President Trump has changed a lot about Washington over the past four months, including how it looks.
I’m not talking about the city’s architecture, although he has made clear his disdain for the brutalism of many federal buildings (an aesthetic that I’m personally quite fond of).
I’m talking about the city’s style.
Trump and his inner circle of aides and family members cannonballed into Washington’s ocean of understated suits and blouses with a bold and strikingly consistent approach to clothing, cosmetics and, well, personal enhancements. (Nothing points up its consistency so well as the occasional departure, like the T-shirts and blazers Elon Musk has worn to the Oval Office, including today.) If style is a way to send a message, and politics is largely a matter of communication, the maturation of a “MAGA style” in Trump’s second term is a development worth understanding.
So I reached out to our reigning expert: Vanessa Friedman, The Times’s chief fashion critic, who has covered political image-making for years (and who, as it happens, writes an excellent newsletter). We discussed the language of Trumpist fashion, the way it has evolved since Trump’s first term and what it means for men as well as for women.
OK, let’s start with some visual aids. Who, to you, really embodies the aesthetic of the people around President Trump?
Why don’t we take a look?
You wrote recently that this style is defined a little more by the beauty choices than by fashion. Tell me about that. What are the key elements of MAGA beauty, and where does fashion come into it?
MAGA beauty — which encompasses Mar-a-Lago face and conservative girl makeup — plays up classically feminine features to an almost cartoonish degree, thus underscoring a retrograde gendered paradigm. Think long, blow-dried, bouncy Breck girl hair; false eyelashes and lots of mascara; plumped lips; and, often, filler in the cheeks. Fashion is there to essentially reinforce that proposition. Hence the figure-hugging sheath dress and high heels.
Washington has its own specific aesthetic, too, but it’s not very exciting. I think of Rothy’s flats, Vera Bradley blazers, subtle Botox and polished hairstyles. Can Trump-era style change this? Or is the clash too pronounced?
If the greater “Make America Great Again” goal, as stated, is to clear out the Washington establishment, rather than merely change it, I think that applies to image-making, too.
How do you see beauty houses and designers responding to this aesthetic? Are they running from it? Or are they embracing it?
In the first Trump term, a handful of designers made a lot of noise about not wanting to dress Melania Trump. But this time around, the official fashion and beauty establishment is largely staying silent and playing it neutral. Of course, the idea that any designer has a say over who wears its clothes is kind of foolish, given that if someone can afford an item, they can simply walk into a store and buy it. At the same time, it is fashion’s job to respond to social and political currents. So who knows? Maybe we will see more sheath dresses soon.
Do you think Trump-era style has changed since his first term, and how?
As with most things Trump, what was there in the first term has been magnified in the second. That goes for style as well as for policy.
There is an important distinction between the style we see in Trump’s world — his close aides, his social circle, the people who frequent Mar-a-Lago — and the style that his followers have embraced at Trump rallies or gatherings like CPAC, where people wear themed T-shirts or fake Trump hair. How do you think about those differences?
I think of it as the difference between dressing to be a member of a private club and dressing to be a member of the larger community. In both cases, however, it’s about belonging and signaling allegiance.
We’ve talked a lot about women’s style here. What is male style — and beauty — in Trump’s orbit?
It’s the cartoon-man equivalent of the cartoon woman, which means square jaw and full head of (short) hair. If there is a beard involved — a relatively new development thanks to Don Jr. and JD Vance — it’s a Clint Eastwood hunter-type beard, to communicate machismo. For fashion, think the mini-me version of the Trump uniform: blue suit, red tie, white shirt. If the flag were a white-collar work outfit, this is how it would look. Kid Rock took it to an even more literal extreme when he visited the Oval Office in April.
Style sends a message. Does Trumpy style send a political message? What do you think it is?
Absolutely. What’s so effective and powerful about these choices is that they serve as representations of many of Trump’s positions, be it the two-gender executive order or his relentless claim that he loves the country so much and is the only one who can make America great again. See something often enough, and it sinks into your subconscious without your even realizing it, and before you know it a Pavlovian call-and-response situation has been created in your lizard brain. Thinking a suit or a hairdo is simply about beauty or fashion is to miss the strategic role that image now plays in shaping opinion.
He Said That
A Diddy Pardon? Trump won’t rule it out.
President Trump has a lot to say. My colleague Karoun Demirjian is here to explain something that caught her attention during the president’s news conference today with Elon Musk.
An Oval Office send-off for Elon Musk veered slightly off course Friday afternoon when President Trump was asked if he would consider pardoning Sean Combs, the music mogul on trial on federal charges of racketeering and sex trafficking.
The question seemed to catch Trump off guard. But he wouldn’t rule out a pardon.
“I would certainly look at the facts,” Trump said. “If I think somebody was mistreated, whether they like me or don’t like me, it wouldn’t have any impact.”
Back in 2012, Trump spoke highly of Combs during an episode of “The Celebrity Apprentice,” referring to him by one of his stage names, “Diddy.”
“I love Diddy. You know he’s a good friend of mine — he’s a good guy,” Trump said, adding that he would “stick up for him” when a contestant who had worked for Combs declined to echo Trump’s high assessment of Combs’s character.
On Friday, Trump said he hadn’t been following the trial and hadn’t spoken to Combs in years. He said their relationship “busted up” after he entered politics, and he insinuated that Combs didn’t like him any more.
But he left the door open to a pardon, if Combs is ultimately convicted.
“Nobody’s asked, but I know people are thinking about it,” Trump said, chuckling slightly. He added, “I think some people have been very close to asking.”
The Moment
The great in-between
We often use this space to spend a moment with a remarkable picture captured by a Times photographer. This one was taken last weekend, as cadets at West Point waited for a red-hatted President Trump to deliver their commencement address.
Kenny Holston photographed the speech, and his images ran with a story by Erica Green. But he also took note of what happened beforehand, when a whole lot of cadets were stuck outside, waiting for the president amid on-and-off rain. That’s when he snapped this photo.
“It’s not very often you see anyone in uniform break their bearing like that,” Kenny told me. He felt some empathy for the cadet, since Kenny, too, was stuck waiting in the rain.
Moments like that — the waiting, the in-between — might sound boring. But Kenny told me that’s when he makes his best pictures.
“When you’re photographing the president or the vice president, a lot of it is a dog and pony show,” he said. “So you got to find moments in between the dog and pony show that actually depict this kind of real human, real life.”
ONE LAST THING
A library caught in the middle
Seven years ago, when I was reporting from New England, I drove up to Derby Line, Vt., for a story about a part of the U.S.-Canada border that was delineated not by a wall or a fence but by nine pots of pink and purple petunias.
At the time, the close-knit neighbors on either side of the flowers — Derby Line’s Canadian counterpart is Stanstead, Quebec — were anxiously watching as a first-term President Trump traded barbs over tariffs with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The tension between the two leaders made little sense in a community where peoples’ lives, the streets and even the library straddle the border.
These days, things are even tenser, and the library is bearing the brunt, my colleague Norimitsu Onishi writes. Today, he published the tale of the library, built as a symbol of unity, where a black line across the floor marks the border — and where U.S. homeland security officials plan to stop allowing Canadians direct access to the main entrance, which they had enjoyed for years, even though it’s on the American side. Local officials say they’re fighting to keep the library open to all, because American authorities have come to view it as a smuggling and security threat.
Karoun Demirjian contributed reporting to this newsletter.
Jess Bidgood is a managing correspondent for The Times and writes the On Politics newsletter, a guide to how President Trump is changing Washington, the country and its politics.
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.
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