MAGA Women Are Realizing Their Movement Is Sexist
Last Monday, Jessica Reed Kraus, who writes the hugely popular Substack House Inhabit, published a lengthy post about her thoughts following the election. A former lifestyle influencer, Kraus became famous for her extremely sympathetic coverage of Johnny Depp during his defamation trial before she pivoted to stumping for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. during his campaign for president. When Kennedy announced in August he was dropping out of the race, she shifted her support to Trump, devoting her newsletter to rhapsodizing about going whale-watching with Kennedy in Hawaii and going to the beach with Tulsi Gabbard.
The tone of Kraus’s newsletter is usually intimate and gushy, offering what she touts as a female-friendly glimpse of a movement that is widely perceived to be the opposite. Kraus’s November 18 post, however, was a little bit different. It was about a UFC fight at Madison Square Garden that she described as “a visual bro fest that unfolded on live TV: fist bumps under flashing lights.” Donald Trump, Elon Musk, RFK Jr., and Donald Trump, Jr. were all there, and their dynamic, Kraus wrote, hovered “oddly between camaraderie and fraternity hazing.” On Trump’s plane after the fight, the four of them — even the famously health-conscious Kennedy — were photographed eating McDonald’s.
“He looked like some kind of health food hostage wanting to impress the cool kids by caving to their greasy junk food vices,” Kraus wrote. “Even for me — someone who unapologetically champions the return of brazen masculinity — the whole thing felt a bit too ‘bro-ish’ for my liking.” Not only that, but the photo was indicative of a larger issue: the absence of a female perspective behind the camera, shaping the messaging of the campaign. “MAGA, it seems, is still struggling to figure out how to incorporate women’s interests.”
Her bone to pick with MAGA, Kraus insisted, was with its bro-y aesthetics, not with the exclusionary nature of the movement itself. But the underlying message will be familiar to any woman who’s felt slighted by a boyfriend not inviting them to poker night or shifted uncomfortably in their seat as the conversation at the bar turned to nostalgia for the early days of Napster porn. It read like Kraus was discovering firsthand that there are certain spaces where women are not welcome — and she had just figured out that MAGA was one of them.
In the days following Trump’s win, this is a realization that even some of his most ardent female supporters appear to be approaching. On Election Night, NASCAR driver and pro-Trump influencer Danica Patrick posted an Instagram Story expressing her disappointment at not getting an invite to Trump’s Election Night party: “Where’s our Mar-a-Lago invite? Seriously,” she wrote. When Representative Nancy Mace began her transphobic campaign to bar Representative Sarah McBride from women’s restrooms in Congress, she was initially applauded by the right — until others learned that Mace had been the first woman to attend a previously all-male military school and even wrote a book about her experience. “Nancy, you’re fighting for women to have a right to their own independent spaces, right? The kind of independent spaces you fought to take away from men? You don’t think that’s even slightly hypocritical?,” one conservative man tweeted at her.
Even the most openly hateful women in the MAGA orbit — those who hew closest to its core ideology — are being confronted with the consequences of their own beliefs. In other words, they’re #FAFO — fucking around and finding out. The acronym is currently going viral on TikTok, where users are gleefully compiling tales of regret from Trump voters upset about being cut off by family members or the possibility of losing their Affordable Care Act benefits, despite having supported the repeal of Obamacare. (If #FAFO TikTok is to be trusted, there’s a mind-boggling number of people who were unaware that the ACA and Obamacare are one and the same.) In one Twitter thread that’s gone viral among liberals, a woman shares in a screengrabbed tweet that she “feels quite dumb” for voting for Trump; when it was repromoted by #Resistance poster Brooklyn Dad Defiant, it racked up hundreds of thousands of views from outraged Harris voters before the original poster made her account private.
These ambivalent posts have amassed a wide audience among liberals trying to find the silver lining in Harris’s loss. The subreddits r/Trumpgret and r/LeopardsAteMyFace (a reference to a viral tweet from 2015: “I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party”) have 132,000 and 1.2 million followers, respectively. They document similar narratives: In one Reddit post, a self-identified leftist writes that she voted for Trump because she thought he could “help get us out of this economic recession,” despite being pro-choice and not considering him “a great leader or even a good or moral person.” “I don’t know if my decision was the best,” she wrote. “I still have mixed feelings about all of this. And I could be wrong about everything.” (Many jumped into the comments to assure her that she was.)
Though much of the appeal of this content is rooted in liberal Schadenfreude, there does seem to be a small yet growing number of women who voted for Trump and are now confronting the consequences of that decision. This was apparent almost immediately after the race was called, when Trump supporter and white nationalist Nick Fuentes coined the horrifying phrase “your body, my choice” to gleefully troll female Harris supporters. The chant went viral in the days after the election, and while some Trump supporters claimed it was not representative of the movement as a whole, a few female voters reluctantly acknowledged that it was at least representative of a larger-than-desired faction. “I’m so sick and tired of these chuds. Always chudding up the Maga movement, and I hate them for it,” one woman who proudly proclaimed that she voted for Trump wrote on X.
It’s easy to look at posts like these and wonder how these women could possibly not have known MAGA was sexist in the first place. Trump, after all, is a candidate who has been credibly accused of sexual misconduct by dozens of women; who was captured on tape bragging to a total stranger about grabbing women by the genitalia in order to have sex with them; who regularly silences his female critics by attacking them for their looks, their medical history, and their menstrual cycles. To those horrified by Trump’s behavior, it seems virtually impossible for any woman to align themselves with him — let alone the plurality of white women who voted for him in 2024, despite pundits’ predictions that female voters would be too incensed by the overturning of Roe v. Wade to support him.
Much ink has been spilled over why Republican women would cast a vote for an accused sexual predator, the same as has been devoted to Latinx or Black or Jewish or LGBTQ conservatives voting against their own best interests. But ultimately the explanation is not particularly complex. These are the girls who rallied in defense of the accused Steubenville rapists, who changed their Twitter handles to include pirate emoji during the Depp trial, who favorited others’ Me Too posts while texting them to their friends, wondering if perhaps these ladies weren’t being a little bit dramatic. When they hear Trump feinting at calling Nancy Pelosi a bitch at a rally or JD Vance referring to liberal women as “childless cat ladies,” they can rest assured that these men aren’t talking about them — they’re talking about some other women, women who can’t take a joke, women with the pathological need to self-identify as victims. They are the exception, not the rule — and as a result, exceptions will be made for them.
Of course, what the growing reservations of female Trump voters indicate is that within the patriarchy, there are no exceptions, no chill girls to whom the rules do not apply. You are simply another pussy to be grabbed, another vote in a coveted demographic, another pawn in a game you have no chance of winning. It may take days or weeks or months or years for female Trump supporters to realize that there is no ringside seat for them, no forthcoming invite to the party, no chud-free movement creating space for them. Some will learn; many won’t. But in the interim, it’s the rest of us who will have to suffer the consequences.
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