The MAGA Face That Launched a Thousand Memes

The position of US ambassador-at-large to monitor and combat trafficking was hardly a splashy title, though an honorable one. That is, until last week, when Barbera Thornhill, a late-70s Los Angeles philanthropist who’s served as an interior design executive, was welcomed to the Trump administration as the latest appointee to the role, and social media lost its mind. A photo of Thornhill posted to X by a State Department bureaucrat, alongside a statement about her joining the office, got more than 20 million views. And on Instagram, Callista Gingrich, Newt Gingrich’s wife and Donald Trump’s ambassador to Switzerland, posted a photo of herself and Thornhill that went viral, with the two wearing coordinating royal blue skirt suits. But it wasn’t Thornhill’s name, background, or résumé that caused the uproar. It was her face.

“Botched” or “alien,” read subsequent comments, which were promptly followed by memes, AI-generated videos, and Halloween-themed content featuring Thornhill, Gingrich, and other women in Trump’s orbit like Susan Dell, the philanthropist and wife of Dell Technologies founder Michael Dell, whose appearance during a White House visit the week prior had set off a similar swirl of commentary. It was the latest backlash against an aesthetic that has become known online simply as “Mar-a-Lago face”: high, dark, arched brows; cartoonishly inflated lips; skin frozen and pulled tautly over multiple syringes’ worth of filler; and barely open eyes that appear to have been pulled sideways and up.

“Republicans really need to elevate and highlight more women in our party who have NOT had bizarre or botched plastic surgery that is both distracting and made a mockery all over the internet,” declared Meghan McCain on X yesterday.  (Susan Dell and Callista Gingrich could not be reached for comment, and Barbera Thornhill declined to comment.)

But what if the surgery isn’t botched at all?

“It’s very fun, particularly when you’re on one political side or another, to aim your criticism weapon at them and say, ‘Oh, look how bad their plastic surgery is,’” says Dr. Terry Dubrow, the plastic surgeon and TV personality known for his roles on reality shows like The Swan and Botched. “But it isn’t bad. From a technical point of view,  it’s extraordinarily successful…. The plastic surgery is super well executed.”

According to Dubrow, a California fixture with a private practice in Beverly Hills and whose wife, Heather Dubrow, is a Real Housewife of Orange County, this kind of conspicuous aesthetic is the ultimate status symbol in certain “East Coast” circles.

“I’m so successful. Everyone around me is successful. We do things to the extreme. We’re excessively rich. We’re excessively powerful,” he says, mimicking the mentality of the clients who request this look. “If I’m going to have a facelift, I don’t want any laxity. If I’m going to have a brow lift, I want to have a brow lift; I want it up. [If] I’m going to have [an] upper-eye lift, take all the skin.”

“Hollywood,” he says, “is more of a preservation and a refinement, a relaxed kind of improvement, a refreshing kind of vibe.” (Admittedly, it’s difficult to comprehend a world in which the plastic surgery trends of Los Angeles, where Runyon Canyon is overrun with hiking girls sporting bolt-on fake boobs, BBLs, swollen lips, and matching Alo sets, are considered more natural and toned down compared to those of Washington, DC.)

When I call Melinda Anna Farina, a facelift consultant to the one percent who’s better known as the Beauty Broker, to ask about the internet’s latest fixation, she is less than enthusiastic. In fact, she hates the premise of my story.

“I see people [who] look like idiots in every single political party,” she says. “There’s bad plastic surgery in every political spectrum.” Farina, who insists she is apolitical (telling me she doesn’t even vote and only knows Eric Trump because he helped her nephew get into the right hospital and see the right doctor during a major health crisis), has little patience for turning cosmetic procedures into a partisan blood sport. “That’s dumb. It’s dumb and it’s a stupid article. So I would say, trash the article if that’s what you guys are talking about, because it’s stupid.”

Farina, who is based in New York City, charges roughly $750 for an hour-long consultation, per The New York Times, during which she helps clients find the surgeons best suited to their faces and desired results. Her own aesthetic philosophy could hardly be further from that of the “Mar-a-Lago face” memes. She wants her clients refreshed, rejuvenated, and, above all, recognizable.

“We are a filler-free consultancy,” she says. “Volume is not allowed in my consultancy.” If a client were to come in asking for an exaggerated, overfilled look, she says she would tell them, “There’s the door, please walk right out of it. Get out of my office.”

Farina, 46, is currently documenting her own facelift journey, which involves three separate surgeons, for a Disney show and her Substack. “I knew exactly who I wanted in that OR, and I wanted six individual eyes on it,” she says. A former dental assistant, she says she’s been in the health care industry for three decades (she was 13 when she first entered an OR, having been invited to “observe” by “friends of family,” as she recounted on Instagram). But she notes that most people don’t have access to that kind of knowledge before going under the knife.

Instead, they’ll blindly follow online influencers who claim to be experts when really they’re more like “some idiot down in Florida…[who] used to write about lipstick in NewBeauty. How dumb,” Farina says with a shudder. “I just have to sometimes put my phone down, take a deep breath, and just focus on what I’m doing and make sure that my clients are looking beautiful.”

The risks of a more-is-more approach aren’t just aesthetic.  The more aggressively a surgeon pulls and lifts, the greater the chance of complications, including nerve damage, scarring, and hair loss. That, Dubrow says, is the main reason he turns down patients looking for Mar-a-Lago face. “Plus, it’s true,” he says. “I don’t like that aesthetic.”