United States (US)

In the early morning hours of January 28, as dozens of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrived in New York to round up undocumented immigrants, a shimmering Kristi Noem appeared in the Bronx. She wore a bulletproof vest and a baseball cap, but also dramatic makeup and hair coiled to show off a set of pearl earrings. “We are getting the dirtbags off these streets,” the new Homeland Security secretary said in a three-second clip she posted to social media.

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Noem’s anti-immigrant politics might have been familiar to South Dakotans. But did they recognize their former governor? Noem is one of several figures—a few men, but mostly women—in President Donald Trump’s orbit to undergo striking physical transformations as the boundaries that once delineated celebrity and political power fully disintegrate. The resulting look has since sparked satirical backlash online, with critics mocking “conservative girl makeup.”

But the most jarring aesthetic in this burgeoning MAGA stagecraft is the unbridled embrace of face-altering procedures: plastic surgery, veneers, and injectables like Botox and fillers. (As one Daily Mail headline declared, “Plastic surgery was [the] star of [the] show” at the Republican National Convention in 2024.) The overall look has since been disparagingly referred to as “Mar-a-Lago face.”

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The lack of discretion within the current GOP might feel strange today when many—even Kim Kardashian—appear to prize confidentiality. But for the MAGA-verse, today’s tweaks seem intended to signal membership with Trump, a man notoriously obsessed with the literal pageantry of beauty, and his broader efforts to force strict gender norms onto the electorate. The aesthetic is, like Trump’s politics, ridiculously blunt.

“I read it as a sign of physical submission to Donald Trump, a statement of fealty to him and the idea that the surface of a policy is the only thing that matters,” says Anne Higonnet, a professor of art history at Barnard College. “In a way, these women are performing a key part of Donald Trump’s whole political persona.”

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At a time when the GOP is viciously exploiting transgender Americans as a cultural scapegoat, Schreiber notes, hyper-femininity also helps reinforce the “norms and differences between femininity and masculinity.” In this way, women in Republican politics show their male counterparts that they are committed to the same conservative goals, but are not threatening. “It reaffirms the femininity of women,” she adds, “even if they have power.” Here is the gender-affirming care the right can celebrate.

 A new executive order from President Donald Trump aims to expand information-sharing across federal agencies as well as between federal and state governments, but civil libertarians and other experts are warning that the main purpose is to help normalize how the Department of Government Efficiency is handling government data.

The order, issued Thursday, directs all federal agency heads to modify or rescind any regulations preventing the sharing of unclassified data and records between federal agencies.

Agency heads also must ensure that the U.S. government has “unfettered access” to comprehensive data from all state programs that receive federal funding. The order extends to all such data even when stored in third-party databases. 

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 While the new EO asserts that the removal of data “silos” is designed to eliminate fraud, waste and abuse, disturbing mission creep is very possible, said Elizabeth Laird, director of equity and civic technology at the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology.

There are no assurances that the data won’t be used for “targeting people who the administration has separately said are a priority for them,” Laird said. “That can include immigrants, it can include people who are transgender, it can include people that speak up” against the administration.

During his first presidency, Trump issued an EO attempting to compel state government agencies to share administrative data with the federal government for purposes of immigration enforcement. At least four states shared immigration data, Laird said.

“You’re laying the foundation for this data to be weaponized in ways never seen before in the country.” 

Karla Jay remembers joining the second night of street protests during the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York City. For her, and for so many other LGBTQ+ people, something had shifted: People were angry. They didn’t want things to go back to normal — because normal meant police raids. Normal meant living underground. It meant hiding who they were at their jobs and from their families. They wanted a radical change.  

Radical change meant organizing. Jay joined a meeting with the Gay Liberation Front, which would become the incubator for the modern LGBTQ+ political movement and proliferate in chapters across the country. At those meetings, she remembers discussing what freedom could look like. Holding hands with a lover while walking down the street, without fear of getting beaten up, one person said. Another said they’d like to get married. At the time, those dreams seemed impossible.

Jay, now 78, is worried that history will repeat itself. She’s worried that LGBTQ+ people will be put in the dark again by the draconian policies of a second Trump administration. 

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“We have forgotten that the laws are written to protect property and not to protect people. They’re written to protect White men and their property, and historically, women and children were their property,” she said. “To expect justice from people who write laws to protect themselves has been a fundamental error of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans community.” 

The Trump administration pushed forward into a new phase of the rolling national constitutional crisis over the weekend, reportedly defying two different federal court orders imposing limits on its deportation of immigrants without due process. First, immigrant authorities deported Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist at Brown University, despite a judge’s Friday order halting her removal. Second, authorities deported about 250 Venezuelan migrants, flouting another judge’s explicit directive to turn around American planes that hadn’t yet landed in El Salvador, where the migrants were being sent. The Justice Department claimed that it could not comply with the order barring Alawieh’s removal because it arrived too late. But the White House defended its defiance of the order prohibiting deportations of Venezuelans, insisting that the judge had no jurisdiction over the migrants—and that Trump holds absolute, unreviewable constitutional authority to expel noncitizens.

Taken on their own, these claims would be chilling enough. But they were coupled with another novel late-night claim of presidential power: On Monday, Donald Trump purported to reverse President Joe Biden’s pardons of Jan. 6 committee members. In a Truth Social post that came just after midnight, Trump claimed the pardons are now “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT,” asserting the power to undo their clemency because Biden allegedly signed it “by Autopen.” (It is the official position of the executive branch, unchallenged by the courts, that autopen qualifies as a valid presidential signature.)

Taken together, these actions and declarations amount to a significant escalation in Trump’s transformation of his own presidency into an autocracy or, perhaps more accurately, a monarchy. His Justice Department has taken vague claims of “Article II authority” to new extremes, ascribing to him an unchecked right to expel immigrants with no semblance of due process—and as his defenders have asserted all weekend, to ignore lawful court orders that stand in his way. Meanwhile, Trump himself has made it clear that this extreme and dangerous new vision of executive power does not apply to the presidency, but only his presidency: It is not a set of neutral principles, but an ever-evolving pretext for his own personal whims and cruelties, dressed up in legalese concocted by the conservative legal movement for precisely this purpose.

Intersex advocates say that they have been shut out of the conversations about gender and health in the United States and that the January 28 executive order has far-reaching consequences for intersex kids, not just because it allows dangerous surgeries to continue.

“None of the EOs mention intersex people specifically — they are systematically scrubbing mentions of intersex people from government websites,” the intersex rights group interACT wrote  in an email to community members.

Several hospitals and doctors have complied with Trump’s order, announcing in recent weeks that they have halted gender-affirming care, though some have resumed care based on ongoing litigation. In some cases, those same health centers that have stopped gender-affirming care have also largely continued to perform controversial sex-altering operations in the form of intersex pediatric surgeries, according to interACT.

Intersex advocates say that juxtaposition lays bare the hypocrisy of the order and those following it. It’s been “striking” to see those same health providers continue non-consensual intersex surgeries, said Sylvan Fraser Anthony, legal and policy director for interACT.

“Hospitals have been so reluctant — flat out refusing or taking years before issuing some partial policy about whether they’re going to be changing practices related to these non-consensual surgeries on intersex children,” Anthony said. “They’ve taken years, if not decades, to review those [policies] and most have not been responsive at all to calls to review and update their standards and their practices for intersex children to respect their bodily autonomy. Whereas they’re responding within a matter of days and weeks to this executive order when no one is making them — rushing to make policy moves that harm trans patients.”

My partner and I found a lovely city park with a picnic area and gazebo to eat breakfast in after camping on National Forest land nearby. After a mug of coffee, I visited the public restroom. I didn’t expect a stranger to yell at me through the flimsy stall door.

“Hello? Are you a male or female?”

I was the only person using the restroom — the kids who had been in there a minute ago had left. I felt this man’s eyes on my sneakers and blue hiking pants under the stall. I was scared this harassment could escalate if I didn’t say something to diffuse the situation. I gulped and called back, “Hello?”

“Oh, you’re a female. My bad.” He sounded reassured by my quavering voice. I heard his footsteps leaving the room. My heart raced as I fumbled with toilet paper, fingers shaking. I felt nauseated.

My voice had immediately identified me as the “female” I didn’t feel myself to be — and all it took was two syllables. But my “female” voice had also saved me from further harassment. Would that man have dragged me out of the stall if I sounded “like a man” or remained quiet? Would he have looked under the stall? Would he have tried to check what was between my legs while my pants were down? Did he have any idea how much of a violation these real and imagined threats were to me?

And why was a man even in the women’s room, questioning me? Did a kid’s mother report me to her husband for looking too much like a man in the women’s room? Perhaps they were alarmed that I, with my short hair, had been in the restroom with their young kids. I felt physically ill at the troubling thought that someone would assume I would do anything harmful to children. I hadn’t said anything, made eye contact with anyone or done anything other than sit quietly in the stall in the room that matches my assigned sex at birth.

I felt bad for looking masculine to make myself more comfortable, because I didn’t want to make anyone else uncomfortable. Some part of me longed to return to my habit of looking more like a woman, but I also felt sick from not feeling right in my body. 

I can empathize with these strangers viewing me and my body as a threat because I have also viewed my body as a threat. I have been unhappy with the shape of my body, my appearance in the mirror and the tone of my voice. And to have that thrown back in my face in such a vulnerable moment — pants down, defenseless, forced by my body’s very personal needs to be in this gendered room — hit close to home.

Twenty-five years ago, trans women (those transitioning from male to female) outnumbered trans men (transitioning from female to male) two to one. Today, those seeking hormonal treatment for gender dysphoria are trending younger and are primarily trans men.

Yet, Trump’s first executive order was titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” The text of the order repeatedly states its intent is to protect women from “men (who) self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women … (which) attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety and well-being.”

If the majority of those seeking treatment for gender dysphoria today are primarily trans men (females transitioning to males), then why do women’s spaces need protecting? Nowhere in the executive order or in any of the various state legislative efforts claiming to protect women has there been any concern expressed for protecting men’s spaces from the trans men who will be entering them.

That’s because the language around protecting women is really about asserting dominance over the bodies of individuals classified as female at birth — whether they are cisgender or transgender. It’s about keeping the female body pure, normalizing bodily oppression and perpetuating rape culture.

The language used is also rooted in racism.

There is a reason those who study the rise of Christian nationalism in America emphasize its connection with white supremacy. The language around protecting women from predatory men has an unsavory history in the United States. It isn’t that long ago that Black men in America were lynched regularly, and far too often the reason given was to protect some white woman’s body.

On Friday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order drastically limiting public service workers’ ability to obtain student loan forgiveness. Under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, workers at government agencies and 501(c)(3) nonprofits are eligible for loan forgiveness after 10 years of service. But Trump's order threatens to strip that benefit—specifically targeting employees at organizations that support transgender rights or diversity initiatives. If enforced, the order could have sweeping consequences, cutting off loan relief for workers at countless nonprofits, civil rights organizations, hospitals, and schools across the country.

“The prior administration abused the PSLF Program through a waiver process, using taxpayer funds to pay off loans for employees still years away from the statutorily required number of payments. Moreover, instead of alleviating worker shortages in necessary occupations, the PSLF Program has misdirected tax dollars into activist organizations that not only fail to serve the public interest, but actually harm our national security and American values, sometimes through criminal means,” says the order.

Organizations that would be barred from the order include what the order calls “subsidization of illegal activities, including illegal immigration, human smuggling, child trafficking, pervasive damage to public property, and disruption of the public order, which threaten the security and stability of the United States.” Further down in the order, this includes organizations that support “child abuse, including the chemical and surgical castration or mutilation of children or the trafficking of children to so-called transgender sanctuary States for purposes of emancipation from their lawful parents, in violation of applicable law” as well as organizations that are “engaging in a pattern of aiding and abetting illegal discrimination.”

Both of these are common administration euphemisms for supporting transgender people and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

Amid all of Donald Trump’s power grabs over the past six weeks, one little-noticed executive order may in the long run have the largest impact on the viability of the country’s democratic system of governance.

The February 18 order, misleadingly titled, “Ensuring Accountability For All Agencies,” claims to prevent government agencies from going off on a tear creating policies that stand in conflict to the agenda of the country’s elected leadership. […] The executive order’s text gives the game away:

"It shall be the policy of the executive branch to ensure Presidential supervision and control of the entire executive branch. Moreover, all executive departments and agencies, including so-called independent agencies, shall submit for review all proposed and final significant regulatory actions to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the Executive Office of the President before publication in the Federal Register."

In other words, if Trump opposes a regulation, that regulation goes out the window.

The order states that, “The heads of independent regulatory agencies shall establish a position of White House Liaison in their respective agencies,” and goes on to say: “Independent regulatory agency chairmen shall submit agency strategic plans … to the Director of OMB for clearance prior to finalization.” In other words, independent agencies will no longer be independent but will instead be ruled over by political commissars, their every action now scrutinized to make sure they are ideologically sympatico to the aims of the MAGA movement.

The Director of the Office of Management and Budget, it should be noted, is Russ Vought, arguably the most fervent of the MAGA revolutionaries.

Musk talks about bureaucracy as being more powerful than government officials. He claims that bureaucracy eats revolutions for breakfast, and that DOGE has been the exception to this rule. He is seeking to gut the machinery of government, which he believes has previously restrained people like Trump, and replace it with algorithmic governance. Even as AI technology flounders in the corporate world, Musk clearly believes he is poised to use this technology to overtake the US government and replace human bureaucracy with a monarchistic apparatus. With algorithmic governance, there would be no resistance, no shame, no compassion, and no fear of prosecution to interrupt the execution of oligarchical whims.

This is Musk’s vision, and it’s why he is battling with Open AI to dominate a troubled industry. He wants the United States to be powered by Starlink and xAI. If the richest man in the world owns all of the machinery of the US government, he can fulfill anti-democratic tech blogger Curvis Yarvin’s dream of a state “CEO” — which Yarvin describes as a kind of monarchy.

Given Musk’s current level of power over the federal apparatus, that dream is clearly in the process of being realized.

The removal of human agency and emotion from governance is consistent with Musk’s views on empathy, which he recently shared with Rogan. “We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” Musk said. Musk qualified his remarks slightly, noting that he is not wholly opposed to empathy, but nonetheless believes that empathy is destroying Western civilization. “I believe in empathy, I think you should care about people. But you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole, and not commit civilizational suicide,” he said. After repeating multiple falsehoods about immigrants, Musk claimed it was empathy that had allowed immigrants to become a threat to the United States. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit — they’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response,” Musk said.