Take a moment and really think about the Republican imagination of the ideal woman. What does she look like? She’s modest. She’s wearing jeans or pants. A shirt, a blouse, maybe a dress. Nothing too revealing. She doesn’t draw attention to herself. She can speak her mind — especially to stand up for her family — but for the most part, she follows the lead of her husband. She’s not loud or abrasive. Certainly not aggressive. She’s a homemaker. She’s pretty — but not overly sexual, and especially not in public. Above all, she is legible within a moral order that values restraint, hierarchy, and decorum.

Within the Republican symbolic frame, that image of womanhood exists alongside a deep anxiety about preserving the symbol of masculinity. Men must remain men. They must be strong enough to defend the nation, the family, and the social order itself: a strong military to protect against foreign threats, aggressive immigration enforcement to guard against outside contamination, and a strong police force to maintain order within. In this sense, masculinity isn’t so much a personality as it is an imagined principle that protects civilization from collapse.

That is why the opposite of “man,” in the Republican symbolic frame, is not the “trad wife.” The symbol of the “trad wife” complements and reinforces the symbol of “man.” The true opposite of “man” is the “dangerous woman”: the woman who leads, who is loud, who draws attention to her sexuality, who unsettles hierarchy, and who introduces disorder into a system built on gendered containment.

That is why — within the Trump Symbolic Universe — former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has always struck me as transgender. Not literally, but as a figure who complicates gender from within. She is loud, punitive, visibly power-seeking, and publicly identified with violence and command — all while being hyper-feminized and ‘90s-porn-coded in presentation.

So when reporting last week revealed that Kristi Noem’s husband has a cross-dressing bimbofication fetish, I wasn’t all too surprised. To be clear, I am not endorsing the Trump Symbolic Universe or its assumptions about gender. I am simply describing how it works. Human beings live through symbols. We rely on symbols to produce meaning, coherence, and the stories we tell ourselves about our lives.

Cue a married couple, ostensibly — at least at one point — deeply and profoundly drawn to each other, both inhabiting the same Republican symbolic frame around gender, and both organized around what psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would call “jouissance”: a charged, excessive enjoyment that both transgresses and depends on the very symbolic order it destabilizes. Obviously, I don’t know Kristi and Bryon Noem. I’m not their psychoanalyst. But as symbols to aid our — yours and mine — understanding of the Trump Symbolic Universe? Yeah, it makes sense.

***

There is a part of me that feels sympathy for Bryon Noem. He didn’t sign up for the attention he’s been receiving. In another world, he might be exploring exaggerated and transgressive gender dynamics without public shame. Too bad the country is at stake. When millions of people are needlessly dying and millions more are needlessly suffering, we sort of got to try to understand what’s going on.

***

As a symbol for understanding how the Trump Symbolic Universe works, I don’t think it is a coincidence that Markwayne Mullin — Kristi Noem’s replacement as Department of Homeland Security Secretary — is coded as hyper-masculine: He is literally a former MMA cagefighter. He built a plumbing business, which gives him double points as both entrepreneur and blue-collar working man. During Senate hearings, he has challenged a union president and even other senators to physical brawls. The gender coding is not subtle. It is cartoonishly exaggerated.

And of course, this cartoonish exaggeration is everywhere. Dr. Oz — a TV doctor who promoted dangerous “miracle drugs,” pushed hydroxychloroquine during COVID, and encouraged all manner of pseudoscience — is the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Linda McMahon — a former World Wrestling Entertainment executive with no education experience — is the Secretary of Education. Pete Hegseth — a former Fox News host whose entire public persona is built around performative patriotism and hyper-masculinity — is the Secretary of Defense.

Our government is literally a television performance. “Literally,” as in literally.

Most reasonable people know our television-government is stupid and absurd. I would go so far as to say that most good-faith Republicans know our television-government is stupid and absurd. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a Republican who took Kristi Noem seriously. But the absurdity is not a weakness within the Trump Symbolic Universe. The absurdity is part of how it works.

Kristi Noem’s gender excesses were obviously ridiculous, even within the Trump Symbolic Universe. Markwayne Mullin’s current masculine excesses are also obviously ridiculous. The commentariat discusses their gendered theatricality, and while that discourse loops, something else quietly solidifies: not just the violence of immigration raids, but the legitimacy of ICE as such. The structure recedes into the background. The question shifts from “should this institution exist at all?” to “we should really be talking about how violent ICE is instead of how cartoonish these figureheads are.”

That is the double fake-out. One “sees through” the phoniness of our television-government figureheads and mistakes that recognition for seeing through the system. But seeing through the performance is not the same thing as recognizing the illegitimacy of the structure.

The reality of the Trump administration’s “power” does not exist in spite of the phoniness. The Trump administration’s “power” exists after the phoniness. The more obviously theatrical the figures are, the more the underlying structure recedes into the background as “fixed,” “serious,” and “legitimate,” while too much of the Left’s argument swirls around the cruelty of the very real actions of the phonies placed in front of us.

Put another way, it is not: These overly-gendered figureheads are stupid cartoons. It is not even: These ridiculous overly-gendered figureheads are allowing untold misery and harm. It is: These ridiculous overly-gendered figureheads are of course stupid so that we talk about the untold misery and harm they are allowing because they don’t want us to talk about our television-government’s core structural illegitimacy.

In this sense, the very real damage of the Trump administration comes after — and because of — the unreality. Do you see?

In the highest of ironies, we should believe the Trump administration’s truth-telling: Indeed, we do have a television-government. While the actions of this television-government are causing real harm, we should realize that the Trump Symbolic Universe is just that — symbolic, illegitimate. And it exists as legitimate only insofar as we believe in our disbelief.