Shucking Oysters: Trumpettes

Shucking Oysters: Trumpettes

By Alex Allen

“Horse face.” “Fat.” “Ugly.” A “dog who has the face of a pig.” And “piggy.” These are just a few terms of endearment Trump has said to various women over the last year. Attacking women’s looks, mocking their bodily functions or comparing them to animals is his repertoire. Which is all rather odd, considering Trump has appointed more women to Cabinet-level positions than any other Republican president. The “new model of right-wing” womanhood – far-far right and blood thirsty. 

In 2012, Trump attacked Cher, over her criticism of Republican candidates, saying that she should “stop with the bad plastic surgery and nasty statements.” In the same year, Trump dismissed Bette Midler as “an extremely unattractive woman.” In a 2015 interview he said, “Heidi Klum. Sadly, she’s no longer a 10.” And yet, for a man who is so obsessed about looks, the women in his inner circle are not exactly Vogue material. All have identical plastic faces. Prolapsed lips, filler cheeks and foreheads, jaw contouring, coupled with heavy makeup, spray tans, fake eyelashes, thick eyebrows, and dark smoky eyes. It’s the Mar-a-Lago look. Which makes perfect sense considering the meaning of Mar is to ruin or diminish the perfection or wholeness of.

As Guardian writer Arwa Mahdawi wrote: “Among women the look is characterized by huge lips that look as if they could suck up a small child whole, frozen facial expressions, and cheeks so bulbous you could hide a gerbil underneath them. Men also have the slick frozen faces, but instead of bigger lips they’re pairing them with bigger jaws.” Also known as the “Republican look,” their clothes, whether casual or corporate, are always form-fitting and often accessorized with big gold Christian crosses. The women are always thin and almost always white.

Mahdawi adds that these are not human faces, they are “luxury meat-masks meant to signal wealth and in-group belonging.” AI-generated caricatures that live in such weird little bubbles that everyone is addicted to filler. No more hiding your secrets, it’s about flaunting them – a sort of conspicuous consumption of cosmetic surgery. 

DC plastic surgeon Anita Kulkarni has been turning down an influx of political insiders asking for “a more done look, like that Mar-a-Lago face.” And not because of a huge waiting list, but because adding extra fillers and injections on top of already treated faces, can be dangerous, she warned. It’s a situation Kulkarni calls “filler blindness.” If you add more and more product to your face and are surrounded by people who do the same, “you lose sight of anatomic normalcy.”

“It’s a mistake to dismiss this as just about fashion, just about makeup,” said Juliet Williams, a professor of gender studies at UCLA. “It’s actually absolutely central because this Trump MAGA movement was able to return to the White House in 2024, I believe, essentially because of leveraging the gender war.” Williams added: “I look at these MAGA women and I don’t see them as fashion victims…I see it as war paint.”

It’s about signalling your exclusive membership in Trump World. As Mahdawi wrote, when surgery is embraced for the purpose of political conformity, consciously or otherwise, the inner circle will just be “a steady stream of fembots, indistinguishable and dulled.” 

Achieving Mar-a-Lago Face isn’t easy. According to DC plastic surgeon, Dr. Jeffrey Lisiecki, the amount of work required depends on how much a person has aged and their natural features. To obtain the signature look, most people need a whole suite of procedures. And this is only the beginning. 

Achieving Mar-a-Lago Face isn’t cheap: $15,000USD for a brow lift, $30,000 for a face lift and neck lift, $12,500 for an eyelid lift, $20,000 for a nose job, and $10,000 for a fat transfer to the face. To complete the look, women will pay thousands more on Botox, fillers, neuromodulators, microneedling, facials, peels, laser treatments and medical-grade skin care products. 

And like a relationship, without regular maintenance, the Mar-a-Lago Face starts to disappear very quickly. Maintenance includes more Botox injections and laser treatments to maintain the skin’s buffed appearance. The bee-sting lips and puffy cheeks will require regular fill-ups and more surgery will be needed to tighten up the aging loose skin.

Dr. Faryan Jalalabadi, a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, uses the term “frozen face,” which is caused by filler obstructing the muscles, resulting in less expression. Studies have found that the ice princess look leads to a lack of ability to connect. “When you look at them and you’re trying to have a heart-to-heart conversation, it’s hard not to get distracted,” Jalalabadi notes. “You have a hard time connecting with this person because they can’t move their face.” 

It’s no secret that when we get old our faces not only lose a bit of volume, they kind of sag and the only way to lift with volume is to overfill. And that’s where we see these overfilled high-cheek-boned, puffy-looking faces, “bordering on non-human looks, because what happens is people keep going back for little maintenance touch-ups.” Eventually, they can only get the surgeon who prefers money over cosmetics. The result? Jalalabadi warns they can “easily end up getting the Joker smile, where your lips are over-pulled horizontally, or windswept eyes because the skin wasn’t set in the proper direction.” 

One of the women most frequently cited as embodying the MAGA face is Homeland Security Secretary and ICE Princess, Kristi Noem. “The long-hair extensions, the big lips, the big cheeks, the makeup, the lash extensions, it’s like she’s doing drag,” said Daniel Belkin, a dermatologist in New York. Megyn Kelly called out Noem for “cosplaying” an ICE agent on a police raid while wearing “25 pounds of hair, only to be outdone by her 30 pounds of makeup and false eyelashes.” 

This is the real brutality of the Mar-a-Lago aesthetic. Like their boss, they have a vile streak all their own. Kaleigh Werner wrote in the Independent, “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.”