Sean Collins

Gaby! Tell me about MAGA aesthetics. When I hear that phrase, a specific image comes to mind, something very starkly gendered. Like, for men, either completely clean shaven or bearded, nothing in between; with hair close cropped on the sides, but long on top. A bulky build. A short sleeved shirt paired with jeans or chinos and some kind of boots, maybe combat boots.

Gabrielle Berbey

Combat boots too? Those are MAGA now? 

Sean Collins

Haha, yeah, I feel like I’ve seen that a lot. And for ladies, I’d say long, wavy tresses, very full lips, sheath dresses that are fitted, but professional, very defined brows. 

Gabrielle Berbey

What you're describing is very much what we wanted to look at in our episode. There’s a noticeable, artificial, confounding look that many people in Trump's immediate orbit seem to have, that goes beyond makeup. 

There are people — both women and men, but especially women — who seem to have gotten very visible plastic surgery. It's different from the sort of plastic surgery we saw even just a few years ago, when people would take great pains to make it look like they hadn’t gotten any work done.

To be clear, no one in Donald Trump’s orbit has come out and said they’ve had plastic surgery. Of the people often pointed to as examples of this facial aesthetic — Kristi Noem, Laura Loomer, Lara Trump, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Matt Gaetz — only Noem has admitted to any work, and only to dental work. 

We talked to a reporter from Mother Jones, Inae Oh, who has looked into this quite a bit, and really sat with the question of: Why do we see what appears to be dramatic plastic surgery around Trump? And she’s explored the question of whether proximity to power — and specifically to Trump — relies on a very specific look.

Sean Collins

That reminds me of a phrase we’ve often heard from Trump over the years — that someone he favors is straight out of “central casting.”

Gabrielle Berbey

That phrase is a helpful reminder that Trump comes from a reality television world, and is also someone that is quite obsessed with the pageantry of beauty — it was literally his business for a time — and is not afraid to say that. 

Part of what we're seeing is people in his circle looking like reality TV stars, in a way that is almost like a uniform. Maintaining a certain look seems to be an important part of remaining — and even getting into — Trump's orbit.

Sean Collins

Does this look tell us anything else?

Gabrielle Berbey

These looks seem to be connected with policy: You have extreme looks paired with extreme policies. Think Kristi Noem doing deportation glam in her DHS videos. 

These extreme looks are a callback to a different era of plastic surgery. These extreme policies are a callback to a different time in the United States. There's a reversion of both policy and aesthetic.

Sean Collins

You used the word “extreme” there; is there an effort to be extreme on all fronts? Is that one way to describe the connection between Trump aesthetics and policy?

Gabrielle Berbey

I think so. Inae points out is that Trump 2.0 is over the top in both policy and aesthetics, in ways that Trump 1.0 was not.

Sean Collins

Over the top, like how reality TV is engineered to be over the top?

Gabrielle Berbey

Reality TV really is a helpful way to think about this, in that it is something that relies on tools of distraction, much like the aesthetics that we see around these Trump-adjacent figures. You get caught up in the glam and ridiculousness, and you don’t notice what’s actually happening (or sometimes how there is nothing happening). 

Inae points out that when you look at the ridiculousness of a deportation-glam, reality TV-ified DHS video, you almost forget that there are real people in those videos who are being deported, who have families, because the performance and aesthetics of it is so shocking.

Sean Collins

As you were saying that, I thought, It’s almost as if Trump’s policies themselves have had plastic surgery — they’ve been given shiny, artificial faces you want to stare at, making it hard to see the reality underneath.

Gabrielle Berbey

That's a really good way of putting it. And that’s the case for talking about aesthetics and policy as a pair. Because when you just talk about aesthetics, it can start to feel very anti-feminist. People should do what they want with their face. But when you pair the brutality of the policies paired with almost brutal face augmentation, they feel connected and worth interrogating.