The MAGA movement tends to glorify traditional female roles — wife, mother, homemaker — while simultaneously (and confusingly) elevating ambitious, career-driven women like Karoline Leavitt.
At first glance, her prominence — and that of other women in Trump’s administration — would seem to rebut the charge that the movement is misogynist. In fact, that’s a line of defense that Trump himself has advanced.
But look a little closer, and you’ll see the structural contradiction at the heart of MAGA femininity: Female power is only legitimate when it’s exercised on behalf of Trump and by women who conform to traditional expectations around gender, marriage, motherhood, and physical appearance.
To Trump, a female White House correspondent was a “piggy,” for instance, but a female press secretary who defended the slur was “knocking them dead.”
A female employee at a Trump golf course was asked to sign an NDA after reporting harassment. But the female attorney who allegedly pressured her to sign it was, according to Trump, “a rocket ship.”
A female politician rose to prominence championing the president’s deportation agenda. But, to get there, she had to find her “Mar-a-Lago face” — and she was ousted after showing signs of personal ambition. (In fairness, she was also very bad at her job.)
It’s a very tricky little tightrope to walk. And lately, that strain has begun to show. While Trump began his second term with an unusually high number of female Cabinet members for a Republican president, women now hold only four of 23 Cabinet or Cabinet-level positions.
Trump’s support is also down among young women. In Congress, a bloc of prominent conservative women lawmakers recently broke from their party to censure Republicans accused of misconduct. Now, the MAGA movement is losing one of its fiercest female proxies in Leavitt.
Even at the height of her powers, however, Leavitt never really got her due. The luxurious office traditionally reserved for the White House press secretary instead went to another White House staffer: a dude.
