Spot on Molly!
Excepts:
I was once a teenage girl, but not a very cool one. I never had the right vintage jeans. I never wore the right high-heeled Free Lance boots, the ones that all the cool girls had.
I think about this a lot while watching how Donald Trump runs the White House and the world alongside a high school clique of dumb jocks (Pete Hegseth!) and hot cheerleaders (Natalie Harp!) and nerdy suck-ups (Mike Johnson!). My Queen Bee — my Regina George from “Mean Girls,” my Cher Horowitz from “Clueless” — wasn’t the president of the United States, but at the time she felt arbitrarily powerful, profoundly charismatic and definitely wealthier than I was. She bullied me about my weight and lack of style. She had her friends shun me, too.
My peers were rewarded with the social relevance that comes from pleasing the top of the food chain. Now, looking at the White House, I almost feel sympathy for Marco Rubio, wearing uncomfortable shoes in the hopes of fitting in.
Mr. Trump’s cabinet of curiosities wears matching $145 Florsheim Oxfords, gifted by the president himself. They’re reportedly eating the same “living diet,” which consists almost entirely of hunks of meat and globs of sauerkraut. (Adherents are said to include: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Vice President JD Vance, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. himself). Mr. Trump’s favorite aide, Ms. Harp, passes the president positive news coverage and good polls like she’s the “Mean Girls” gossip Gretchen Wieners. Other White House staffers and cabinet members have begun to emulate the president’s leggy blond echo chamber cultivator, so much so that the White House has been overtaken by a kind of sycophancy Olympics; members of Trump’s inner circle never miss the chance to praise him in televised cabinet meetings.
In short, our government is being run by a clique of middle-aged men. Marco and Pete don’t drink identical Iced Banana Bread Matchas or wear pink on Wednesdays, but the social-emotional engine behind our government is the same as the one that runs the popular girls’ clique at Spence. This dynamic — more than another unnecessary war or even a cost of living crisis — will be the key to Mr. Trump’s undoing.
Mr. Trump’s cabinet was picked like something out of Bama rush, and, boy, does the government run like it. The president reportedly considered sizzle reels of candidates’ cable news hits; the focus was not on who was most qualified to do the job, but who managed to best dazzle dear leader. Once a cabinet member was installed in office, it seemed like the only thing that mattered was continuing to tell the president what he wanted to hear — or saying the right thing on TV — as opposed to giving sound advice in service of the nation.
Those who didn’t do that could be dropped over the slightest misstep, and plenty of people who have spent much of the past few years dressing up just right and sucking up to the man in charge have already been kicked off the popular kids’ table — Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, even Marjorie Taylor Greene. Axios recently reported that Mr. Trump’s people no longer try to stop him from doing things; as a longtime adviser and admirer told Axios: “Why bother? He’s the boss.”
Mr. Trump doesn’t want to hear it. And it shows.
He’s regularly saying things like “affordability is a con job” and “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.” He’s obsessed with building a ballroom even if it ignores the fire code (“I am the code,” he reportedly declared), a triumphal arch with snipers on top, and slapping his name on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts — or else. Our unpopular president thinks he’s actually popular (he denounced polls, which he often calls “fake,” at least nine times in August alone), so popular that he seems to believe that people are going to carve his face into Mount Rushmore. He doesn’t see the problem with A.I. or crypto or his family’s self-enrichment. Last week, he banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico journalists from the White House, simply because he didn’t like their apparently negative coverage.
Maybe because everybody around him was too scared to tell him.
This president, for much of his two terms in office, seemed to have a preternatural understanding of how to twist the press and the public to believe his narratives about the world; now he’s living in such a fantasy world that his greatest power has been effectively neutralized. It’s the same overconfidence that seems to have led to the failures of many Trump-branded products — steaks, mortgages, casinos, vodka, a for-profit university and an airline. It now seems likely that MAGA Republicans in the midterms could be his next project to fail.
In “Mean Girls,” that great parable of clique-dom, Regina falls from grace only after she loses what makes her powerful — her hot boyfriend, her hot body and her coterie of followers. She’s supplanted by one of them, Cady Heron, who eventually learns that teenage girl cliques are bad and gives up her spring fling crown.
I don’t think such a lesson is in store for Mr. Trump. What would learning not to be a bully even look like for him? Ending the trade war with Canada and getting mani-pedis with Mark Carney? Inviting Chuck Schumer for an Oval Office tea and glow-up? Promotions for the female and Black military officers who have been sidelined or fired? Checks from World Liberty Financial sent out in restitution for those rounded up in brutal ICE raids?
Eventually I learned to stand up to my bully. If the midterms go their way, the Democrats will, I hope, have the means to be able to as well. As he becomes even more self-destructive, the Republicans could — in a late-breaking fit of attempted self-preservation — do so too. Teenage girls can’t invoke the 25th Amendment on their bullies, but this cabinet theoretically could.