Good news for the Women’s Marchers of 2017. The future did turn out to be female. Less good news: The females now in power are far-right and bloodthirsty.
Having appointed more women to Cabinet-level positions than any other Republican president, Donald Trump now has a quartet of harpies fronting the administration’s most vicious bloodsports. Like middle-aged Manson girls, Pam Bondi, Tulsi Gabbard, Linda McMahon, and Kristi Noem take orders from a supremely nasty felon. But they have vile streaks all their own. The vileness blends their private and public actions in a filthy smoothie.
On the main stage, Attorney General Pam Bondi has proven a singularly dutiful and hollow-eyed Trump soldier. (For Manson family obsessives, she’s probably closest to Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme.) As Bloomberg recently reported, Bondi has been covering for both Trump and Trump buddy and child rapist Jeffrey Epstein since 2011. From 2011 to 2019, as Florida’s attorney general, Bondi first quashed an investigation into Trump’s (corrupt, now defunct) Trump University after receiving an apparent $25,000 bribe from the Trump Foundation. Then she turned a blind eye to the lawsuits filed by Epstein’s victims that challenged the nauseating plea deal that Epstein received in secret in 2008.
Early this year, Bondi tried to cover up the cover-up, exciting the pinwheel-eyed QAnon diaspora by boasting that she had yottabytes of smoking guns and child porn that implicated deep staters in Epstein’s sex trafficking. But after reportedly finding Trump’s name amid the smoke, she went evasive, and finally radio silent. This kicked her Epstein-Trump cover-up into high gear. Bondi’s flip-flopping then boomeranged on Trump. Of Americans surveyed by YouGov in July, 46 percent said they believe Trump was involved in Epstein’s crimes. (Bondi “has very little time to turn this around,” a House Republican told Politico.)
Gabbard, the newly minted gun fetishist who now speaks in Q drops, is concocting sham treason charges against Obama. This is probably to get back into the boss’s good graces after she crossed him on the Iran bombing—and to help Bondi and Trump distract from Trump-Epstein. Gabbard’s Q-ish nonsense detonated almost nowhere but on right-wing social media, which now resounds with predictably sick, racist calls to lynch Obama.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon—whose estranged husband, Vince, a serial sex pest and allegedly much worse, was busted a few days ago for reckless, Bentley-totaling driving and sued earlier this year for sexual assault and trafficking—is being sued for her own alleged complicity in the sexual exploitation of children. In the midst of this thorny litigation, McMahon has been willfully destroying American education, imperiling the country’s future in plain sight.
And DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who believes habeas corpus means Trump can do whatever the hell he wants to immigrants, continues to vamp as the national avatar of constitutionally dubious raids, renditions, and detentions—in a $50,000 Rolex.
As for their knack for striking Instagram poses—in concentration camps, on horseback and beaches, thumbs-upping with Trump, sometimes brandishing big guns—these women have been training their whole lives for MAGA shock theater. Bondi cut her teeth in blonded-and-bronzed Fox appearances; Gabbard on social media and in a flamboyant cult in which adherents evidently ate the leader’s toenails; McMahon as a heel in what Roland Barthes called pro-wrestling’s “spectacle of suffering”; and Kristi Noem in a teen beauty pageant.
Just like reality TV, the demimonde where Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Trump himself rose to power, these spectacles all pass off fiction as fact and call for cartoony personas as contrived as the heroes and heels of McMahon’s garish WWE. Persona cultivation is integral to Trump’s Cabinet personalities and involves everything from stage makeup to did-she-or-didn’t-she cosmetic procedures to the stagey cruelty infliction.
The original Manson girls wore prairie dresses, shifts, and bare faces. Bondi, Gabbard, and Noem go for the trademark Trump-girl glam. But their cheugy hair and smeary MAGA makeup would just be a reprise of the Hicks-Guilfoyle lewk from season one, if their images weren’t now explicitly pressed into the service of so much disturbing political iconography.
Gabbard’s Instagram shows her thirstily clad in ammo—carrying the kind of assault rifle she used to oppose—at the Tactical Games, where “fitness meets firearms.” Flame emoji and catcalls for the director of national intelligence pervade the comments. And of course then there’s Noem flexing outside a chainlink cage packed with shirtless men in an image that wouldn’t be out of place in groyper porn.
Only one of the Trump ladies avoids MAGA glam. McMahon, at 76, cultivates a back-office look that became her pitch to Trump as a sharp businesswoman. But that was a pro-wrestling persona too. In WWE days, founder Vince McMahon cast Linda, whom he considered drab, as his sexless wife in one especially dark storyline. In the role of “Mrs. McMahon,” Linda was sedated, committed, and consigned to a wheelchair by “Mr. McMahon” so he could sexually abuse female wrestlers, including one he forced to strip, crawl, and bark like a dog while Linda watched. At the same time, according to Josie Riesman, Vince’s biographer, Linda “was almost certainly aware of a massive pedophile ring that ran within the McMahons’ World Wrestling Federation (as it was known) from the 1970s to the early 90s.”
It’s all so depressing. And of course Kristi Noem shot the family puppy. “I hated that dog,” Noem explained in her memoir, later adding: “I have always been a wolf.”
MAGA makeup aside (“It’s giving drained, it’s giving dusty”), all of these women are wolfish. When did Republican women, aged 44 to 76, become so savage? So proudly deviant?
In McMahon’s shakedown letter to Harvard’s president in May, she asked, “Why is there so much HATE?”
There it all was. The boss’s shouty capital letters. The compulsive projection. And the question these women should be asking themselves.
