Along with a few other TV critics, I have the dubious distinction of attending the last party at the late Hollywood producer Robert Evans‘ Woodland estate before its storied pool house burned down in 2003. There, I rubbed elbows with famous comedians and an assortment of UPN and WB starlets. But the guests I remember most clearly were a woman in her 40s, possibly, and her daughter, who was perhaps in her mid-20s. They were remarkable because they’d been surgically altered to look like twins. By that, I mean both women bore evidence of similar procedural enhancements, most noticeably lips plumped like party balloons and sharp cheekbones.

Plastic surgery is common in Hollywood, but this was something novel. This mother-daughter duo wasn’t in a show. They were there because they were part of Evans’ wealthy, powerful social circle. And they weren’t trying to maintain an existing aesthetic but to stand out with the best version of perfected artificiality money could buy.

That memory sat at the bottom of my mind’s darkest well until I watched Erin Lee Carr’s “The Swan: Behind the Mirror.” Indeed, I had blocked out most memories of that 2004 Fox reality train wreck until Carr’s documentary reached into my mind’s cobwebby attic and retrieved its cabinet of horrors.

For those who also blanked it out or were too young to clearly remember the details, “The Swan” recruited a bevy of normal-looking women convinced by magazine ads, the tabloid industry and other media that they were, in fact, ugly ducklings. “I wanted some big-a** cans,” one of Carr’s subjects said, explaining that was the age of Pamela Anderson and Maxim cover girls, women she wanted to be.

Yes, this horrendous TV egg could only have hatched in a place like Hollywood, where mother-daughter spa days might also mean going under the knife.

When I say “The Swan” was one of the vilest shows ever made, that is coming from a person who has seen a quarter-century’s worth of terrible television. Lest you think my opinion is an outlier, here’s what my predecessor Heather Havrilesky had to say about it when it first aired:

The funny thing is, it doesn’t just make you depressed about plastic surgery and sad women and sleazy TV executives. It also makes you depressed about the war in Iraq, the frailty of the human ego, the undeniable soul-sucking lameness of our culture, and the impossibility of real beauty at a time when such confused animals roam the earth.

Somehow, despite each episode’s invasive gawking at each participant’s ghastly surgeries, the lasting legacy of “The Swan” and other shows – it didn’t exist in a vacuum – was not simply to normalize cosmetic surgery but to establish it as part of a system of social signifiers.

At the lowest consumer-friendly rung rest affordable fillers and Botox injections. At the top, in the realm of multimillionaires and billionaires, you will find the Hall of Mar-a-Lago faces. A library of radically changed visages, sliced and sculpted to fit the funhouse-mirror beauty standards set by a handful of influential men.

Dr. Randal Haworth was among the specialists creator Nely Galán recruited in 2003. Galán declined to be interviewed for Carr’s documentary, having been thoroughly raked over the coals once the public’s visceral disgust with “The Swan” got it canceled after its second season.  

But Haworth offered his view, which he may now regret. At first he opines that plastic surgery is surgical psychiatry before likening himself to an interior designer and then, in explaining his role in the series, saying, “My goal was, as a plumber, can I perform early hyperesthetic surgery on these people?”

Off-screen, Carr calls out the weirdness of a plastic surgeon describing himself that way. “You’re literally talking about toilets,” she says. “And women.”

“That was unintended,” he replies, only digging himself in deeper when he explains that, like plumbers or electricians, he was there to do a job.

So. The women in “The Swan” weren’t quite latrines, but the man who got intimate with their flesh and bone didn’t exactly see them as people either.

With “The Swan: Behind the Mirror,” Carr does a service to the participants this production tortured for ratings and to the modern TV audience by not only reminding us how exploitative it was but also establishing it as a benchmark for the beauty industry.

Of course, the first idea is likely to gain much more traction than the second, if the public’s shocked reaction to Netflix’s “Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model” is an indicator. “ANTM” and “The Swan” were contemporaries, after all. Before “The Swan” aired, ABC ran “Are You Hot? The Search for America’s Sexiest People,” made memorable by ‘80s star Lorenzo Lamas, one of its judges, using a laser pointer to point out contestants’ flab and cellulite for viewers at home.

“Extreme Makeover” had also been airing since 2002, showing ordinary men and women undergoing plastic surgery, receiving style makeovers and adopting fitness routines. “The Swan” was not a singular occurrence, then, but part of an era hawking cosmetic improvement, whether surgical or noninvasive, as the key to succeeding at life.

The difference between the two shows resembles the divide between workaday vanity and Mar-a-Lago maximalist aesthetic uniformity. “Extreme Makeover” pitched each contestant’s journey as personal, ending with them showing their “new, improved” selves to their friends and family.

Producers on “The Swan” not only pressured participants to undergo a series of grueling procedures and painful recoveries (that Carr’s documentary reveals were insufficiently managed), but they also made them compete against each other in a pageant. Very much like an election, in other words, only one populated with women who were scalpel-sculpted, lifted, tanned and tucked to surgical specifications.

Or, in Haworth’s telling, maybe just one surgeon’s.

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To be clear, that difference does not make “Extreme Makeover” less morally reprehensible. The fact that it outlived “The Swan” by several years only enhanced its role in mainstreaming elective cosmetic surgery. More than two decades after these aired, we’ve swerved between an age of unattainable thinness being pushed as a cultural ideal and a time of healthy-at-any-size body positivity from which we’re slowly regressing. The first runs of these shows probably missed Gen Z. Not millennials, sadly. And yet, Sephora and other cosmetic retailers love that their obsession with anti-aging begins in their teens and 20s. These products are marketed to them as “skin-loving,” not as wrinkle creams.

As the recent, depressing discourse about the difference in Jasmine Guy’s appearance between when she starred in “A Different World” four decades ago and how she looks in the reboot rages on, we’re reminded that Americans still have a deeply ageist view of daring to grow old gracefully.

For the record, Guy is a physically fit woman in her 60s who has not undergone cosmetic surgery, whom many women would kill to look like. And if she had gotten all the lifts and tucks we expect of a TV star, we’d be criticizing her for that too.

But her appearance is her choice and doesn’t serve anyone but herself which, in these days of grotesque facial augmentation being associated with a dehumanizing strain of conservative politics, is downright refreshing.

Carr’s documentary closes by showcasing the sisterhood shared by the women who survived “The Swan” – women seduced by a sales pitch predicated on the assumption that cosmetic surgery would change their lives. Most of them found that wasn’t true.

But at least one participant in “The Swan” still believes in its promise. “It was empowering,” insists Haworth in “Behind the Mirror,” “because it shows you that beauty is power.” Reflected power, sure. But whose?

“The Swan: Behind the Mirror” is streaming on Hulu.

 

 

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Before it became reality, the biggest fear around a second Donald Trump administration was an increased level of competence. The candidate and his team displayed shocking measures of discipline and consistent messaging throughout the 2024 race, with much of the credit going to campaign manager Susie Wiles, who became his White House chief of staff. As a result, some feared that the shambling jankiness of his first term would be replaced by an efficient, experienced administration that would carry out a ruthless, quasi-fascist platform with few hiccups. 

That hasn’t happened. Once in office, Trump replaced the GOP’s establishment scolds who curtailed his worst impulses in his first term with loyalists who were just as green as him. The result has been constant outrage over blatant graft and executive overreach, as Trump is unable to stop blabbing about his — possibly illegal — dealmaking and unconstitutional policy goals. But look to the Republican Party’s backbenchers: You’ll see what MAGA could do with a figurehead who can keep their trap shut. 

A loyal Trump acolyte, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry has happily deployed bored-looking National Guard troops to New Orleans and the U.S.-Mexico border for little more reason than pleasing the president. He has successfully pushed a law to require the display of the Ten Commandments in schools, and he rarely shies away from red meat conflicts with his state’s few Democratic strongholds. Little surprise, then, that Landry was hailed as MAGA’s next-generation hero by Rolling Stone in 2024.

But when the time comes to pass Republican policies he truly cares about, or to hand out contracts and favors to his preferred businesses, Landry goes eerily quiet. Unlike Trump’s premature crowing over his massive ballroom or countless would-be Iran ceasefires, the governor has a tendency to let his work speak for itself. 

When it was published, Landry’s profile in Rolling Stone made hay out of his ability to go dark. Lately, though, when he gets quiet, it’s out of legal necessity. His administration has proven remarkably open to signing non-disclosure agreements while working out public deals with megacorporations.

According to a report from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Landry administration has signed nearly 300 NDAs since he took office in 2024. The Gulf States Newsroom uncovered a further 100 NDAs between the governor’s office and its employees, restricting what they can share about their time on the job. Reporter Drew Hawkins, who spoke to employees of former Louisiana gubernatorial administrations, said the broad gag orders on public employees was unprecedented.

“[T]hey’ve never seen anything like this,” Hawkins told New Orleans television station WWL. “They don’t know about anybody else signing them. They never signed them, and then you know one of them reviewed it and went through it point by point and talked about just how wild this would be to enforce.”

The result of all these hush-hush agreements is most noticeable in recent headline deals with SpaceX and Meta. The former was given the OK to build a massive spaceport in coastal Louisiana in between two wildlife refuges. While the under-wraps deal was being worked out, Landry signed laws exempting aerospace operations from property taxes, nuisance liabilities and public records requests. The final deal, approved in a public meeting of a new development board announced just 24 hours before, granted SpaceX more than $24 billion in tax breaks to build a rocket-launching facility no locals had even heard about.

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A similarly tight-lipped dealmaking process led to Meta’s announcement of its largest data center to date in rural Northeast Louisiana. The project, dubbed Hyperion, will cover six square miles of Richland Parish. The tax breaks granted to Meta, again without public input, total more than $3 billion.

For his part, Landry kept quiet about the agreements until the last possible moment. But once the ink was dry, he was downright boastful about them. “I have no problem letting the people in the state of Louisiana decide whether what we put together was worth it,” he said, telling the Times-Picayune that he was motivated by pragmatism and a desire to drag his economically underperforming state into the future. “You don’t do these deals in the public,. At some point, you have to give the people elected to lead this state the opportunity to lead.”

Since Louisiana’s have a habit of ending up in prison, some level of backroom chicanery is to be expected in the Bayou State. At the moment, Landry’s NDA-heavy approach is largely a Louisiana phenomenon. But the ethically dubious practice of burying public-private deals under NDAs could be put to use elsewhere. 

Landry’s down-low dealmaking offers a blueprint for post-Trump Republicans looking to push through potentially unpopular agreements and policies, including those involving data centers and artificial intelligence. While the president may no longer be able to harness the support he enjoyed by virtue of being loud-mouthed himself, his followers can work quietly to carry on his project under a blanket of keep-quiet agreements — springing them on the public when the deals have already been made.

The post We’ll never know the art of Jeff Landry’s Meta, SpaceX deals appeared first on Salon.com.

It seems like a million years ago now, but there was a moment back in 2024, in the heat of that weird presidential campaign, when everyone was talking about the radical blueprint for Donald Trump’s restoration. Project 2025 was so extreme, in fact, that his campaign had Trump disavow it publicly. He usually said that he hadn’t read the plan and didn’t intend to, but at times he went further. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, on July 20, 2024, Trump said, “Like some on the right, severe right, came up with this Project 25 . . . They’re sort of the opposite of the radical left. You have the radical left and the radical right, and they come up — I don’t know what the hell it is, it’s Project 25 . . . and then they read some of the things, and they are extreme, seriously extreme.”

Trump probably wasn’t lying when he said he hadn’t read it, but his advisers obviously believed he should keep his distance from the plan, which didn’t poll well, and when people found out what was in it, they were appalled. Project 2025 was a far-right manifesto, filled with the kind of pie-in-the-sky fantasies that denizens of conservative think-tanks had been churning out for decades in the hopes of influencing Republican administrations. 

One such organization, the Heritage Foundation, had been publishing “Mandate for Leadership,” its so-called policy guide, since 1981 and updating it as necessary. But Project 2025 was different from the group’s previous effort. This time, the Heritage Foundation had organized a formal transition operation, created training sessions, personnel lists and a day-one playbook for Trump to hit the ground running with a flurry of executive orders and personnel changes. 

This effort was largely guided by its co-author, Russell Vought, who served in the first Trump administration as the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Having worked for years for the Republican Study Committee in the House, a group of far-right members dedicated to social conservatism, tax cuts and the destruction of the federal safety net, Vought was an experienced bureaucrat with a specific vision: to shrink the federal workforce and bring as much power under the direct auspices of the president as possible. As a self-described Christian nationalist, he also believed that the U.S. should espouse fundamentalist Christianity, and that the country has no obligation to engage in global initiatives that do not directly benefit its own people.

Vought was an active member of a group formed after the 2012 election called Groundswell, which included an eclectic group of influencers and activists such as Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and far-right political operative Steve Bannon, who had come to believe that Republicans needed to be much more radical in their methods and their goals. Seeing the federal workforce as nothing more than sinecures for dangerous liberals, Vought and his comrades planned mass firings under new rules such as Schedule F, which would reclassify thousands of federal workers as at-will employees, making them exempt from civil service protections. And if they could not be fired, he would make their lives so difficult that they would quit. As Vought famously explained:

We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.

Vought believed that the way to secure a mandate for this agenda, even under Democratic presidents, was to cut the federal workforce so massively that the government would be unable to function beyond the most basic services. We will have to see just how well that works out for them in the future. But the destruction is already monumental.

In the months after Trump returned to the White House, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency wreaked havoc on the federal government. Thousands were fired and departments were shuttered, leaving chaos everywhere. That’s the tech-bro style. 

But Vought is a different breed. He is a patient and methodical destroyer. Vought believes that we are living in a “post-constitutional” time in which the “precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last 200 years” must be thrown off. And even while Trump’s presidency appears to be on the verge of collapsing from the weight of historically low poll numbers, Vought is quietly accomplishing his mission of comprehensive deregulation mostly under the radar. 

On Tuesday, the administration ended Title IX protections for LGBTQ+ students, effectively allowing them to be bullied and discriminated against in America’s schools. But since this is a man who joyfully prescribes “trauma” as a political tactic, it’s not entirely surprising that his crusade would eventually reach schoolchildren.

Vought’s influence is also being felt on Capitol Hill. As the chair of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine has made her role a centerpiece of her reelection campaign. For years, she has argued to Mainers that her value lies in the seniority and influence she yields. But Collins should think again: One of Vought’s primary strategies for securing the unitary executive is through confrontation with the legislative and judicial branches. That conflict is currently playing out in the courts. But under a supine GOP congressional majority that has been willing to cede the powers granted to them by the Constitution, he is winning — and making more moves. 

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According to the New York Times, an Oval Office meeting grew heated when Vought attempted to have the president rescind National Institutes of Health grants to universities that did not align with the MAGA agenda. Trump was on board with the idea, since it would have targeted Harvard University, an institution he sees as his enemy. After fierce pushback from members of both parties, the pair pulled back. But that reprieve could be temporary; conventional wisdom says they are likely to try again after the November midterms are over, when Vought’s new initiative to confront Congress begins in earnest.

Then, on Wednesday, Senator Ron Johnson, R-Wis., blocked a Democratic bill that would have stopped Vought’s recent pocket rescission of $810 million in domestic spending previously approved by Congress. (In a statement released days before the vote, Collins decried the move.) The money had been earmarked for programs focused on immigrants, refugees, civil rights, climate change and children. Johnson said the issue will likely have to be decided by the Supreme Court, which approved Vought’s rescissions in 2025 because they pertained to national security. These funds do not, but it won’t be surprising if the Court’s conservative majority, which has been largely sympathetic to the unitary executive theory, finds another reason to allow it.

If Vought and the administration were to win at the Supreme Court, Congress might as well just go part-time to approve presidential appointments, name post-offices and pass one big pile of money for the presidential monarch to spend as he pleases. Article I of the Constitution will be effectively dead.

Under Vought’s leadership, the damage to the federal government is already overwhelming, and it’s unclear if a Democratic congressional majority or administration will be able to fix it. But then, that’s part of the plan too. Trump’s presidency may be faltering, but Vought’s dream is being realized every single day.

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