--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You are not doing this because you enjoy it. You're doing this because you're trying to fulfill a weird obligation to, like, the patriarchy.
--:-- Suzanne Lambert: Oh, okay. Oh, look at you. Oh, yep, that's perfect. It doesn't match your undertones. Yeah, we don't have attention to detail over here, as evidenced by certain group chats.
--:-- Suzanne Lambert: Am I going to look less crazy at some point? No. You kind of look intense, too, actually. Okay, so I just added some muddy bronzer. Cool. Okay. You know, when you're filming glam videos with Border Patrol, you can't always bring all your tools with you. So this is very authentic to how they might do it in the car, for example.
--:-- Suzanne Lambert: I accidentally just colored in my entire eyelid. That's fine. They love eyeliner over there. I hit my eyeball. Oh, no. It's okay. I'll make it. I look like I'm ready to go vote to take away my own rights.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hi, we're doing Mar-a-Lago makeovers on Today Explained. Join us. and focus on the work that matters most.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Good morning. Okay, we're feeling well-rested and hydrated, and we are going to get ready for the day on Today Explained. For Suzanne Lambert, it all started with TikTok. Anyone who creates any kind of online content, I feel like can relate to this.
--:-- Suzanne Lambert: It was a video that I filmed on such a whim. Hey, I noticed that all of the Republican girlies in my comments do their makeup the exact same gorgeous way. So I thought that I would try to do it myself. It took me all of 10 minutes to record, edit, and post where I was on vacation for my birthday. And I was just pissed off and feeling hopeless after the election.
--:-- Suzanne Lambert: Starting with the base, I'm not going to do any prep at all. We really want our makeup to cling to any dry spots and accentuate any texture that we might have. And seeing the way that people were messaging online, it was like, I'm not out here to spread, like, hate, you know, or else you're spread love. So please be respectful and be kind to each other, because the person who sits in the Oval Office, they come and go every four or eight years.
--:-- Suzanne Lambert: All of those things are great, but I was like, this isn't what I want to say. And I feel like the people who kind of caused us to be in this predicament in the place have learned nothing. Right. They haven't learned as far as messaging and what works and what doesn't, what people really want to see from Democrats and from the left.
--:-- Suzanne Lambert: So I posted a video essentially saying like, not all of us were meant to be Michelle Obama, Jack Schlossberg liberals. Some of us were meant to be Regina George liberals, Lucille Bluth, Principal Ava Coleman. Some of us have some bite to us that we've really been suppressing because y'all told us that we had to.
--:-- Suzanne Lambert: Everyone's getting on here now being like, oh, liberals need to be meaner. Democrats need to be meaner. Say less, babe. Do you know how many reformed mean girls have been waiting for this exact moment in time? And where did you go from there?
--:-- Suzanne Lambert: Well, from there, I finally was like, okay, I have a plan for this and I have a roadmap for what this looks like and how people can start fighting back and what that really looks like. So I just started making more videos. Rather than using a brush, we're actually just going to apply directly to the skin and use our hands. That way it's streaky. It doesn't blend well.
--:-- Suzanne Lambert: I also applied extra tanner to my hands so that it doesn't actually match anything. Some of those videos were, you know, making fun of Republican makeup. You'll notice that it's also really matte. I wanted a really matte finish.
--:-- Suzanne Lambert: It's getting drained. It's getting dusty. Some of those videos were making fun of politicians in particular. Everyone's asking me to do Caroline Levitt's makeup from yesterday, but the problem is I just don't have the right products because when I'm gleefully taking away school lunches from kids and defunding childhood cancer research, I try not to look so jaundiced.
--:-- Suzanne Lambert: Me personally. Some of it was just talking about our frustrations, but I think in a way that if I had done it prior to the election, it just, like, it would not have worked. People would have hated me for it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You said Republican makeup. For people who are maybe unaware, what exactly is Republican makeup?
--:-- Suzanne Lambert: It's characterized by, like, lack of, I just say matte and flat. Dry, bland. We want to make sure that it doesn't look like we've ever used moisturizer once in our life. big block eyebrows. For brows, we want bold glamour filter, but in real life and not totally matching. They love some eyeliner over there. Just like a general lack of moisture, including the lipstick.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's crazy. And how did people respond when you decided to mock Republican makeup? I mean, predictably, right? Republicans had a little hissy fit over it, right?
--:-- Suzanne Lambert: Talking about how, oh, I thought y'all, I thought y'all were the party of love and kindness. And I was like, no, look at my pinned video. I literally said, you don't fight fire with a little drippy water hose. You fight fire with equal exertion of force.
--:-- Suzanne Lambert: Some of them, like to their credit, were like, okay, like this is, this is actually funny. Um, and I do have Republicans who follow me. And I think from the left, there was an overwhelming sense of like, oh my God, we're finally talking a little shit because I've been ready for this.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Why am I just finding her? Like, she is my hero. She got an automatic follow from me because, bitch, we absolutely need a Regina George of the Democrats.
--:-- Suzanne Lambert: What I will say, what I find funny and interesting is it's white conservative women and white liberal women who get mad at me. That's it almost without exception, right?
--:-- Suzanne Lambert: I'm not going to speak for everyone. Interesting. They have the exact same talk track, which is we shouldn't be bullying other women and we shouldn't be bringing them down.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I heard a rumor that you used to be a Republican, that you were the president of the young Republicans in college, maybe. No, high school. In high school. Yeah. So I grew up in a town called Kennesaw, Georgia. It's like the law to own a gun, for example. That's our slogan. It's the law in Kennesaw.
--:-- Suzanne Lambert: The history teacher was the football coach who also sponsored, you know, the Christian club that met at the school. So everything was taught from this like white evangelical lens. Yeah. And I was the president of Young Republicans, which didn't really mean anything. We would just like have meetings and be like, isn't Sean Hannity cool? And it's like, why does a 17-year-old know who Sean Hannity is?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And how did you go from being a high school Republican and a college Republican to being a liberal woman? What happened? Was it the makeup? No, but like honestly, it was a gradual unraveling, right?
--:-- Suzanne Lambert: But it was when Trump announced his run for presidency. And it was when his tapes came out where he was talking about, you know, assaulting women. and no one was like that bothered by it. And I was like, hold on, hold on, hold on. I feel like people should still be saying we're still going to vote for him, but that's bad. Like that's like bottom of the barrel, like bar of what I was looking for.
--:-- Suzanne Lambert: And then I got pregnant unexpectedly, didn't want to be pregnant, right? That obviously accelerates a lot of things as well because like I was super vocally anti-choice, you know, cause that's what I've been taught. I'd never really heard stories of women exercising their right to choose. And I thought of them as being like lazy and irresponsible, all the things that you're taught.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then you got pregnant all of a sudden and it's like, oh yeah, no, I don't want a kid, right? Like there was not even a second where I questioned it and I've never questioned it.
--:-- Suzanne Lambert: So then it was like, okay, so if I was wrong about that, and they were wrong about that what else were they wrong about and then it just it all unravels really quickly as soon as you dig just like a little under the surface um and I think that's also why given how vocal I was in the past about my views it's why I'm so vocal now one because I'm kind of like I grew up Catholic right I'm like this is my penance I like I ran my mouth a lot back then. I need to run it twice as much now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But since they've entered office, there have been a lot of mean things happening. You could argue, you know, Elon Musk saying he needs to take a chainsaw to USAID, an agency that literally keeps the poorest people on earth alive, is mean. Deporting people who are here legally for things they may have written, exercising their First Amendment free speech rights, you could argue is quite mean, taking photo ops in front of prisoners in El Salvadoran prison who apparently—
--:-- Suzanne Lambert: Didn't even commit a crime other than entering this country without papers, arguably quite mean.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Have you seen people come around to the meanness thing in the intervening months since the Trump administration took office? Yeah. And I have said exactly what you just said, like, hey, if we want to have a mean competition of who's meaner, it's such an absurd conversation to even have given everything that they're doing and the way that you could have listed hundreds of more things.
--:-- Suzanne Lambert: I mean, right. I would say on the left, people have come around. I would say they are uncomfortable, which I think is OK. But for the ones who haven't come around, those those aren't the people I'm trying to reach. I'm not trying to reach the people who are trying to draw a line at critiquing makeup, not weight, not like not, you know, making racist comments.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I've never done like anything of that sort. We are talking about mutable choices that you can change. I have Republicans who follow me who will also ask me questions and advice. They'll be like, I'm Republican, but this tutorial was actually the most helpful tutorial I've watched in terms of what not to do.
--:-- Suzanne Lambert: And I'm like, I'll have you around, which surprises me. But I think it's also what we haven't done before, which is talk about politics alongside topics that are maybe a bit more accessible and entertaining and like interesting.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I was entertained and I definitely look very interesting now. So thank you so much, Suzanne, for taking me and our audience on this journey. I think you should go take a lap around the office and show off your work.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for the show today comes from LifeKit, the podcast from NPR. What's in your life kit? I'm asking. They didn't ask that. Every day you have to make choices that might shape the direction of your life, but you can't flip to the back of the book to find an answer key.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Instead, you can listen to the Life Kit podcast from NPR. Life Kit offers real stories about common issues like relationships, finances, parenting, and your career. If you're looking to move with more intention or just need thoughtful guidance on living better, Life Kit delivers strategies to help you make meaningful, sustainable change From fitness routines to mental resilience, navigating personal goals to tackling burnout, each episode is full of relevant insights and clear takeaways about things we all could use a little help with.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: LifeKit wants to help you approach your own life with confidence and clarity and walk away with a game plan you can implement right away. Enough from me. Go listen to the show, LifeKit. It's a podcast from NPR.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is Today Explained. All right, so Suzanne Lambert is making fun of Republican makeup on TikTok for the lols, but also to process this political moment of ours and her feelings about it.
--:-- Inae Oh: Oh, I'm not someone who wants to just point out a specific look or something in a woman's face that I might not agree with just for the sake of pointing that out. But what's going on with this MAGA aesthetic is political. The image is political. The image that they're crafting is political.
--:-- Inae Oh: And I think that to ignore it would be a mistake, especially when we have a president in power who is all about the appearance as opposed to the actual substance. You dovetail that with just how much more certain procedures are more accessible than they were decades past. You know, it just feels all turbocharged.
--:-- Inae Oh: And a lot of things in our politics right now feel very turbocharged. And I think to ignore what might be happening to women's literal faces around Donald Trump would be a mistake.
--:-- Inae Oh: I wrote in this piece about my own relationship to just our beauty industry and how, you know, I'm 37 years old. You know, I'm a young mother. I have a three-year-old. I am constantly tired. I have not gotten Botox or fillers yet but they are certainly on my mind I'm actually going to Korea next month yes it is the plastic surgery capital of the world being in Seoul as a person who has not gotten the same popular procedures as many people in South Korea do and to know what it feels like to be sort of the odd man out when it comes to a beauty standard and then feeling just kind of bad about it.
--:-- Inae Oh: You know, I think it helps me in some way empathize also with these maggot figures, not in policy, but in terms of, you know, if you're at Mar-a-Lago, if you're just staying there for a week and everyone around you looks a certain way and you notice like, oh, I'm different. I don't I can see why you would feel attracted to that look and think oh maybe I should do such and such too and I think when you're constantly served a specific look and a specific beauty ideal I see the pull.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Maybe we don't need to be super judgmental either but we can be judgmental about people who are posing in front of prisoners yes for kicks because the right there like the look is political and that is absolutely like rife and it deserves our interrogation at the very least in a o senior editor mother jones.com the required reading is titled in your face the brutal aesthetics of maga you heard from suzanne lambert early in the show you can find her on tiktok on the gram her handle is it's suzanne lambert what else can i tell you gabrielle burbay made the show today amina al-sadi edited laura bullard was on facts Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdottir were on sound.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Abishai Artsy, Hadi Mawagdi, Amanda Llewellyn, Miles O'Brien, Victoria Chamberlain, Devin Schwartz, Carla Javier, and Peter Balanon-Rosen also make the show with executive-level supervision from Jolie Myers and Miranda Kennedy. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder. My name's Sean Rameswaram. You can send me any and all complaints about the show any time. The door is open. My email is noel at kingmail.net.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained is distributed by WNYC. The show is a part of Vox. If you'd like to complain about the ads on this show specifically, you can listen to us ad-free by signing up at vox.com slash members. Thanks! Thank you.
