Kristi Noem; Lara Trump; Laura Loomer. Kimberly Guilfoyle. Matt Gaetz. Wayne Gretzky, bizarrely. George Santos. Jeanne Pirro. What do they have in common? Well, you just have to look. A trend is rapidly emerging among those in, or aspiring to enter, Donald Trump’s inner circle: they all have the same, surgically-achieved look. They all have “Mar-a-Lago Face”.
One DC-based plastic surgeon told Axios that she was having to turn down people asking for “a more done look, like that Mar-a-Lago face.” Other clinics have started explicitly advertising the procedure. “What defines the Mar-a-Lago Face look?” one Palm Beach plastic surgeon’s website asks, continuing breathlessly: “Cosmetic enhancements that reflect timeless elegance rather than fleeting trends… it doesn’t scream surgery. Instead, it whispers refinement – something that looks elegant both in person and in photos.”
This isn’t about plastic surgery in general – people should be free to look however they want. But it is nonetheless pretty notable that, if they want favour, progression, and ultimately power, those people around the president of the United States appear to be strongly incentivised to surgically alter themselves after a very specific visual ideal.
Trump’s effect of bending reality around him has created a kind of visual Darwinianism: if you want to get anywhere in the court of Donald Trump, you must join in with the move towards visual uniformity, as if there were a Platonic ideal face, and the closer you get to it, the more attention you receive. Trump is, of course, about nothing but aesthetics – after all, this is the man who gold-plated the Oval Office. More, his understanding of the world comes in large part through a television screen, which suggests that the origins of the Mar-a-Lago face could well lie in the Fox News anchor look.
Ronnee Schrieber, a recently retired professor of political science at San Diego State University focusing on gender and politics, and who specialised in researching conservative women in the US, starts off our interview with a warning. “ I want to caution us against just having a conversation about purely the looks of women who are involved in politics,” she says. “I don’t want to be part of a conversation where we’re reproducing that as the main focus.”
“ Having said that,” she continues, “there’s a lot more to unpack here in terms of why there’s this particular aesthetic.”
“There does seem to be, among the women who are more prominent leaders among the MAGA movement – they do seem to all be engaging in particular plastic surgery,” she says. “The question is: why is that happening? Are they doing this as a way to appeal to Trump and then gain power in that regard? And are they just sort of succumbing to his wishes?”
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So, what exactly is the look, from a technical standpoint? “ The Mar-a-Lago face has been defined as having a very broad forehead; it’s immobile, doesn’t move at all,” says Dr. Tina Alster, director of the Washington Institute of Dermatologic Laser Surgery in DC and a clinical professor at Georgetown University. “Pretty much a flattened brow as well as a very prominent cheekbone. That’s been the norm. I think it’s been mostly that kind of full face and broad brow line.”
To achieve it surgically, Alster says, “ in the brow it is mostly what we call the neurotoxins, which include Botox or Dysport or Xeomin. They all have trade names. They all do the same thing. They were just released at different times. The cheekbones is more the fillers – fillers would not affect the muscle, but are literally filling the area with hyaluronic acid – products that would include Juvederm or Restylane.”
Men in the Mar-a-Lago-face set, Alster says, “tend to go for a stronger jawline… that would be achieved often by the injectables that we talked about, to basically put some bulk in along the mandible in order to give them a broad jaw. Or if they have a weak chin, or a recessed chin, same thing – you would put an injection in there to make that protrude more.”
“Having a strong jaw line is really important, as is Botox in the brow. They don’t want to be seen as particularly angry, they don’t want to have a lot of creasing across the brow. So those two extremes of the face are dealt with much more with the men. I don’t know any woman who said that they wanted to have a stronger jawline, but that is a common request for men.”
“ It’s really new,” Alster says. “Even [during] the first Trump administration we didn’t see as much of the Mar-a-Lago face as we do now. And in large part, that’s because, in the first Trump administration, there was still a lot of the regular Republicans who are already here, not necessarily part of his inner tribe, so to speak, in Mar-a-Lago.”
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“ It fits so much of the ideological grounding of conservatism,” Schreiber notes. “There’s very much a hyper-focus on biological differences between men and women, as we see getting played out in so many different ways. And so this reinforces that, ‘yes, you know, I can have power and have the same kind of authority as men, but… I’m not giving up my womanhood.”
“ There’s certainly a rewarding of a very feminised, traditionally feminised and narrowly feminised look,” she says. “It gives you stature just like any other person involved in the way you dress to go to work. Women in general in the workplace tend to have to dress more professionally and nicer than men. And so there is an incentive-structure. So you can have power as a woman among conservatives best if you still maintain an air of hyper-femininity.”
“ In general, when one talks about plastic surgery, people do focus more on women – because more women get plastic surgery,” Alster says. “However, men are a vital part of the plastic surgery world, and certainly they have been diving into it more and more as less invasive procedures become available.” By less invasive procedures, she explains, “I mean the injectables – whether it’s with the toxins like Botox and Dysport – or fillers to make a strong jawline.”
“ I do think it’s – and maybe this is just because I feel very strongly about this issue – but to the issue of rights for transgender people I think it’s kind of a fascinating hypocrisy,” says Schrieber. “You have these folks who are trying to hyper-feminise the way they look, including using surgical procedures and so on, and yet are critical of people who are trying to express their gender identity in other surgical and medical ways to feel authentic, or to be authentic.”
Circles surrounding the powerful have always come with aesthetic fads. Think of the powdered wigs of Elizabethan England or Regency France. And surgical alteration, too, has historical precedent – think of eunuchs in the courts of ancient China or Egypt. Now, it’s Trump who demands physical demonstrations of total dedication from his followers. The fact that his sycophants are willing to surgically change their very appearance to please him is an intentional sign – and what it signals, of course, is that their loyalty to the American Pharoah is absolute.
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