New York’s June 17–30 cover story by Rebecca Traister examines the new mold of Republican womanhood in the age of Donald Trump, in all its wrath, sweetness, strength, and subservience to the MAGA right. Traister looks at exemplars of this model of Republican woman, including Representative Lauren Boebert, Senator Katie Britt, Governor Kristi Noem, Representative Nancy Mace, Missouri Secretary of State candidate Valentina Gomez, and others, who present a fevered performance of hyperfemininity and hypermasculinity. “It’s a balance between what’s your feminine side and your Main Character Energy,” Mace tells Traister. Ultimately, Traister notes, “if the women of today’s Republican Party are upending gender conventions in unprecedented fashion, they’re doing it in service to a party that has never been more openly hostile to women and their rights.”
Traister says that the impetus for this story was Katie Britt’s State of the Union response. “I’d written about women in politics for 20 years, but mostly Democrats,” Traister says. “Every politician is performing, and I’m really interested in how female politicians present themselves as part of this performance — not just what they say or what policies they enact. The choices that women in both parties make about self-presentation are really fascinating and revealing.”
The cover image features Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kristi Noem, Lauren Boebert, Valentina Gomez, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Nancy Mace, and Lara Trump in a collage by New York’s Susanna Hayward.
Elsewhere in the issue, Olivia Nuzzi and Andrew Rice profile Michael Cohen on the heels of Donald Trump’s hush-money trial, and Simon van Zuylen-Wood looks at what could have led Aaron Bushnell to burn himself to death outside the Israeli Embassy to protest the Israel-Hamas war.