Essay: The Demise of the Fascist Beauty Queen

Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Marjorie Taylor Greene

PART I

Donald Trump has surrounded himself with women; specifically white women.

They lie for him, they justify murder and violence by the thugs of the immigration militia known as ICE for him, they prosecute and persecute his enemies for him; they do his bidding.

And he discards them quicker than you can say patriarchy.

Look at Kristi Noem, who as U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security was Trump’s chief enforcer of anti-migrant violence and cruelty. Look at Pam Bondi, who as Attorney General was Trump’s chief law enforcement officer and used the law to target Trump’s enemies. Look at Karolyn Leavitt, who as White House Press Secretary is Trump’s official mouthpiece and liar. Look at Amy Coney Barrett, who as Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court hammered the necessary final nail in the coffin of the federally protected right to an abortion.

White women have helped Trump make history: Kellyanne Conway was the first woman to successfully lead a presidential campaign when Trump was first elected in 2016. Susie Wiles, the chief of staff for Trump’s second term in office, is the first woman to hold that position.

And they provide a plausible deniability for him: he points at those women for cover when we rightfully accuse him of misogyny.

More than two dozen women have accused Trump of sexually assaulting them. In May 2023, while he was out of office, a jury found that Trump sexually abused and defamed writer E. Jean Carroll in 1996. Trump’s relationship with disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has defined the president’s second term. He calls the matter a “hoax.”

Nonetheless, he has frequently described himself as a “protector” of women. During his campaign for a second term in office, he declared he would protect them “whether the women like it or not.” In addition to realizing the long-held conservative goal to destroy abortion rights, he has appointed a vice president with deeply misogynist views of his own. J.D. Vance has ridiculed women who choose not to have children as “Childless, cat ladies,” and is said to oppose no-fault divorce, which has been vital for women leaving abusive marriages.

Fighting just misogyny is not enough when there are women giving cover to authoritarianism.

When fascism surrounds itself with women who are willing footsoldiers for its violence and cruelty, feminism that targets more than just misogyny dismantles the lies and hypocrisy of fascists like Trump and others.

While the “manosphere” – a range of misogynistic communities that vary from anti-feminism to more explicit, violent rhetoric towards women – helped deliver a second-term in office to Trump, the emerging “womanosphere” and its almost exclusively white women influencers is targeting young women with right wing ideology alongside lifestyle content. Researchers have found “significant cross-pollination between the ‘manosphere’ and right-wing extremism,” which the womanosphere looks likely to copy.

The goal of feminism cannot be simply the elevation of any and all women. What a vacant and meaningless goal that would be, without also destroying patriarchy, with all its attendant oppressions. Patriarchal fuckery is no more palatable because it is delivered by women.

Italy and Japan recently got their first female prime ministers–Giorgia Meloni in 2022 and Sanae Takaichi in 2025–both women come from the far right. In France and Germany, women lead far right parties–Marine Le Pen and Alice Weidel. Right-winger Laura Fernández Delgado was elected Costa Rica’s second female president in 2026. Women have led right wing parties in Denmark and Norway, countries that long boasted feminist advances.

When the U.S. finally gets a woman president, she will most likely be from the right wing.

What makes those women so powerful is a reminder of why feminism remains a vital force against fascism.

“A part of the answer lies in culture and identity. From marianismo in Latin America—a cultural ideal derived from the veneration of the Virgin Mary that defines womanhood through moral virtue, humility, and self-sacrifice—to long-standing European notions of femininity rooted in domesticity and nurturance, women have been socialised to see themselves as caretakers, mothers, and moral anchors of society,” write Christine Kellner, Maja Włodarczyk, and Marija Bule.

Undoubtedly, the gains that feminism has made so far in the U.S. and other parts of the world are what make the ascension of those women to powerful positions possible. In return for being allowed to ascend that ladder of power, those women promote right-wing opposition to immigration, provide support for tough “law and order” issues, and proffer anti-feminist positions on women and gender issues.

Conservative and right-wing parties alike, who benefit from a host of oppressions employed by patriarchy, such as white supremacy and the disparities in wealth and income that are maintained by capitalism, will obfuscate from their misogyny by pointing to the appointment by those parties of a woman here or a woman there and smugly exclaim, “See!” Yet the agendas of those women—which are the agendas of those conservative and right-wing parties—cut feminism at its knees.

We must recognise that disingenuous ruse for what it is—an appropriation of the very thing that conservatives claim to despise: identity politics.

The sorority of fascist footsoldiers are women who think they can afford the gamble that they will not be hurt by the fascist patriarchy they serve. They are not my sisters. I do not support a woman merely because she is a woman.

White womanhood is privilege sweetened with an innocence and fragility that white women--liberal or conservative, Trump-voting or not--are adept at weaponizing.

PART II

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former Republican congresswoman from Georgia was Head Girl of the Sorority of Footsoldiers for Trump during her three terms in the U.S. Congress. Ask her if serving fascist patriarchy protected her from that fascist patriarchy.

The short answer is no.

Greene spent three terms as “Trump’s most notorious acolyte in Congress,” and “had adopted his unrepentant pugilism as her own.”

Greene backed insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and supported executing prominent Democrats.

Greene has supported the far-right QAnon movement which the FBI labelled a domestic terror threat in 2019. She has called the Sandy Hook and Parkland school massacres false flag operations designed to destroy the Second Amendment.

White womanhood is privilege sweetened with an innocence and fragility that white women--liberal or conservative, Trump-voting or not--are adept at weaponizing.

Greene was dangerous and vile long before she was elected but because much of her vileness was directed at Muslims, Black people, and Jews, Republicans shrugged and carried on with their craven hypocrisy, happy to throw their weight behind anyone who brings them votes.

Greene has been called “a Donald Trump in Heels” and “the female version of Trump.” Republicans who should have done everything to ensure that she never ran for office in the first place, placated concerns about the danger of Congresswoman Greene with facile “I hope that she will grow and learn,” in office and, as they said about Trump, that the weight of her political duties would mature and moderate her.

That is delusional and enabling.

It is imperative to recognize that Greene, like Trump, is not an aberration. She is from Georgia, where 75 percent of white women voters chose a white man - Brian Kemp - against Stacey Abrams, a Black woman, in her campaign for governor in 2018. Southern white women are the nexus of the GOP’s Southern Strategy’s reliance on race, gender, and religion to keep white people in that part of the U.S. resolutely Republican and increasingly right wing.

As Angie Maxwell, co-author of The Long Southern Strategy insists, voting patterns must be disaggregated by region and race because when they are, it is clear that white women do not overwhelmingly vote Democrat. It is a long held and myopically racist caveat to claim simply that the majority of women vote Democrat and to blame Trumpism on men. Far from it: 78 percent of white women who call themselves southern voted for Trump in 2016.

White supremacist and increasingly evangelical patriarchy has an army of willing white women serving as its footsoldiers in the South.

The danger, always, is that someone as vile as Greene is normalized by the U.S. media. White, blonde, Christian women--even the dangerous ideologues--are afforded the privilege of default and the audacity of innocence.

Southern white women are the nexus of the GOP’s Southern Strategy’s reliance on race, gender, and religion to keep white people in that part of the U.S. resolutely Republican and increasingly right wing.

PART III

And then it came crashing down. Fascist patriarchy demands absolute obedience, even from its most enthusiastic footsoldiers, or else it eats them up.

Greene, who had called Trump “my favorite president of all time,” and was a staunch, vocal Make America Great Again (MAGA) loyalist for the president, voting with him 98 percent of the time, became more critical of her party and president on issues such as healthcare. The biggest rupture came when she supported legislation to force the Department of Justice to release the Jeffrey Epstein files, documents related to the case of the convicted child sex predator. That caused a bitter split with Trump, who has called the files a hoax.

Trump called her a lunatic and a traitor, and said her views were “those of a very dumb person.”

“The result of that was a pipe bomb threat on my house, a pipe bomb threat on my construction company, multiple pizza doxxing deliveries, and a direct death threat, multiple direct death threats on my own son. And this is the type of the nature of toxic politics that I think America is so tired of,” Greene told National Public Radio (NPR).

“But it shows, it really shows there’s a problem in the Republican Party when the leader of the Republican Party, the president of the United States, would actually attack one of his own members that has been so good to him,” Greene said.

She resigned soon after.

White, blonde, Christian women--even the dangerous ideologues--are afforded the privilege of default and the audacity of innocence.

Why would anyone who herself had engaged in “toxic politics,” that included inciting violence against her political opponents, be shocked that she could become a target of such toxicity?

Fascist patriarchy is loyal only to itself and those who work to maintain its power. And the quickest way it punishes its once stalwart female footsoldiers, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, is to resort to misogyny–calling Greene a lunatic, traitor, and “very dumb person.”. The same misogyny that it claimed to have outgrown because so many women have helped give it plausible deniability. “Of course we’re not misogynists!” fascist patriarchy claims as it points to the Marjorie Tayler Greene’s who footsoldier for it.

Fighting just misogyny is not enough.

Level up your feminism and aim it at the hypocrisy that unites the sorority of fascist footsoldiers. Level up your feminism into the serious threat to fascism that it must become.

PART IV

Right wing and increasingly fascist white supremacist patriarchy–from Donald Trump in the U.S. to Viktor Orban when he ruled in Hungary to the AfD in Germany–peddles in racist, anti immigrant hate speech that demonises Black and brown men that their white supporters, including women, are all too happy to consume.

All the while, that same right wing and increasingly fascist patriarchy is destroying the rights of anyone who is not a white, cisgender, heterosexual, conservative and wealthy able-bodied man.

Level up your feminism and aim it at the hypocrisy that unites the sorority of fascist footsoldiers. Level up your feminism into the serious threat to fascism that it must become.

Feminism is a daily revolution. It is not a coat I pull out of the closet whenever a man has been a shit to me. White supremacy, misogyny, genocide, capitalism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ageism, and a host of other bigotries that fuel fascist patriarchy will not disappear, regardless of who occupies the White House for the next two and a half years. And a robust feminism is how to fight them all.

Feminism is not easy or nice; it is fire and a fight. I am not playing; I am here to destroy. I want to be free. That is my daily demand.

Coming soon: The Second Installment to this essay will look at how to fight back

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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her books have been published in 13 languages. Her latest book is an anthology on menopause she edited called Bloody Hell!: Adventures in Menopause from Around the World. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.

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