'Rude awakening' for MAGA women as they flee movement that thinks they’re 'subhuman'

Million MAGA March Rally at US Capitol East on sidewalk, across from US Supreme Court, along First Street at Maryland Avenue, NE, Washington DC on Saturday afternoon, 14 November 2020 by Elvert Barnes Photography

According to new reporting from the Intelligencer, “New Right misogyny” is driving women from the MAGA movement. As the reporter explains, “Young women drawn to the cause in recent years for more traditional reasons…are having a rude awakening” as they increasingly recognize the “valorized” sexism of the far-right.

This disillusionment comes after MAGA received a swell of electoral support from women. While only 39 percent of women voted for Trump in 2016, that number grew to 42 percent in 2020, then 45 percent in 2024. But “anxiety and disgust over sexism have been steadily growing since the beginning of Trump’s second term,” pushing more and more women to ditch the movement.

For many, the turning point came when MAGA began openly embracing far-right commentator Nick Fuentes, who is well known for his “visceral hatred of women.” Fuentes has never been shy about promoting these views, recently declaring, “We need to put women in their place, and it starts with our political movement.”

Once considered a fringe figure in the far-right, Fuentes has exploded in popularity since having his X ban overturned by Elon Musk in 2024, with his followers growing from 168,000 to 1.2 million. One conservative blogger estimates that roughly a third of young GOP staffers follow him, and one former Trump administration official asserts that “a lot” of junior staff members “most certainly are Fuentes listeners.”

MAGA’s misogyny problem isn’t just among its brash online influencers, but is ingrained in its policy development. Last year, for example, a key position at the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation went to Scott Yenor, a family policy scholar who has called professional women “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome,” among other sexist statements. When dedicated Trump supporter Henry Olsen criticized the appointment in the Atlantic, he was attacked relentlessly by his MAGA colleagues, with one saying that women “ARE, as Yenor has said, medicated, miserable and quarrelsome … There is no true restoration of conservatism without raising these conversations.”

For many conservative women, another moment of recognition came after an ICE agent murdered Renee Good, whose death was widely justified by the Trump administration as the byproduct of a “lunatic woman” breaking from traditional gender norms. As one woman who has left MAGA explained, their messaging was clear: “she deserved it” because she was a woman.

Now women who are fed up with this misogyny are leaving the movement for good, saying they’re “politically homeless.” While some express frustration with other conservative and liberal political options, they know they’re not going back to MAGA.

“They see women as subhuman,” said one. “How could I tolerate this and participate in this?”

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