social media accounts, addressing the camera with an influencer’s cheerful “Hey, guys!” “Trump’s newest press secretary is radiant, blond and apple-cheeked — as if one of Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonnas had been styled for a Fox News hit,” wrote the Washington Post of Leavitt in January. “Her delivery is righteous, if a bit smug. God gives everyone gifts, Leavitt believes; hers is public speaking. And for roughly a half hour, once or twice a week, she delivers Trump’s word to a room filled with professional skeptics.” Leavitt’s rapport with the press may be combative, but within the media-hostile landscape of the Trump White House, she’s still the good cop, which is perhaps to say, the nice girl. The Washington Post notes that her office door is open to reporters and that she peppers her emails with “friendly exclamation points.” Still, “good cop” sometimes plays as junior partner. The large, luxurious office that traditionally goes to the White House press secretary is, in the current administration, occupied by (male) deputy chief of staff for communications Taylor Budowich. Leavitt’s office, down the hall, is less than half the size, an issue of which she has never complained in public. If the snub hurts her ambition, she does not show it. [Image: Karoline Leavitt arrives to the White House Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn. https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/04/GettyImages-2211282477.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] One frequently-told anecdote about Leavitt sums up the classic conservative persona she’s playing with. Last summer, she went on maternity leave from her role as Trump’s campaign press secretary. Three days after giving birth, holding her son in her arms, she turned on the television in time to see an assassin’s bullet narrowly miss Trump’s head. “I looked at my husband and said, ‘Looks like I’m going back to work,’” Leavitt told the right-wing blog Conservateur last fall. (The husband in question is 32 years older than her.) The publication dubbed her a “Wonder Woman” for her decision to return to the office just four days post-partum. The heroic young (white) mother is a classic 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 same way that Noem’s makeover feminizes hers, making her unthreatening to an ideology that aims to undo the advances that allowed women to work in the first place. But where Noem’s glamour carries troubling notes of vanity for her critics, Leavitt’s motherhood can be positioned as selfless, traditional, Americana. Strikingly, though, what keeps coming up in profiles of both Leavitt and Noem is the idea of “sacrifice,” as though their different modes of femininity offer each woman the chance to showcase her submission to Trump. Leavitt gave up recuperation and time at home alone with her young child to serve as Trump’s press secretary. Noem remolded her body in the image of the women with whom Trump surrounds himself. If they are each trying to play out a right-wing archetype, they do so before Trump on bended knee. What should a MAGA woman be? Overtly feminine, certainly. Ambitious, perhaps, but submissive, too. What is most important, always, is an unfailing loyalty to Trump. That, in the end, is the heart of the spectacle of Noem’s militaristic videos and Leavitt’s scolding and lies. What they are selling is whatever they think that Trump thinks a woman should be.

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The unspoken rules of MAGA womanhood