In Your Face: The Brutal Aesthetics of MAGA
In the early morning hours of January 28, as dozens of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrived in New York to round up undocumented immigrants, a shimmering Kristi Noem appeared in the Bronx. She wore a bulletproof vest and a baseball cap, but also dramatic makeup and hair coiled to show off a set of pearl earrings. “We are getting the dirtbags off these streets,” the new Homeland Security secretary said in a three-second clip she posted to social media.
The operation seemed designed for maximum coverage, despite actual goals achieved. (While Trump officials claim operations round up felons, many of the migrants arrested by ICE so far have no criminal record.) Still, Noem would later tell CBS News that the raid was not about creating a “spectacle.” Instead, she said the government simply sought “transparency.” But was that all? Here was a top-ranking Trump appointee asserting the absence of performance after a theatrical show of force. That Noem tagged along for the predawn crackdown in the full glam of a Real Housewife made the claim even more absurd.
Noem’s anti-immigrant politics might have been familiar to South Dakotans. But did they recognize their former governor? Noem is one of several figures—a few men, but mostly women—in President Donald Trump’s orbit to undergo striking physical transformations as the boundaries that once delineated celebrity and political power fully disintegrate. The resulting look has since sparked satirical backlash online, with critics mocking “conservative girl makeup.”
Clockwise from top left: Kristi Noem, Matt Gaetz, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and Lara TrumpChip Somodevilla/Getty(2); Ivan Apfel/Getty; Dominic Gwinn/Zuma
But the most jarring aesthetic in this burgeoning MAGA stagecraft is the unbridled embrace of face-altering procedures: plastic surgery, veneers, and injectables like Botox and fillers. (As one Daily Mail headline declared, “Plastic surgery was [the] star of [the] show” at the Republican National Convention in 2024.) The overall look has since been disparagingly referred to as “Mar-a-Lago face.”
Although plastic surgery and injectables are enjoyed far beyond conservative circles, what distinguishes Mar-a-Lago face from what you and I might contemplate getting done on an especially self-flagellating day is the aggressive, overt nature with which MAGA-ites seem to pursue it. “Over the top, overdone, ridiculous,” is how one New York plastic surgeon I spoke with described it.
“What we’re seeing with something like Mar-a-Lago face is a swing back toward [an era of plastic surgery when] people can tell that people have had work done,” Alka Menon, a professor of sociology at Yale University, told me.
The lack of discretion within the current GOP might feel strange today when many—even Kim Kardashian—appear to prize confidentiality. But for the MAGA-verse, today’s tweaks seem intended to signal membership with Trump, a man notoriously obsessed with the literal pageantry of beauty, and his broader efforts to force strict gender norms onto the electorate.The aesthetic is, like Trump’s politics, ridiculously blunt.
“Over the top, overdone, ridiculous,” is how one New York plastic surgeon described it.
“I read it as a sign of physical submission to Donald Trump, a statement of fealty to him and the idea that the surface of a policy is the only thing that matters,” says Anne Higonnet, a professor of art history at Barnard College. “In a way, these women are performing a key part of Donald Trump’s whole political persona.”
Take Noem. Soon after Trump said that he was considering her to be his running mate, Noem released an infomercial-style social media video debuting dental work. The new smile, one Republican strategist told the New York Times, was “all about her appeal to an audience of one.” Noem never got the VP role, and she was sued for “deceptive advertising practices.” That lawsuit was dismissed, and she denied being compensated for any advertisements. Still, Trump did appoint her to lead the Department of Homeland Security, despite the fact she had neither worked in the department nor had a background in law enforcement.
What Noem did seem to have was the face for the job. “I want you in the ads, and I want your face in the ads,” Noem recently recalled Trump saying, referring to a set of new taxpayer-funded ads celebrating the immigration crackdown. “I want you to thank me. I want you to thank me for closing the border.”
Is one’s proximity to power in Trump’s administration, then, governed at least partly by a willingness to mold oneself to the MAGA aesthetic, no matter how severe the undertaking? As Menon put it to me: “Plastic surgery that is very visible makes it clear that women have invested in their body, and that’s a signal that they’re sending to everybody that they’re putting in this work.”
Call it girlboss logic with a MAGA facelift.
Strange and self-abasing tactics to signal affinity with the ruling class have always existed. During Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, artificially blackened teeth were considered fashionable among those who wanted to mimic the genuinely decaying teeth of a monarch who consumed too much sugar.
If plastic surgery operates as a kind of professional certification, a move to level you up in this administration, then is it not an act of empowerment? It isn’t far-fetched to imagine these women and men—former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), to start—believing that going under the knife could be a form of legitimate labor, getting the literal work done to maximize one’s economic and political standing.
Our capitalist beauty bonanza, of which I am a faithful adherent, insinuates similar ideas: Botox advertises injectables as a path to confidence for women. On TikTok, openness about the procedures you’ve undergone is seen as a critical ingredient for virality.
The right has adopted this laboratory to sell itself to women, too. Trump-era Republicans have long played a similar trick with the pop feminist catchphrase of “empowerment.” In 2016, Lara Trump led a “Women Empowerment Tour” for the man who would later gut Roe v. Wade and destroy initiatives to help women get equal job opportunities. “Blazing a trail to empowerment” is how a lifestyle magazine described Kimberly Guilfoyle, who led fundraising for Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign. In 2019, now-Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote a Sun Sentinel editorial urging voters to reelect Trump headlined: “President Trump empowering women across America.”
Casting Mar-a-Lago face as a path to female freedom isn’t that odd, considering the fun-house mirror feminism of the GOP. As Corey Robin wrote in The Reactionary Mind, one need only turn to Phyllis Schlafly—the godmother of the Republican women’s movement—to see how the right “adopts, often unconsciously, the language of democratic reform to the cause of hierarchy.” Schlafly famously co-opted the language of feminists when she criticized the Equal Rights Amendment as “an attack on the rights of the wife.” (Noem’s office was generally evasive when reached for comment on this piece. But one exchange struck me: “I imagine you are focusing on men, right?”)
The new look among MAGA women is consistent with the conservative movement’s decades-old willingness to embrace women’s rights—up to a point. As Ronnee Schreiber, a politics professor at San Diego State University, notes: “The caveat is, ‘Of course, women should have the ability to make choices, but we don’t want to go as far as the feminists.’”
At a time when the GOP is viciously exploiting transgender Americans as a cultural scapegoat, Schreiber notes, hyper-femininity also helps reinforce the “norms and differences between femininity and masculinity.” In this way, women in Republican politics show their male counterparts that they are committed to the same conservative goals, but are not threatening. “It reaffirms the femininity of women,” she adds, “even if they have power.” Here is the gender-affirming care the right can celebrate.
Cut deeper. What happens to the self when surgery is embraced for the purpose of political conformity, consciously or otherwise? At its most extreme, the result might look something like a steady stream of fembots, indistinguishable and dulled. But the urge to do Mar-a-Lago face also feels familiar to any woman.
“To me, it’s less about the gaze of one man,” Schreiber explains of Mar-a-Lago face, “and more about the broader political meaning of gender.” For women to have power, she notes, they often feel they must appease, with their appearance, a man in power. This plays out in garish ways in Trumpworld. But the pressure on women is not unique to politics.
Trump’s Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, New Jersey, once offered a winner $25,000 worth of plastic surgery.
We already know what happens when digital trends and algorithms dictate real-life beauty standards. Just look at everyone’s cheeks. After years of popular buccal fat removal procedures, Allure reports that in 2025, facial fat grafting, wherein fat from other parts of the body is used to fill in those recently hollowed-out faces, will be the look to chase.
Yet as fast-moving as our digital trends are, so too are the whims of Trump, a man notorious for his chaotic management style. Naturally, the whiplash extends to his views of plastic surgery.
After bringing Laura Loomer to several events to commemorate September 11 last year, prompting alarm that the right-wing, xenophobic internet troll could serve somewhere in his administration, the Atlantic reported that one of the final factors to convince him otherwise was not only her hateful views, but also the extent of her surgery.
The president has also specifically gone after face-altering procedures to humiliate women. “She was bleeding badly from a facelift,” he once said as president in 2017, referring to MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski. Meanwhile, it’s been alleged that Trump himself has had work done—which is to say nothing of the many women in his orbit who have seemed to enjoy unfettered access to procedures. Heralded as his most ambitious real estate endeavor, Trump’s Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, New Jersey, once offered a winner $25,000 worth of plastic surgery.
But young conservatives seem to be struggling with the aesthetics of their MAGA elders. As MAGA influencer Arynne Wexler told New York’s Brock Colyar in January: “We need to be better. That’s why I put my face in my videos. People need to see that I look like a liberal! I look like a girl that would, ugh, vote for Kamala [Harris].”
The urgency with which Wexler underscores a need to look “normal,” even like a “liberal,” is clarifying: Young conservatives see many things to celebrate about Trump—the end of DEI, the return of the r-word, cruelty—but looking like a fembot is not one of them. It hints at the possibility that MAGA’s aesthetic choices could expire as quickly as all the facial injections.
Or it simply could be the fact that they’re still young. The ambient pressure will eventually come for them; it comes for us all.
When was the last time I caught a stranger looking at me with subtle desire? Working full time from home at the cusp of early middle age, as a relatively new mom with a 3-year-old, I genuinely can’t recall. I look like garbage most days and since giving birth, the internal hormonal shift has left me, at times, smelling like an Italian sub. (Botox could fix that, too, I know.)
So far, I have resisted the siren song of cosmetic enhancements, even as friends, and many with increasing regularity, dabble in procedures. Yet I am just as mesmerized by the standards of our internet-fueled homogeneity as anyone else. It simply feels good to look good. And when the world feels so bad, why not use everything available to feel good? So I spend too much on serums and dodge the mirror in the mornings.
I look like garbage most days and since giving birth, the internal hormonal shift has left me, at times, smelling like an Italian sub.
You could attribute my current resistance to a bunch of factors. But I suspect that one of the strongest is having already experienced what seems like our future every time I visit South Korea, the plastic surgery capital of the world and my parents’ birthplace. The faces of manipulated uniformity—double eyelid surgery, face-whitening injections, breast implants on laser-toned thin bodies—are jolting to witness. And at first, it’s almost funny; the absolute chokehold is weird to behold! But by the third or fourth day, the ambient sense that I am the odd one, even ugly, starts to creep in. Perhaps a quick visit to one of Seoul’s 600 plastic surgery clinics would fix things.
Which is to say that I hesitate to fault anyone in the eyeshot of the most powerful person in the world—against all the signals both in and out of the White House—for aesthetic choices made on their paths to power. Look at Joe Biden, who in his own catastrophic stubbornness to retain the presidency was suspected of heavy Botox.
But any empathy one might have for those who apparently feel a need to conform to Mar-a-Lago face instantly evaporates when power is wielded for the shocking cruelty we now see before us: mass deportations, but make it sexy. Noem in a cowboy hat threatening “economic pain” upon other nations. Inhumanity as ASMR. Each features a callous energy that courses through. In the same way their aesthetics build on conservative notions of gender, ultimately producing such garishness, Trump builds on old American ideals—empire and capitalism—and turbocharges them into the nightmare before us.
This is the real brutality of the Mar-a-Lago aesthetic. It’s not the makeup or potential plastic surgery, but the eagerness with which its adherents capitulate to the whims of their king. American politics, like our faces, may never recover.
Continue Reading…
Mother Jones
