The Pitfalls of Making America “Hot” Again

Over the last four years, a refrain in the MAGA movement gave hope to those recoiling from the ugliness of the woke era: “Make America Hot Again.” It was a dark time when the “health at every size” movement reigned supreme and questioning the attractiveness of transgender people resulted in cancellation. On the dissident right, it felt rebellious and edgy to say that people should strive to be thin, healthy, and well-coiffed. The “Make America Hot” meme, like its corollary call to “Make America Healthy Again,” found a home and a platform in Donald Trump’s big tent where you could state the obvious about everything from the entrenched bureaucracy to forever chemicals.

The movement served its purpose in Biden’s America as an antidote to ugliness. But in Trump’s America, where the right is culturally and politically ascendant, it’s time to retire the phrase and focus on a higher standard of beauty. As “Make America Hot” moves from meme to reality, the right risks elevating a hollow and shallow aesthetic. Conservatives can do better.

The phrase “Make America Hot Again” started circulating in heterodox online spaces where users made fun of the freakshows the left promoted as paragons of health and beauty. The Biden administration appointed a man who thinks he’s a woman as assistant secretary for health. Time Magazine bemoaned the “white supremacist origins of exercise.” Cosmopolitan put an obese woman on its cover with the words: “This is healthy.” The desire to see hot people on screen and in real life was a plea to return not just to normalcy, but a version of America that values excellence. Raquel Debono, an influencer, popularized the slogan. The Conservateur, a right-wing fashion and lifestyle magazine, sold hot pink “Make America Hot Again” hats, which became a staple at Trump and MAGA-adjacent events. Conservative women dressed to impress, and a certain level of style and panache became expected at right-wing events in New York and D.C. 

Now, the hoped-for vibe shift is at hand. Trump is in power and the norms and aesthetics of the woke era are being dismantled. His cabinet is replete with health-conscious men like Pete Hegseth and RFK Jr. and beautiful women like Tulsi Gabbard and Pam Bondi. Top designers are dressing the Trump women. The January New York magazine cover, which went viral, signals the victory of this new aesthetic: Gone are the days of masked liberals with multicolored hair and a pronoun pin leading youth culture. The ascendant youth culture values beauty and excellence. 

“Hot” is in. “Hot” won. That’s why it’s time for “hot” to retire. The new conservative coalition can do better aesthetically and morally than to prop up “hotness” as some kind of cardinal virtue. Being hot is great—it’s fun, enticing, and necessary window dressing for a movement. But it’s not a virtue. A few recent examples illustrate how seeing “hotness” as the be-all, end-all quickly veers into the vulgar and base. 

Take the “Conservative Dad’s™ MAGA Babes: Make America Hot & Healthy Again” 2025 calendar. For the second year in a row, the supposedly “conservative” beer company compiled a calendar of scantily-clad influencers. How this reflects any traditional strand of conservatism is anyone’s guess. The worst part is not even the concept but its execution, which is entirely void of artistic impulse or even eroticism. The photographs are sterile, over-lit, and badly staged. The women are “hot” only because they are almost naked and shilling right-wing buzzwords. 

A recent tiff between a new White House reporter and the media serves as another example. Natalie Winters, who’s twenty-three and co-hosts Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, had a viral moment in January when the Daily Mail ran a story claiming she was “slammed over ‘inappropriate’ outfits.” Winters wore a short skirt with athletic shoes at a White House briefing—perhaps not appropriate for work, but overall not uniquely offensive. What was eye-opening was the amount of engagement Winters got when she defended her outfit choices by in turn insulting the journalist who wrote the piece. Thousands upon thousands of her fans cheered her on and told her to keep the tight skirts coming. Winters is absolutely right to say she won’t be “gaslit” by people who celebrate obesity and mutilating surgeries. But is it right to believe that being hot excludes you from the rules of decorum?   

For publications that purportedly celebrate conservative women, the answer is “yes.” Evie—a magazine that caters to young, right-wing women—generated online debate last year when it launched its “Raw Milkmaid Dress,” inspired by the “hardworking dairymaids of 17th-century Europe.” But with its high slit, thin fabric, and low neckline, it looks less like something a fetching farm girl would wear and more like a cheap costume made specially for a reactionary, pastoral sexual fantasy. The issue isn’t that the dress is sexy—it’s that its primary function isn’t to beautify the wearer but to play into a fetish of the pastoral “tradwife.” The lesson is that women can and should sexualize themselves so long as they do so with culturally “conservative” bells and whistles. If porn is the gratification of sexual fantasy through erotic images, this dress is just porn with extra steps.

Neither the left nor the right has a good foundation for aesthetic imagination. The left, when it’s able to sublimate its political prerogatives, tends to be better on this front. But the right is usually unable to approach art (in any form, from movies to fashion) without politics at the forefront. Kat Rosenfield put the issue well in the Free Press: “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 hunger to return to normal beauty and gender standards is certainly more natural than what was going on during the woke era. But placing “hotness” above anything else is a stumbling block to true interior and exterior beauty. Unregulated, unabashed attachment to “hot” promotes materialism, consumerism, vanity, and pride rather than humility, creativity, dignity, and collaboration. “Make America Hot Again” was a step in the right direction, but it needs now to transcend its aims. We need to make America beautiful again, and that starts by those on the right cultivating beauty in every aspect of their lives, from style to etiquette to faith. “Hot” is fleeting; beauty endures.