On hallowed military ground, Stars and Stripes whipping in the upstate New York breeze, an old man in a red hat toddled on stage and shared some wisdom.
"He ended up getting a divorce, found a new wife. Could you say a trophy wife? I guess we can say a trophy wife," El Presidente said, referring, non sequitur, to the late New York real estate developer Bill Levitt. "But that doesn’t work out too well, I must tell you, a lot of trophy wives, it doesn’t work."
Trump emitted this ramble to a West Point student body that is about 21 percent female. Would “trophy wife” be on their list of career goals yet? Maybe! God only knows what they think their job prospects are in a military currently presided over by an accused roofie rapist, who is on record speaking against women in the military, and an administration that sacked top female military leaders as its first order of trolling-the-libs business.
The West Point trophy wife riff was a tangent off another tangent – about the U.S. military’s job being not to “host drag shows,” but to “dominate any foe, anytime, anyplace.”
There is a certain logic to Trump’s tangents sometimes. Trophy wife. Goals. For both MAGA genders. The transactional relationship ascendant. Everyone has a price. Sugardaddies.com. Young beauty attached to the arm of a rich, powerful old man, pampered in exchange for being value-added in business and politics, submitting occasionally to the desiccated paw.
The freaky gym rat who goes by “Bronze Age Pervert” (eventually outed as poor little rich kid and Ivy league PhD Costin Almariu) blames all Western Hemisphere’s problems on the ascendance of supposedly feminine attributes – encapsulated in what he calls an “obese Mammy” HR overlord policing language – in his bestselling book, Bronze Age Mindset, which calls for the return of Agamemnon, Hercules worship, and widespread slavery.
BAP’s world view, widely shared in Trumpland, assumes that women do not need, want, or naturally exercise agency. It presumes that women are constitutionally, genetically, mentally, physically, in every way, not as capable as men of self-reliance or living with a purpose or a mission beyond childcare. Such creatures, given power and influence, clearly must drag down the rest of society, including the he-men they try to police out of their God-given right to authority.
BAP and his male fans like to refer to the current supposedly egalitarian enforcement system, also labeled by them as “wokeness,” as “the longhouse.” Here is how “L0m3z” (another former online anon, outed as California creative writing instructor turned neo-fascist literature publisher Jonathan Keeperman) defined the term in an article published in the trad-Cath, anti-democratic “First Things” magazine:
More than anything, the Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior. ….
As of 2022, women held 52 percent of professional-managerial roles in the U.S. Women earn more than 57 percent of bachelor degrees, 61 percent of master’s degrees, and 54 percent of doctoral degrees. And because they are overrepresented in professions, such as human resource management (73 percent) and compliance officers (57 percent), that determine workplace behavioral norms, they have an outsized influence on professional culture, which itself has an outsized influence on American culture more generally.
Those tiny gains — two percent here, ten percent there …. unacceptable! Think of all the worthy white males with dreams deferred.
BAP and his fans must know that American society is more unequal than ever, and that white men still, by orders of magnitude, run everything from America’s major companies to all of Silicon Valley to the global financial sector to federal and state governments.
But still, women, learn your place.
We are living in a time of Orwellian erasure of women, as Anna Funder recently wrote in Time. Artificial Intelligence is literally hunting for and eradicating government web pages and documents with the word “women.”
This is nothing new. George Orwell himself – and his biographers – managed well to erase the contributions and influence of his accomplished wife, according to a new book, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, by Funder. (Kate Zambreno’s book Heroines has a more extensive list of modernist writers who used their disappeared wives for literary material.)
At the heart of the anti-feminist effort to convert younger women into trophy wives and nothing other than trophy wives is the notion that a viable route to success – or perhaps the only viable route, in MAGA men’s perception – is to serve rich, powerful men who need assurance that women are playthings with no agency. This model has been held up by Trump and Melania since he first screamed, “Where’s my supermodel?” as she picked her way onstage and said… literally nothing the whole time.
Melania is clearly the trophy Trump was rather wistfully thinking of when he blurted that it sometimes doesn’t work out. The East Wing is supposedly unstaffed for the first time in modern history. She served a political purpose for sure – the “supermodel” on the arm, value-added.
The late Vogue editor Andre Leon Talley said that Melania Trump was “the most exquisitely moisturized” person he’d ever met. “Melania is very moisturized, groomed, lacquered to perfection. She can stand on those 4-inch heels…“
And that’s it.
The top echelon of the MAGA right is packed with women who – like Melania – are openly engaged in transactional relationships. And now, younger MAGA women have lined themselves up with this model. Steve Bannon’s "War Room" White House correspondent Natalie Winters, who is 23 years old, proclaims she is looking forward to leaving her career so she can get down to the work of finding a husband “to be submissive to.”
If they’re not serving the regime in Washington, young women like Winters, who came of age with this look and lifestyle ascendant, are LARPing on social media as never-been-happier Betty Crocker 1950s tradwife influencers. But, in the case of influencers in particular, the joke is kind of on their guys: Follow the money home and see who really wears the pants.
The greatest difference between Gen Z and the Boomer-Gen X-Millennial cohorts is that while younger women may have been taught the lessons of feminism as children – girl power! – the real world in their living memory has not upheld that promise. Younger women don’t remember the very real restrictions that second-wave feminists eradicated, so feminism seems impotent and useless against new challenges. Submission seems like a viable choice.
A lot of this is camp, theater, and shock jock-ing, a new version of the “female chauvinist pigs” Ariel Levy chronicled in her book in the aughts. But in a time of performative erasure of women’s records of achievement, of purposeful diminishment of women’s cultural relevance, and of state power directed at women’s bodily autonomy, surrender really might seem preferable to struggle.
The White House is busy purging transcripts of Trump’s public verbal rambles from its websites, so you must catch him when you can. At West Point, Trump blurted out the unhappy old man’s truth about the trophy-ization of women.
Hopefully, both male and female cadets were listening.
Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel Zero Visibility Possible.
Reprinted with permission from COURIER's American Freakshow
