If you’re looking for some, ahem, firm and well-rounded evidence of the MAGA influence on American culture, look no further than the “MAGA babes” pinup calendar released last week by the reactionary beverage maker Conservative Dad’s Ultra Right Beer. In a press release, the company declared the calendar symbolic of a new “golden age,” borrowing a phrase from Donald Trump’s inaugural speech—because when the president talked about taking advantage of America’s natural resources, we all know exactly what he meant. To paraphrase a line from a certain comedy series of the 1990s: The vibe shift is real, and it’s spectacular.
The first iteration of this calendar caused a minor civil war between members of the extremely online political right when it was released in late 2023. Titled “Real Women of America,” it featured titillating shots of bikini-clad women including Dana Loesch, Ashley St. Clair, and Riley Gaines—all bedroom eyes and pouting lips, their backs arched like fossilized velociraptors in postmortem lordosis.
Although the calendar was enthusiastically (and predictably) mocked by liberal commentators—“The raunchy Christians are here,” declared a New York Times op-ed—the real meltdown happened mainly in right-wing spaces, led by not-so-raunchy Christians who felt like the MAGA right had lost the plot. “It’s one thing to reluctantly accept that somewhere, somebody is buying an edition of Playboy in the back of a seedy corner store; it’s quite another to market your own version while wearing the skinsuit of the political movement that claims to advocate for a more virtuous culture,” wrote Nate Hochman in The American Conservative. Surely it was a bit immodest and porny, not to mention hypocritical, for a company that claims to be deeply committed to conservative values—and a portion of whose sales, per its website, “is donated to conservative casues”[sic]—to be promoting such a product? As The Free Press’s own Madeleine Kearns, then writing for National Review, put it, in a heartfelt plea against the coarseness that was increasingly ascendant on the political right: “Good art arrests the imagination and points to something higher. This calendar, vulgar and base, does neither.”
The controversy surrounding that calendar was a microcosm for the war for the soul of the political right. Then, family-values conservatives like Mitt Romney were fighting to prevent the Republican party from tipping permanently into MAGA-brand post-conservative debauchery, as represented by the likes of Andrew Tate. This latter world has purposefully appealed to very online young men whose entire concept of eroticism derives from watching internet porn, and the Conservative Dad enterprise was clearly a product of it. This was not your father’s calendar, and not your father’s conservatism, and if the intended buyer of the “Real Women of America” calendar was a dad, he was the kind who needs something to hang on the wall in the crappy little apartment he’s been forced to rent after his wife kicked him out for schtupping the babysitter.
Unfortunately, despite the prescient warnings of people like Kearns, 2024 turned out to be a big dang year for vulgar and base, culminating in the reelection to the presidency of a thrice-married adulterer who once famously announced that he liked to grab women by the, well, you know. And with Trump back in the White House, the Conservative Dad calendar is back, too, and bolder than ever; it even has a new subtitle: Make America Hot & Healthy Again. Here we have 12 new MAGA pinup girls, all clad in Ultra Right-branded bikinis and holding in one hand a can of Ultra Right beer and in the other a volleyball, bauble, or scandalized-looking catfish.
But this time around, the reaction has been remarkably muted. Where last year’s calendar was a prophetic forerunner of the impending vibe shift marked by Trump's reelection, this year’s just feels like a lackluster victory dance. And what little controversy there is centers not on the substance of the calendar, but on the style. As commentator Alina Clough put it after New York magazine put out a cover decrying the new right-wing set as the “cruel kids,” “It’s funny that liberals’ art attacking conservatives is a way better aesthetic than conservatives’ art celebrating ourselves.”
She's not wrong: The pictures in the calendar, political ideology notwithstanding, are objectively bad. The compositions are lifeless, the settings sterile, the poses stiff and unnatural; the models are so Photoshopped that their skin no longer looks like skin. Some of the images are so comically un-sensual that it seems like they’re doing it on purpose. Observe this remarkable snapshot of a blonde in sky-high stiletto heels and a flour-stained apron, awkwardly perched on the cold, hard countertop of a contractor-grade kitchen in which not a single meal has ever been prepared. Beside her on the counter is a grocery store cake with a can of beer shoved into its center, and, I’m sorry, I have had dental surgeries sexier than this photo.
Some people would point to this as evidence of the oft-cited trope that conservatives are simply bad at art, that they lack the openness and imagination to produce meaningful and beautiful things. But I suspect that this is just what happens to a movement that defines itself through negative polarization, that eschews the coalition-building power of beauty because it’s too busy embodying whatever its opponents find most hideous. The paradox of the aesthetic of the online right is that it’s explicitly and intentionally unaesthetic; its purpose is to disgust its enemies rather than to delight its friends. And so nobody cares if the art is beautiful. They only care if it triggers the libs.
For a newsroom debate on MAGA aesthetics, read Suzy Weiss and Josh Code on the big question: Is It Cool to Be Right-Wing Now?
