Beltway Barbie and the Botox cougars

by David Benjamin

“Another day, another round of pedophiles, violent thugs, and human traffickers removed from American communities. Under President Trump and Secretary Noem, ICE is targeting and removing the WORST OF THE WORST criminal illegal aliens terrorizing American families.” ―Tricia McLaughlin

MADISON, Wis.—Despite a decorous embargo by the establishment media, you might have noticed that Dear Leader Trump has surrounded himself with a flock of remarkably compliant and largely harebrained women. In the unwritten story about this staffing anomaly, the phrase that comes to mind, almost involuntarily, is “bimbos stacked like cordwood on the Oval Office casting couch.”

But this is a reductive zinger that understates the cunning and devotion of the lovelies who swirl in the orbit of the tangerine prince. At least eight of the 28 gals attending Trump’s whims and fancies are simply too old to qualify as bimbos. To invoke Will Smith in Enemy of the State, the “proper slur” for an odalisque as aged and haggard as, say, Tulsi Gabbard, 44, Pam Bondi, 60, or Jeanine Pirro, 74, or is “cougar.” Foremost among this group is Homeland reichsfuhrer Kristi Noem, 54, who’s had more cosmetic procedures than Cher, Tammy Faye Bakker and Faye Dunaway all rolled together. Her neediness to be loved by Trump seeps from her body like sweat off a bay heifer.

Of course, it’s not unusual for a president to lift older broads to high office. Liz Dole, Elaine Chao and Madeleine Albright, for example, are elder women who preceded Bondi, Linda McMahon and Brooke Rollins into the Cabinet, the difference being that the latter group could actually tell their ass from their elbow.

The distinction that makes this White House—in Trump’s terms—“unlike anything you’ve ever seen before” is a president surrounded by what looks to be the entire supporting cast in the first reel of Legally Blonde. Apparently reminiscent, and envious, of longtime wingman Jeffrey Epstein wallowing in nymphets, Trump has immersed himself—legally—in sorority girls. Among his bevy of at least twenty exceptionally young women flitting in and out of the West Wing, only five have cracked their thirtieth birthdays. The reigning dowager among these stewardesses, press secretary Karoline Leavitt, is just 31.

Although, they like to call themselves a “blonde supremacy,” not all of the Barbie battalion are as golden as Leavitt. DOD press secretary, Kingsley Wilson, a brunette, punched her ticket into the girls club by adopting the Nazi war cry “blood and soil” as a sort of personal motto. The Barbies tend to be the products of right-wing campus politics. Several did quite well in beauty pageants. Few ever had a real job, waiting tables, cleaning hotel rooms, emptying bedpans, teaching third-graders. Their young Republican activism led them, magnetically, toward “communications” duties. Most served on the staffs of right-wing legislators who were able, after the 2024 election, to pump the White House pipeline full of dewy white handmaidens reeking of White Shoulders.

The Barbies occupy offices, deflect the press and “support” Trump’s elusive “agenda.” But the pointless functions they perform are not the reason why this confectionary torrent of cupcakes has flooded the government. Like the First Lady—an icy cynic who knows what she bought—the girls are present in the proximity of the mad king to submit to his will, coo in his ear and validate his virility. They are the symbolic equivalent to his cantilevered comb-over and chemical tan. The more the girls mimic the style and “feel” of their master, the safer they are from his explosive displeasure.

Leavitt, Trump’s personal mouthpiece, blonde and eerily blank, is the alpha bimbo. But I think the one likely to arrive in Hell before Karoline—more Ilsa Koch than Eva Braun—is Tricia McLaughlin, whose corrosive lies serve Trump’s ethnic cleansing of America. Tricia is the herald of state bigotry and industrial cruelty. Her job, as the Revlon face of atrocity, is to proclaim a de facto campaign of apartheid, rounding up America’s untouchables, scaring the shit out of their children and warehousing bewildered political prisoners in remote spec buildings. out of sight of white America, with no hope for any vestige of due process.

Tricia—Karoline, too, and the dissembling cougars—give feminine voice to a Trumpian ethos of lying blatantly and then escalating the lie, because it works. As Kaivan Shroff wrote in The Bulwark, “The lies are no longer meant to be believed; they are simply meant to impress the big boss. The solution is not to tick through arguments on the terms of liars. It is to offer the public a reality to believe in that is more compelling than the litany of lies.”

I could wonder, although pointlessly, if Tricia—or Karoline, Kinglsey, or Sonny Joy Nelson—might feel some compassion at the sight of masked thugs loading randomly chosen brown people into black vans, or if she might be troubled by video of a Trumpville concentration camp, where toddlers stare out from chain-link cages. But such sights and feelings seem beyond Tricia’s myopic range. She and the other Barbies were the larvae of MAGA conservatism, cocooned all their lives in affluence, privilege, cocksureness and perfect hair.

Karoline, Tricia or the lovely Abigail Jackson could risk rupture from Trump. But the danger of departing any orbit around so powerful a sphere is to either crash to the earth in flames or to drift off into space—a speck in the black void.

Still, I wonder what next? Where does a Trumpette go, after Trump?

For the cougars even as “young” as Kristi, this second Trump reich looks to be a last hurrah. His golden girls are likely to fall victim to the prophecy of ex-GOP strategist Rick Wilson: “Everything Trump touches dies.” They’re too old to stir Trump’s libido and too tainted to shake his stigma. At best, Pam and Jeanine, Linda, Tulsi and Alina will devolve into Shakespearean tragicomic figures, like Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, cited by historians in ironic footnotes.

For the Barbies, the future is fuzzier.

The most ruthless and prominent among them, Tricia and Karoline, have anchored their careers in Donald Trump, which threatens to become the anchor that drowns their hopes. But, even if they can somehow erase the mark of Trump, they are girls mired in a misogynist movement. They’ve been complicit in the creation of a “manosphere” that deems them alien and subordinate. How does a career woman navigate a community that regards careerism as a male prerogative?

If Karoline Leavitt had not sold her soul to a sexual predator whose self-declared “best friend” raped hundreds of girls as young as nine years old, she might have had some Republican potential. She could have lingered on the political fringe waiting for conservatism to regain a measure of credibility, working her way upward in local or state party leadership, possibly using her good looks and talent for mendacity to get elected to some office.

But always tied to her, like the ancient mariner’s albatross, is Trump. She’s shackled to a sexist movement that prefers all its women to stay home in the ’burbs, bake apple pies, breed like fruit flies and herd the little ones to church on Sunday. It’s a bygone Eisenhower utopia that’s not really bygone, because it never was. And if it came to pass, I can’t imagine any self-respecting woman who could stand to live there, even if she’s a Republican.

The question yet to be answered, though, is: Once a girl’s given herself to Trump, body, mind, soul and conscience, can she ever re-enter civil society? Or is she stuck forever with only the company of geriatric Trumpists snapping towels, scratching their nuts and calling them “honeybunch”?

Put simply: Is Mar-a-Lago Hell?