Marjorie Taylor Greene Is Waging War on Mar-a-Lago Face

Greene isn’t challenging patriarchy, she’s rejecting the MAGA beauty standard that quietly governs women’s access to power...

Welcome back to The Red Letter.

This piece was written by Abi Baker for The Red Letter. Baker has been tracking the aesthetics of power on the right—how image, gender, and loyalty intersect in Trumpworld—and noticed something unusual: Marjorie Taylor Greene pushing back against the very visual culture that helped define MAGA femininity.

What follows isn’t a defense of Greene’s politics, but an examination of a contradiction inside the modern conservative movement. It’s one that says as much about women, power, and visibility as it does about ideology. Baker’s essay explores what happens when rejection itself becomes a form of authority.

Is Marjorie Taylor Greene a feminist?

It feels almost perverse to ask the question out loud. Marjorie Taylor Greene—professional antagonist, MAGA provocateur, political pariah even among her own—has never claimed the feminist label. And yet, in a political moment shaped as much by aesthetics as ideology, Greene is articulating a backlash to a very specific strain of Trump-era femininity.

For years, proximity to power on the right has required adherence to an unspoken visual code, one perfected at Mar-a-Lago and reinforced nightly on Fox News. Big hair. Bigger lashes. Sculpted cheekbones. The increasingly ubiquitous “Mar-a-Lago face.” It’s less ideology than image management, and it has become a quiet prerequisite for women who want to remain close to Trump.

“I never liked the MAGA Mar-a-Lago sexualization,” Greene told The New York Times’ Robert Draper. “I believe how women in leadership present themselves sends a message to younger women.” She went further: “I have two daughters, and I’ve always been uncomfortable with how those women puff up their lips and enlarge their breasts. I’ve never spoken about it publicly, but I’ve been planning to.”

Coming from Greene, this isn’t a throwaway comment, it’s a tell. Conservative women have spent nearly a decade navigating a rigid aesthetic hierarchy that hardened alongside Trumpism. In this universe, power is sexy or at least styled to signal youth, desirability, and loyalty to the MAGA brand. It’s hard not to be, when the movement’s leader once owned the Miss Universe Organization.

Greene is rejecting that code outright. In doing so, she flirts with something like a fifth-wave feminism, not progressive or intersectional, but reactionary and protective, framed as maternal concern rather than liberation.

The contrast is stark across the Republican women’s bench. Kristi Noem’s transformation since entering national politics has been impossible to miss: bigger hair, heavier makeup, a look increasingly indistinguishable from the Fox News greenroom pipeline. Whatever one thinks of her politics, the evolution reflects an incentive structure that rewards women who visually conform. The message is clear: become camera-ready, or risk becoming invisible.

Then there’s Elise Stefanik, the counterexample that haunts this conversation. Stefanik looks much as she did when she first entered Congress: polished, but not radically altered. No MAGA glam overhaul. No reinvention. She did everything else right—unwavering loyalty to Trump, aggressive media hits, full immersion in culture-war politics. And yet, when it mattered most, she was passed over: vice president, UN ambassador, now the Republican nomination for New York governor. Her ascent stalled anyway.

In Trumpworld, constancy reads not as strength but as stagnation. For women especially, ambition appears to require visible transformation. Reinvention isn’t just political, it’s physical.

This is where Greene’s critique lands differently. She isn’t interrogating patriarchy or arguing for liberation in the #MeToo sense. She’s positioning herself as the anti–Mar-a-Lago woman: unpolished, confrontational, uninterested in desirability. Her feminism—if we’re calling it that—is rooted in rejection. Rejection of cosmetic excess. Rejection of performative sexuality sold as empowerment. Rejection of the idea that power must be aesthetically pleasing.

That doesn’t make it progressive. But it does make it coherent.

The fifth-wave feminism Greene implicitly defines isn’t about shattering glass ceilings; it’s about refusing the mirror. It tells younger women that leadership doesn’t require bodily modification, that authority doesn’t need glamour as a buffer. Coming from a politician whose brand is provocation, this restraint becomes its own form of rebellion.

Greene no longer needs to seduce the base, or Trump, to command attention. She already has it. And in calling out the aesthetic sorting of conservative women, she’s not trying to dismantle the system, only to redefine who gets to win within it.

It may not be feminism as it’s traditionally understood. But in the warped politics of Trumpworld, it’s something new.