LARA TRUMP IS UGLY
Since I began publishing political art when Barack Obama was still a US Senator I’ve drawn countless men and women of different shapes and sizes. They’re subjects because of what they do and say, never because of how they look. Yet, most of them also have a particular physical characteristic the political artist takes advantage of to first identify the public figure and in the best case help emphasize the political point being made.
Political artists have different styles, some exaggerating a subject’s physical anomalies to an absurd, even cruel, extent, and others less-so. I tend toward the latter, possibly because I shudder to consider what a skilled charicaturist could do with my misshapen mien. Also because, to me, it’s sufficient to enlarge only slightly someone’s ears, for instance, to identify them and add a comic take, but it’s not their ears that are the problem (neither are they responsible for the appearance of their ears) — it’s their political cruelty or their dishonesty, for which they are entirely responsible.
That all said, Lara Trump is ugly.
As the Republican National Committee Co-Chair she’s organized a convention in Milwaukee built upon a foundation of ugly hate speech. Leading up to the convention she’s propagated on behalf of her father-in-law and the MAGA Party the ugly lie that the 2020 election was stolen. She’s committed in the present to the ugly MAGA platform that imposes unnecessary suffering upon women, the poor, and the non-white and in the future to a White Christian Nationalist state under Project 2025. And, on one of the ugliest days in our history, on January 6, 2021 she was among the speakers who encouraged the insurrectionists to commit their violent treason.
I try my best to think only about these things when I hear her speak, and look beyond what has become, undeniably, a signature look among women like her in Donald Trump’s sick orbit: Mar-A-Lago Face. Lara’s got it. Kimberly Guilfoyle — Don Jr.’s wife — has it. You can see it in any of the sad, shallow photos from parties at our nation’s new Southern White House. Fillers and Lip-Plumps and surgery. Am I body- or face-shaming here, against my own rules? No. They did this to themselves. They did this on purpose.
It’s ugly. But as political art identifies the physical, it more importantly recognizes the metaphor. As she has changed her own face, Lara Trump and her kind are changing the face of America itself. What was hope is now fear. What was justice is now the exercise of raw power and unbridled and immoral wealth. What was beautiful . . . is now ugly. Like Lara.
