Trump's Drag Race.
The GOP and Trump are facinated with Trans Americans - and it shows. But why?
The Grand Old Party has always been peculiarly obsessed with what happens in other people’s bedrooms—particularly those like mine. Their prurient interest in all things LGBTQ would make Freud reach for his notepad.
For decades, we’ve watched the kabuki theater of Republican righteousness collapse into tawdry tabloid scandals. The pattern is as predictable as it is pathetic: The louder the condemnation from the podium, the more likely the midnight confession in a courthouse.
Take Dennis Hastert, that avuncular wrestling coach turned longest-serving Republican Speaker. While he thundered against marriage equality from his perch in Congress, he was quietly writing hush-money checks—$3.5 million worth—to silence the ghosts of his predatory past
Larry Craig’s wide stance in that Minneapolis airport stall became the punchline that wrote itself. Mark Foley’s fevered IMs to teenage pages read like a cautionary tale from Sophocles. Roy Ashburn voted against LGBTQ rights for 14 years before his DUI arrest leaving a gay bar forced him out of the closet—at least he had the grace to apologize. Each fallen crusader adding another verse to the GOP’s gospel of projection.
But now, friends, the moral panic has found fresh prey: our transgender and non-binary neighbors. The pitchforks have been sharpened, the torches lit, and somewhere, Cotton Mather is smiling.
Which brings us to the curious case of the morphing MAGA women.
Kristi Noem arrived in Washington looking like she’d stepped out of a Nancy Meyers film—all pearls and pastels. Now? She’s cosplaying Rambo’s little sister, her face frozen in a permanent state of surgical surprise, her hair achieving heights that would make Twisted Sister jealous.
Even Melania, once the soft-focused Slovenian sphinx with her smoky eyes and “I want to marry a billionaire” elegance, has hardened into something more architectural than human—her cheekbones could cut glass, her squint now permanent, perhaps the only way to hide the contempt behind her eyes.
Kellyanne Conway went from political operative to Cryptkeeper Barbie, her face becoming a topographical map of alternative facts, each line etched deeper with every spin cycle. And Kayleigh McEnany, who started as a fresh-faced Harvard Law grad, morphed into a Fox News fembot with hair so aggressively blonde it could signal ships at sea.
Laura Trump has undergone a similar metamorphosis, developing arms that suggest she’s been brachiating from the chandeliers at Mar-a-Lago. And Kimberly Guilfoyle—whose romantic trajectory from Gavin to Don Jr. deserves its own Shakespeare play—has transformed into something out of Macbeth’s cauldron.
I watched with fascination as Laura Ingraham toured the gilded Trump palace (formally known as the White House) the other night with the president. Clearly, radical right reporting and ginning up non-controversies won out against her draft dreams for the WNBA—she’s remarkably tall. Her voice is positively Helena Handbasket, aka Chandler Bing’s mother as played by Kathleen Turner, embodying the very aesthetic these culture warriors claim to despise. The look mirrors her boss’s ex-wife Jerry Hall, whose prolific plastic surgery makes her look like she discovered her Y chromosome behind the Geritol.
The mascara alone could stock a Sephora.
This conservatives and their predilictions. Well, we can all agree that it seems that they have their “type.”
It is ironic. While raging against gender fluidity and non-conformity, these women have themselves become unrecognizable, their transformations more dramatic than any drag performer’s. They’ve become walking contradictions—railing against artifice while drowning in it.
The truth is simpler than they’d like to admit: When you need a scapegoat for your electoral anxieties, the vulnerable make easy targets. It’s the oldest trick in the demagogue’s playbook—distract from your own inadequacies by demonizing difference.
But projection, as any therapist will tell you, is confession through accusation.
Perhaps it’s time for the GOP to stop peering into America’s bedrooms and start looking in the mirror.
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