The podium is empty. The open call has some specifications: Rapunzel locks or Heidi of the Alps hair extensions, pancake HMU. Willingness to undergo Mar-a-Lago face alteration. Experience playing borderline personality disorder and/or scheming diva preferred. Non-negotiable skill: running on grass in stilettos while smiling.

Other than always needing one super-efficient matron – from his long gone German Grossmutter to Susie Wiles – to keep the show running behind the scenes, the American President has a very particular use for women in his employ.

He learned that sex sells at Daddy’s knee. Fred Trump used T and A to promote his real estate, including, infamously, one of New York’s most notorious tear-downs. In 1966, he put four models in bikinis, chests out, hard hats on, into the bucket of an earth mover and handed them axes to advertise his destruction of a beloved Coney Island landmark. The historic stained glass was smashed so he could replace it with mid-century middlebrow apartments.

Modern Sydney Sweeney ads notwithstanding, the role of women in Trumpworld is about more than sex. It is the 21st-century reality show stock female character: the histrionic, pretty bitch that audiences love to hate. In the White House, Trump is the impresario of his own reality show. He does the casting himself.

There is a through line that connects Trump’s first term out-of-control femme Omarosa to Guilfoyle, Noem, Bondi, Zacharia and the photogenic but out of their depth attorneys Alina Habba and Lindsey Halligan (the latter was so inept that a federal judge formally disqualified her from her post as federal prosecutor in Virginia). These women are brought in to play a role, promoted to the outer limits of their abilities and then allowed to crash and burn. The crash is part of the entertainment.

Why else select unqualified but gorgeous women for jobs that any number of experienced, competent women with natural hair color and unreconstructed faces could perform brilliantly?

For marketing purposes, the sexy, camera-craving, and possibly unstable woman is reality show gold. She satisfies the well-known low-brow appetite for despising women. Remember Hollywood PR maven Melissa Nathan’s famous text during her stint running protection for Justin Baldoni: “Socials are really, really ramping up … In his favour, she must be furious. It’s actually sad because it just shows you have people who really want to hate on women.”

Trump feels this pulse in his blood. He knows well the satisfaction his people get from grinding their gears over a “nasty woman” who doesn’t smile, doesn’t know her place and plots villainously to rise above it.

Meanwhile, the cast of male fuckups are all still standing: Hegseth with his weird testosterone obsession, Signalgate mess, and lies about the Iran war; Bessent careening around the U.S. Treasury, punching enemies and lying about the economy; and the epic corruption of Lutnick, Witkoff, and Kushner. Manly, mendacious pillars of strength.

Disposability is the ultimate qualification for these women. Here is Politico’s Daniel Lippman with the scoop on Trump’s exact words about Zacharia, a woman he had personally selected apparently without staff consensus: “One White House official told me that President Trump, in an earlier meeting that Katie Zacharia was not present for, told attendees that she had no talent and shouldn’t be on television.”

Brutal.

And then came the glee. And the mean jokes. She lasted half a Scaramucci (your Freakshow guide indulged in this, alas). Her lie about being a lawyer was exposed, followed by the inevitable “She’s at the bar” memes.

In Athens, Guilfoyle is still playing her role on the way out like Norma Desmond. She is reportedly – according to the Daily Mail, one of the media outlets that, like Trump, understands well how to make bank on troubled women – “screaming at the staff” as she is “evicted” from the ambassador’s mansion.

Bondi looked the part but lacked the presentation. Too restrained, too low on histrionics. Screaming at and insulting a Congressman came too little too late to save her job.

Plastic-fantastic cowgirl Noem worked well for a while – the pushup bra and the $50,000 watch in front of the cage at the El Salvador torture chamber were Trumpshow gold. But she failed to cut The Boss in on the no-bid, $220 million ad campaign she gave her pals. Now, Noem is posting pictures of herself with another hunting dog, eternally banished to the Circle of Hell reserved for dead puppy jokes.

The press room podium is empty. Casting is on.

My personal favorite is Laura Loomer, that profane Zionist Omarosa knockoff. After Zacharia’s fall, Loomer posted a picture of herself with AI-adjusted long blonde locks, proclaiming “I’m Ready.” Loomer as a Trump 2.0 press secretary seems like a very overdue appointment.

As one of my Twitter followers put it, “It would be the most cynical appointment since Caligula made his horse a senator.” Caligula’s horse appointments are, of course, one of the hallmarks of Trump 2.0. What else is convicted felon Charles Kushner doing at the ambassador’s residence in Paris?

Loomer checks all the boxes but one: she made the strategic error of dying her naturally fair hair raven a few years ago. And as pro-Israel as the administration is, there are no Jewish women anywhere near the Oval, unless you count Katie Miller, and the occasional visit from Miriam Adelson.

In his dotage, as has been noted, the President wants to cozy up with Ivanka lookalikes, Marla lookalikes, or young Ivanas. People forget about Ivana, but personally I believe that resemblance is what Natalie Harp has going for her.

Besides blondes, Donald has acknowledged a preference for women who are a little crazy. “Can you imagine the sex with this troubled teen?” Howard Stern once asked Donald about Lindsay Lohan. “She’s probably deeply troubled and therefore great in bed. How come the deeply troubled women, you know, deeply, deeply troubled, they’re always the best in bed?”

Beyond his private tastes, though, there’s canny public strategy at work in the selection of this particular type of woman for high profile positions. The genius of selecting women for idiotic, retrograde reasons is that it reinforces the white Christian nationalist and secular manosphere’s misogynistic certainty that women are, by nature, confused, useless, hapless, hysterical, incapable, “stupid,” and “nasty.” It sends a clear message about the essential un-qualification of all women.

Trumpworld women agree to play caricatures – and to serve the reality show presidency version of the female role in Trump’s business years, either as accoutrements for deal-making or as brand enhancement (which is, of course, still Melania’s job).

At the Freakshow, we kind of feel sorry for these disposable women. Instinctive compassion, going the way of suicidal empathy.

Blondeness, whiteness, self-mutilation, the willingness to go under the knife and wake up looking like Lamia, the Mother of Beasts or Mistress of Insanity.

Poor Susan Dell. Poor Kimberly. Poor Loomer. Poor Noem.

Then reason kicks in: why expend a drop of pity on women willing to sell their sisters out for a chance to be cool chicks at the Predator’s Ball?

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow