Not all girls are girls’ girls.
Girls’ girls lift each other up, believe each other, have each others’ backs. Girls’ girls don’t defend family separation policies or gaslight the country about backdoor national abortion bans. They don’t stonewall investigations into powerful men’s sexual abuse.
Kristi Noem, Karoline Leavitt, and Pam Bondi aren’t girls’ girls. They’re shields. And if you’re wondering why these women keep showing up to take the heat for Donald Trump’s loser administration, you’re asking exactly the right question. Let’s dive in.
In contrast to girls’ girls, there are other women who wake up and choose violence. They throw each other under the bus for male approval, they do everything in their power to prove to the men around them that they’re not like those other girls. They often mistake proximity to power for having it. We see these dynamics everyday in interpersonal relationships, in workplace politics, in social hierarchies…and lately in Trump’s cabinet across social media.
Scroll any socials right now and you’ll see the weight of public anger landing squarely on the women he has hand selected as the face of his destruction: Kristi Noem defending family separations, Pam Bondi stonewalling on Epstein, Karoline Leavitt reciting talking points that make you want to scream. They have become the frontline of everything you hate about this administration which is exactly what Trump intended
The Pattern Hiding in Plain Sight
It’s called the glass cliff, which describes what happens when women are elevated to high-visibility positions during crises or moments designed to fail. They’re handed the mess, they take the heat, and then the entire fall out lands on them instead of the policy, the system, or THE MAN who made the call.
In Trump’s chaotic ecosystem, this is the entire strategy because we are culturally wired to punish women differently than we punish men in power.
[Women become a] lightning rod because public outrage then sticks to her instead of the structure behind her.
Why This Strategy Is So Effective
Research proves what we already know intuitively: women leaders face harsher scrutiny than their male counterparts. We are tone policed, judged on our appearance, and our mistakes moralized in ways that men’s simply aren’t. Men get criticized for strategy. Women get criticized for character. We are “Cold”. “Shrill”. “Hysterical”.
You might be wondering here, if women are more harshly critized, why chose them to be the face of Trump’s worst policies? It’s because when a woman defends brutality, it softens the optics. (“See? Women support this too.”) It blunts accusations of misogyny (“How can this be anti-woman when women are leading it?”) It also divides women against women, turning feminist rage inward rather than outward at the larger system. And crucially, it creates a lightning rod because public outrage then sticks to her instead of the structure behind her. She becomes the story and the architecture behind her stays invisible.
Continue reading over at the Women in America Substack.
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