Usha Vance and the Iconography of the Trump Women

J.D. Vance, the newly nominated vice-presidential candidate, may represent the new generation of the MAGA movement. But, as became clear Wednesday night when Usha Vance stepped gingerly into the spotlight to introduce her husband at the Republican convention, his wife represents change of a different kind.

That is not because she is a Yale-educated lawyer with three children, or the daughter of two Indian immigrants. It’s because she does not hew to the very specific mold of femininity that has become the norm in the world of Trump.

After all, there is a certain kind of look that the women in Mr. Trump’s closest orbit — his wife, daughters and daughters-in-law — all share, and that has become a defining gender trope in his own political reality show.

It involves a lot of hair, often left to cascade in glossy, carefully controlled Breck girl waves. It involves heavy mascara (or false eyelashes), lip gloss and vertiginous heels. It often involves a brightly colored sheath dress. It calls to mind a cross between a Miss America — or Miss Universe — pageant contestant and a Fox newscaster. It is the equivalent of the Palm Beach billionaire take on the trad wife (even if these wives also have work). It looks as if it requires a lot of effort to maintain.

See, for example, last night’s Trump family speaker, Kimberly Guilfoyle, the fiancée of Donald Trump Jr. Ms. Guilfoyle took to the stage to rouse the crowd in a scarlet dress and spike heels, brown hair flowing down to frame her heavily made-up face as she cried: “We will restore an era of national pride where freedom of speech is respected and cancel culture is ended. Where high school girls only compete with other girls, not biological men.”