For President Donald Trump, “hot” isn’t just a compliment — it’s an ethos.

Sydney Sweeney is the “HOTTEST. ” Taylor Swift is “NO LONGER HOT,” the president proclaimed in a series of posts last summer on Truth Social, the hottest social media app, no doubt.

“Hot” is why women of the MAGA movement seek out Mar-a-Lago face, why the men lean hard into spray tans, and why Trump himself fawns over the pilots of Air Force One.

“These guys are specimens,” he said during a 2024 interview with Joe Rogan. “They’re better looking than Tom Cruise ... Like, perfect specimens.”

Hotness is next to godliness for MAGA. Given the fixation, it’s no surprise that being the “hotter” political party has become another way of “owning the libs”: Earlier this month, Katie Miller, a political adviser and the wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, tweeted a survey suggesting that 60% of “extremely liberal” men are childless.

It’s because “liberal men aren’t attractive,” Miller remarked. (“Have you seen your husband?” many replied.)

Miller isn’t the only one on the right playing Hot or Not: Political Edition — Kid Rock, the stogie-loving MAGA songbird, recently blamed “ugly liberal women” for America’s declining birthrate.

Then there’s Fox Nation’s Tomi Lahren, who has blamed “ugly white liberal women” for what she calls the “open and blatant hatred of white people” in the U.S.

Brian Glenn, a host at the conservative Right Side Broadcasting Network and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s boyfriend, thinks that liberal women are usually the “ugliest” women.

“I believe that conservative and Republican people are better-looking people,” he told Christina Bobb, a Trump attorney, a few years back. “They’re happy. They’re joyous. They exercise. They get outside. They enjoy the outdoors. They’re proud of themselves. They embrace their inner beauty and outer beauty.”

There’s nothing new here, really ― “women’s libbers are ugly” is a taunt that goes back to attacks against suffragettes more than a century ago.

“The idea is that feminists are just women who can’t attract a man, and therefore hate men,” said Dan Cassino, a professor of government and politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University, who has studied how Trump is shaping ideas around gender.

The underlying belief is that what women really want is to get married, have a husband who earns all the money, and be housewives and mothers.

“This deal of trading attractiveness and sex for security is presumed to be a good one, so the only reason a woman would reject that deal is if she isn’t attractive enough for a man to want to have sex with her and take care of her,” Cassino told HuffPost. “It allows people to dismiss any criticism coming from these women as just sour grapes.”

College-educated white women have long been skeptical of the MAGA movement and have been deemed “nasty” or “ugly” for it. (Though the latest school yard taunt for the demographic is AWFUL: “Affluent White Female Urban Liberal.”)

In the event a woman criticizing MAGA is considered attractive, Cassino says the disparagement tends to shift to her being shrill, bossy, slutty or in some other way so undesirable that no man wants her.

Look at the overly sexual memes critics post about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), or the crude, sexist attacks former Vice President Kamala Harris faced in the 2024 presidential election.

Of course, women on the right have been subject to sexism online, too: former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin or ex-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, for instance.

But for the corners of the conservative right that dovetail with the manosphere ― both share anti-feminist ideologies ― Cassino said women are increasingly framed in terms of “sexual market value.” Opting out of traditional roles isn’t seen as a choice — it’s framed as something only women with low perceived value would do.

There’s also an element of betrayal inherent in such commentary.

“Men on the right think that the deal they’re offering women — protection and financial support in return for subservience and sexual access — is a good one, and they think that attractive women should be lining up for it,” Cassino said.

“Hence the weird tradwife fetishism,” he added. “When women don’t want to live like it’s the 1950s or the 1750s, there’s a need to find some reason why not.”

But there’s another, Trump-specific reason winning the hot wars matters so much to his acolytes: How you look matters immensely to Trump, a former reality star himself who loves to talk of people who look like they were brought in from “central casting” and disparage “ugly” female reporters.

“Given the emphasis Trump has put on appearance [rather] than content, this is something they have to ‘win’ because otherwise, they really can’t justify why they deserve the power they have,” said Einav Rabinovitch-Fox, a historian who writes about gender and politics, and the author of “Dressed For Freedom: The Fashionable Politics of American Feminism.”

“That’s the thing, the ‘beauty’ they celebrate is not natural or one that is a result of ‘good genes’ but one that requires a lot of work and effort to achieve the ‘hotness,’” Rabinovitch-Fox said, pointing to the aforementioned Mar-a-Lago face.

Looksmaxxing is a superficial pursuit, but “the effort, money and time they put into looking hot is a way to show loyalty to Trump and the MAGA movement,” Rabinovitch-Fox said.

As Cassino noted, though, it’s not just MAGA elites who use cultural markers to show how committed they are to the cause or the subculture.

“If someone gets a face tattoo, they’re announcing that they’re punk for life, and never getting a real job, because they can’t,” he said. “Someone getting Mar-a-Lago face, or breaking their jaw to better match some standard of beauty isn’t any different.”

Being reality-show-star “hot” is a way to signal how committed they are to the movement, “like having a red MAGA hat that you can never take off, ” the professor said.

There’s a darker side to all of this, too. Cassino thinks the right’s fixation on being attractive may also be part of its troubling flirtation with eugenics, a discredited theory that selective breeding can, and should, be used to improve the human race: We see it in how Trump repeatedly talks about “good genes” or the rise of pronatalism that has Elon Musk obsessed with having as many children as possible.

“America invented eugenics, and it’s never led to anything good, but we’re still at it,” Cassino said. “No one has gotten out the calipers to start measuring the sizes of people’s skulls, but we’re not far off.”

What’s ironic is that there’s some actual science the right could lean on to make their case: A 2017 study in the Journal of Public Economics suggested that the attractiveness of a candidate does indeed correlate with their politics. The researchers found that politicians on the right were perceived as more good-looking in Europe, the U.S. and Australia.

Other studies have suggested that good-looking people are more likely to hold conservative views and possess greater confidence in navigating social systems because they experience more positive life outcomes due to their beauty ― a “halo effect,” the researchers said.

Another suggested that the more attractive people believe themselves to be, the lower their preference for egalitarianism, a value typically associated with the political left.

Clearly, “who’s hot, who’s not” is a loaded, complicated subject. But in some ways, why the right employs such bullying is pretty simple: “You’re ugly” is a classic schoolyard taunt ― one that still lands in Congress and on the political podcast circuit.

“It’s a strategy that has long proved to be successful for the right, unfortunately,” Rabinovitch-Fox said.

The professor pointed to how right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly often leaned on such mean-spirited digs, casting feminist and liberal women as unattractive, mannish or joyless in her fight against the women’s lib movement and the Equal Rights Amendment. (Toward the end of her life, Schlafly softened that stance — slightly. “Find out if your girlfriend is a feminist before you get too far into it,” she wrote in a 2014 Christian Post column. “Some of them are pretty. They don’t all look like Bella Abzug,” a famous feminist.)

“Just like Schlafly, today’s right-wing pundits know that it’s easier to call someone ugly than to actually engage with their arguments,” Rabinovitch-Fox said.

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