The Femininomenon: Decoding Feminine Energy in the Trump Era

As “masculine energy” pulses through the manosphere, it’s time to take a look at the women of the right, from Fox News–friendly Trump officials to Gen Z YouTube talkers to Nap Dress–clad lifestyle influencers. Inside the Hive host and Vanity Fair editor in chief Radhika Jones, alongside executive editor Claire Howorth and Hive editor Michael Calderone, unpacks what it means to be a MAGA woman today, whether wielding power in Washington or amassing followers on TikTok—and what these political and cultural roles say about the state of feminism in America.

There are many different stripes of MAGA women, but to Howorth, most fall into three specific categories. “The first is the executive. That’s the Pam Bondis, the Susie Wileses—the women with legit power and who hold real offices, whether in media or the administration. The second is the influencer layer. Those are the podcasters, the cultural observers, maybe sometimes some of the more retail-focused leaders in MAGA world. And then there are the everyday women who lean conservative, who maybe aren’t thinking of themselves as Trump supporters, but they’re espousing some of these ideas, and they might even think of themselves as feminists.”

In that first category, Attorney General Bondi and White House chief of staff Wiles are joined by top Trump officials like Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who engage in a kind of “masculine posturing that comes along with” their positions, says Jones. “Their performance in these roles often relies on a kind of traditional, conservative, masculine view of what is tough.” True as that may be, MAGA women in politics and media are still expected to live up to a brutal beauty standard, which is often straight out of the Fox News aesthetic (think: cosmetic work, layers of makeup, and a wardrobe that screams Stepford meets Capitol Hill).

In the second category, you have women who wield major cultural influence, such as 23-year-old Brett Cooper, who hosted her own show produced by Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire and boasts 1.4 million subscribers on YouTube. “She’s speaking to, I think, a Gen Z audience and a heavily female audience,” says Calderone, noting that Cooper even sold out a show in the liberal bastion of New York, where she delivered a take on the Justin Baldoni–Blake Lively feud. “Several episodes hit on transgender issues and kind of familiar culture-war terrain…. There’s definitely the kind of right-wing, conservative views, but it’s this mix of lifestyle and family and other content that feels less cable news and more Instagram.”

Beyond the Brett Coopers of the world, you also have social media tradwives and influencers like Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, who “still see themselves as having a ton of agency and as entrepreneurs in their own right,” as Howorth puts it. They reject “wokeism,” DEI, and the “girlbossing” ethos of, say, Sheryl Sandberg, instead favoring family values and traditional gender roles.

And last but not least, there’s the third category, which includes the many women who might be exposed to more conservative viewpoints through lifestyle influencers or videos they come across on YouTube. These women, Howorth notes, “arrive at this place and maybe get hoodwinked because they’re coming from a place of being curious about motherhood or curious about their children’s health”—which dovetails, she adds, with the MAHA movement. “They’re not actively trying to be subservient women to please men, but they’re pitching subservience and patriarchal ideas because they’re pleasing to themselves. It’s like, maybe it’s sixth-wave feminism.”