How Kristi Noem and her husband both pursued MAGA beauty ideals

Even before Kristi Noem became Donald Trump’s homeland security chief, critics say she began trying to curry favor with the president by becoming transparent about altering her appearance to conform to what’s become known as a recognizable MAGA beauty aesthetic.

That meant wearing cascading hair, heavy makeup, puffed-up lips and undergoing any other surgical enhancements needed to achieve a uniform, ultra-feminine appearance, as cultural critics at Mother Jones, The New York Times and other news outlets have observed.

At the same time, Noem’s longtime husband Byron was apparently exploring his own obsession with a version of the MAGA beauty aesthetic, but in an extreme, fetishized way that he also appropriated for himself in private settings, according to this week’s bombshell report in the Daily Mail.

During his wife’s controversial leadership of the Department of Homeland Security, Byron Noem, 56, communicated online with female porn performers from the “bimbofication” scene. In describing this corner of the adult-entertainment world, the British tabloid said that participants on fetish sites would transform themselves into “real-life Barbie dolls” by surgically enhancing their breasts to extreme XXL sizes.

But Byron Noem took this fetish even further by cross-dressing, the Daily Mail reported. In a selfie that the outwardly straight-laced rancher, insurance executive and grandfather shared with one of these performers, he could be seen squeezing his tall frame into skintight pink shorts and a flesh-colored crop-top, into which he had stuffed two balloons that were supposed to resemble gigantic breasts.

Starting in Trump’s first administration, cultural critics began to observe that the prominent women in his orbit began to adopt a certain look, which encompasses what’s been called “Mar-a-Lago face,” or “conservative girl” makeup. The New York Times chief fashion critic Vanessa Friedman said this look “plays up classically feminine features to an almost cartoonish degree, thus underscoring a retrograde gendered paradigm.”

Some of these women also have been likened to Barbie dolls, going back to Barbie-related monikers attached to his his daughter Ivanka Trump. The Barbie reference continued to Noem herself. During her 14-month tenure in the DHS, which ended with her firing last month, Noem was dubbed “ICE Barbie” because of her habit of “playing dress-up” with ultra-feminine looks, the Daily Beast said. Noem liked to put on heavy makeup and apparent hair extensions as she donned uniformed bullet-proof vests and other uniforms while joining in Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations.

For the most part, discussions of MAGA beauty standards have tended to focus on the female face. But these standards also arguably include the “MAGA Mar-a-Lago sexualization” of the female body, as former Trump acolyte Marjorie Taylor Greene described it in The New York Times in December.

To conform to this physical ideal, women should “puff up their lips,” have nipped-in waists and “enlarge their breasts,” as Greene said, explaining to the Times how she had become uncomfortable with the example it sent to girls like her own daughters. Trump critics also have noted that this ideal no doubt appeals to a president who owned beauty pageants and who was therefore “notoriously obsessed with the literal pageantry of beauty,” as Mother Jones said.

It’s also not hard to see that this body ideal has a lot in common with the traditional Barbie doll, which was known for her exaggerated and unrealistic physical proportions, which historically included long legs, a narrow waist and a perky, ample bust.

In his “secret life,” Byron Noem confessed his lust for “huge, huge ridiculous boobs,” according to the Daily Mail, which said he shared hundreds of messages online with three “bimbofied” performers, whom the Daily Beast also said are known as “fetish cam girls.” “It’s called bimbofication,” one of the performers explained to the Daily Beast. “People who modify their body to look like a doll. The Barbie look.”

The Daily Beast also reported that Byron Noem participated in the “sissy sub” world. Along with “bimbofication,” the “sissy sub” world is an area of the adult entertainment industry where men like to adopt an ultra-feminine persona, which often involves cross dressing, and they like to be bossed around by fetish cam girls.

In response to the Daily Mail report, Kristi Noem put out a statement saying that she was “devastated” by the images of her husband and that “the family was blindsided by this.” For his part, Byron Noem responded to multiple requests for an interview by The New York Times by texting back, “I will at some point. Today is not the day. I appreciate your heart.”

Given that the couple are not giving interviews, it’s hard to know how these revelations about Byron Noem’s reported fetish and apparent cross-dressing do or don’t figure into his 34-year marriage or into his own concept of his sexuality and gender identity.

But one of the adult performers who interacted with Byron Noem online told the Daily Beast that she could not believe that Kristi Noem did not know about her husband’s sexual proclivities. “There is no way in hell that she did not know,” said Lydia Love in an interview with the Daily Beast, published Thursday.

Love said she was paid $5,000 over the past two years to “dominate” Byron Noem in his “sissy sub” role-playing. She also said he often came online to tell her how stressed he was and that wearing gigantic fake breasts relaxed him. “He didn’t just wake up two years ago and start talking to cam girls about wanting to be a woman,” Love told the Daily Beast.

Meanwhile, writers at LGBTQ publications, such as LGBTQ Nation and Them, have noted that cross-dressing is not inherently considered queer or trans. But they say that the Daily Mail report comes after Noem spent the past decade demonstrating “staunchly anti-drag” views and a “long history of public hostility toward the trans and larger LGBTQ+ communities.”

Going back to 2015, when she was in the U.S. House of Representatives, Noem stated her opposition to Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court ruling that allowed same-sex marriage to became the law of the land.

As South Dakota governor from 2019 to 2025, Noem signed a bill banning transgender girls and women from participating in school sports, saying she was “grateful” to be able to sign it, LGBTQ Nation reported. She also signed a law that allowed business owners to cite religious beliefs as a basis to deny services to people based on sexual orientation or gender identity, and she backed restrictions on gender-affirming care for minors.

In 2023, Noem furthermore wrote a letter to the state’s college governing board requesting that they ban drag shows from public college campuses and remove all references to “preferred pronouns” in school materials, LGBTQ Nation reported. Noem described higher education as “in a state of crisis” and said that “many states have allowed liberal ideologies to poison their universities and colleges.”

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