There is a very distinct “look” many people in the MAGA world have adopted, and comedian Suzanne Lambert is making a career calling it out. Mother Jones senior editor Inae Oh says it’s bigger than bronzer. This episode was produced by Gabrielle Berbey, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at the White House. Photo by Ken Cedeno/UPI/Bloomberg via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who is Suzanne Lambert and how did her TikTok journey begin?
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For Suzanne Lambert, it all started with TikTok.
anyone who creates any kind of online content i feel like can relate to this 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. 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.
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 first 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.
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. 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?
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Chapter 2: What is 'Republican makeup' and why does Suzanne Lambert critique it?
I mean, predictably, right? Republicans had a little hissy fit over it, right? Talking about how, oh, 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. Some of them, to their credit, were like, okay, this is actually funny.
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.
I just went down the Suzanne Lambert rabbit hole and I'm obsessed. 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.
Chapter 3: How did people react to Suzanne Lambert's satire of Republican makeup?
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? 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. I think that's really interesting that they share that commonality and that way of thinking. But yeah, they'll be like, this is mean. And I'm like, I don't care, right?
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. 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. 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?
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?
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Chapter 4: What was Suzanne Lambert's political background and how did her views change?
Like, that's like bottom of the barrel, like bar of what I was looking for. 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 um you know because that's that's what I've been taught I'd never really heard stories of women exercising their right to choose um and I thought of them as being like lazy and irresponsible all the things that you're taught and then you get 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. 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.
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 ran my mouth a lot back then. I need to run it twice as much now. But also, I think I want people to be able to see, like, oh, no, I actually did used to think what you think.
So I get why you think that way. Here's why that's wrong, though.
You said you started doing the mean thing after the election. Of course, it was a few months before the second Trump administration entered office. 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 Salvador in prison who apparently... With your $50,000 Rolex and your mismatched extensions. Didn't even commit a crime other than entering this country without papers. Arguably quite mean.
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. I mean, right. I would say on the left, people have come around. I would say they are uncomfortable, which I think is okay.
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Chapter 5: Why did Suzanne Lambert start 'being mean' in her political commentary?
How do you navigate an entire career change after losing everything? This week on Net Worth and Chill, I'm chatting with Lewis Howes, the host of the School of Greatness podcast with over 500 million downloads. Lewis went from rising professional athlete to broke after a career-ending injury.
I believe self-doubt is the killer of dreams. When we doubt ourselves, it doesn't matter how talented or smart you are, you're going to limit yourself on what you're able to do.
But that was just the beginning of his story. It's an episode packed with raw honesty and failure, practical advice for career pivots, and the financial wisdom that comes from losing it all and rebuilding it. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com slash yourrichbff.
Hi, folks. This is Kara Swisher. This week on my podcast, On with Kara Swisher, I'm speaking with philanthropist, businesswoman, and women's rights advocate, Melinda French Gates, on how she's refocused after her divorce from tech mogul Bill Gates. We talk about why investing in women in politics and business is playing the long and smart game, and we discuss her new memoir, The Next Day.
My mom used to say to me as I was growing up, set your own agenda or someone else will.
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Chapter 6: How has the political climate influenced people's acceptance of more direct criticism?
I know society is better off when women are in positions of power.
I really enjoy this conversation because it's an interesting moment where women in technology are having much more of an important impact than men who are still moving fast and breaking things. Have a listen to On with Kara Swisher wherever you get your podcasts.
Chapter 7: How does Suzanne Lambert engage both Republican and Democratic audiences?
Chapter 8: What is the broader significance of Suzanne Lambert's makeup critique in politics?
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 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 am i gonna look less crazy at some point no you kind of look intense too actually okay so i just added some some muddy bronzer cool okay you know when you're 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.
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.
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