A few weeks ago, a South Carolina woman wearing stilettos and raw-edged jeans got into an expletive-laced shouting match with a man in the aisle of a beauty store. This fracas went viral on multiple social media platforms, which would be totally unremarkable — just another day of verbal aggression, social unrest and cosmetic consumption on the internet.
But the incident made it to People magazine because the woman is Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina. She and her constituent, who asked her about when she’d be holding her next town hall, recorded the encounter and posted it.
Mace — who has hundreds of thousands of followers on X, Instagram and TikTok (where she goes by the handle @basedmace) — is easily clocked as just the kind of Republican woman who is ascendant in the Trump administration. The women’s hair is in Utah curls, long waves with straight ends, popularized by Mormon momfluencers. Their makeup is heavy; the content creator and comedian Suzanne Lambert called it “Republican makeup,” which she explained to me is “matte and flat”: thick eyebrows and lashes, dark eyeliner on the top and bottom lids, a bold lip, lots of bronzer. “Inappropriate unless you’re on a pageant stage. And in that case, I would still do it differently,” she said. Their clothes, whether casual or corporate, are form-fitting and often accessorized with giant crosses. They are always thin and almost always white.
To each her own. But it is also undeniable that this hyperfeminine and overtly Christian look offers a stark contrast to the often blunt and even brutal language they employ. Another glaring example of this is the horrifying video of Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, at CECOT, the tropical gulag in El Salvador where the Trump administration has sent migrants. She stood there before a group of shirtless prisoners and declared, “If you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face,” while wearing a $50,000 Rolex.
Public shows of aggressiveness are something Noem and Mace have in common. (Let’s not forget the media moment around Noem’s dog killing.) This isn’t the first time Mace has posted confrontations that escalate into slurs and name-calling. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, isn’t quite as aggressive on her socials, but her attacks on the media happen so frequently that Fox News put together an Instagram sizzle reel of her most “iconic comebacks” from the Trump administration’s first 100 days.
Leavitt prefers another common influencer strategy: appearing on the channels of other social media stars with large followings to spread her message. She recently collaborated with the running influencer Kate Mackz. Unlike other political figures who have appeared on Mackz’s channel, Leavitt did not go for a run alongside Mackz, but Leavitt did show off a Tesla and a meme that she printed out and tacked to her corkboard. It depicts someone presenting a disembodied brain to a man who says, “No thanks. I won’t be needing that. I believe everything the legacy media shows.”
