A tattooed breakfast TV host for defense secretary, a state governor who shot dead the family dog – because she ‘hated’ it – for Homeland Security and a Moscow-friendly former Democrat to head intelligence. What could possibly go wrong?
It’s difficult to think of another time when a President-elect’s nominations for his cabinet have created so much angst and outrage as Donald Trump’s selections for his new top team.
But will their spouses also cause a stir when they get to Washington? Or will they fade gracefully into the background, perfect adornments to Republican politicians who could certainly do without the additional controversy?
Here are a few of the Real Housewives (and Husbands) of Trumpworld to watch in the coming months…
The Democrat Deserter: Usha Vance
The wife of Vice President-elect JD Vance is set to become the first Indian-American Second Lady – and what a journey it’s been.
Friends at Yale remember her as a solid Democrat, the child of upper-middle class Indian migrant parents from San Diego, who dearly wanted to see Hillary Clinton in the White House.
The last person, they thought, who’d ever turn to the MAGA side. However, after meeting her future husband at Yale Law School, Usha effected a remarkable transformation – on a par, in fact, with JD’s own embrace of Trump, a man he’d previously compared to Hitler.
The couple’s relationship was encouraged by their Yale professor, author Amy Chua (aka ‘the Tiger Mom’), who described the match as ‘extremely unlikely, almost opposites of personality’.
They married in 2014 in a multi-denominational ceremony (she’s a Hindu, he’s a Christian) and have three young children.
Usha has been a strong influence on her husband’s political career, helping him with his speeches and defending him when needed, such as when she dismissed his calling senior female Democrats ‘childless cat ladies’ as just a ‘quip’.
She has also softened his image with cozy revelations such as how Vance likes to cook Indian food for her mother.
Vance says that Usha, a corporate litigator at a ‘radically progressive’ San Francisco law firm, is far more brilliant than him and can digest a 1,000-page book in just a few hours. How she’ll cope with endless MAGA cocktail parties remains to be seen.
The Unenthusiastic Actress: Cheryl Hines
Friends were reportedly horrified to see pictures of Mrs Robert F Kennedy Jr. partying away on election night at Mar-a-Lago.
After all, actress and director Cheryl Hines is a registered Democrat and was widely rumored to have been so appalled by her husband joining Team Trump that she considered divorcing him.
Even Kennedy admitted that his shock endorsement of The Donald was ‘the opposite of what [Hines] would want to do’.
Hines, in turn, has called some of her husband’s public comments – such as suggesting Holocaust victim Anne Frank was better off than Americans who must get vaccinated – ‘reprehensible’.
But, given what she’s already tolerated from the eccentric and philandering conspiracy theorist, why would she jump ship now that the fun’s about to start?
Hines, 59, is a rare MAGA WAG who is famous in her own right, having been the star of the acclaimed TV comedy series ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’.
Hines’s acting career had been distinctly low-key until she bagged the role of Larry David’s long-suffering wife.
‘They wanted to cast an unknown actress. It worked in my favor that I hadn’t done anything. It changed my life,’ she later explained.
Hines also has David to thank for her marriage to Kennedy – her second husband – as he introduced the pair in 2011. They married in 2014.
But while Kennedy claims Hines has been a big influence on his political career, she hardly figured in the recent election campaign, choosing to concentrate instead on plugging the plastic-free skincare range she launched with her daughter Catherine (whose father is her first husband, TV producer Paul Young) in 2023.
MAGA Mistress: Jennifer Rauchet
Pete Hegseth, Fox & Friends co-host and Trump’s choice for Defense Secretary, is very much on the defensive at present over his allegedly White Supremacist tattoos and a seven-year-old 𝑠e𝑥ual assault claim.
At least his TV producer wife Jennifer Rauchet has escaped scrutiny – for now.
Hegseth met the woman he’s described as ‘my favorite person on planet Earth’ while she was producing Fox & Friends Weekend – and both of them were married to other people.
Their office affair burst into the open in 2017, amid accusations that she showed favoritism towards Hegseth on the show. The couple confessed their affair to Fox management after Jennifer discovered she was pregnant.
They married in 2018 at – of course – a Trump golf club in New Jersey, having worn MAGA-themed ‘Make weddings great again’ hats to their wedding rehearsal.
They’re raising their seven children from their various marriages together.
When Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox News last year, it was reported that Rauchet, now 39, had been heavily involved in the decision – and that it had been an attempt to get Carlson’s prime spot for her husband.
Hegseth dismissed the claim as ‘the fakest news I’ve ever seen’.
Melania 2.0: Jeanette Dousdebes Rubio
Melania Trump might have been a famous lingerie model but the wife of Donald’s choice for Secretary of State can almost match that – as a former cheerleader for the Miami Dolphins and star of its first swimsuit calendar.
And, just like Melania, Jeanette Dousdebes Rubio is actually a rather shy woman who hankers for the quiet life away from the glare of politics.
Like husband Marco – the Florida Senator who has spent 25 years in politics – Jeanette is the child of poor migrants, in her case from Colombia.
The couple first met in their teens in Miami and began dating at college. Marco proposed on Valentine’s Day in 1997 and, knowing Jeanette loved the movie Sleepless in Seattle, took her to New York City and up to the observation deck of the Empire State Building.
Recreating the film’s most famous scene, he handed her the ring – before promptly taking it back for safekeeping, as he was scared she was going to drop it. Jeanette and her sister Adriana became Miami Dolphins cheerleaders that same year, bringing rather more excitement to Jeanette’s daily life than her previous job as a bank teller.
She married Marco in 1998, her extrovert husband belting out My Way in front of 200 guests.
Now aged 50, Jeanette reportedly has so little interest in politics that, it is said, she barely ever votes.
‘I get the sense she would rather [Marco] be home cleaning up the dog poop and helping her out with the [four] kids and just working a nine-to-five job,’ a commentator claimed in the Tampa Bay Times in 2015.
Jeanette’s passion is religion. A devout member of a Southern Baptist-affiliated church, she hosts a weekly Bible study class in the Rubio family home.
The Intimacy Expert: Lisa Oz
Like her husband Mehmet Oz, Lisa is a former cardiothoracic surgeon who wanted something more.
He went on to find fame as TV’s ‘Dr Oz’ (and is now Trump’s nominee to be administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services).
And Lisa, too, dropped out of the serious but unglamorous world of performing lung transplants to pursue fame as one of the media’s favorite ‘relationship experts’.
Asked about their own relationship – they married in 1985 after Mehmet says he proposed on a Philadelphia street corner, using a discarded soda can tab as a makeshift ring – the couple recommend a positive attitude, a healthy lifestyle, and a lot of 𝑠e𝑥.
‘Have it as often as possible!’ Lisa trilled back in 2011. ‘You have to make intimacy a regular part of your life.’
Now 61, Lisa has expounded on relationships for years in books, and on radio and TV shows.
She has also loyally stood by her husband through myriad controversies over his business dealings and bizarre endorsements – including of quack medicine.
However, her greatest help to his political career, it’s been argued, is her money.
Thanks to a multi-billion dollar tree-pruning business set up by her grandfather, Lisa’s family is one of the wealthiest in Pennsylvania.
Moscow Momma: Rachel Campos-Duffy
Rachel, wife of Department of Transportation Secretary nominee Sean Duffy and mother of his nine children, is used to media attention.
She became a reality TV star aged 22 when she was cast on ‘The Real World: San Francisco’, an MTV show focusing on the lives of seven housemates living in the city’s Russian Hill neighborhood. She was the token Republican.
Rachel had a stormy romantic relationship with a male housemate which another of them put down to her taste for ‘bad boys’ (which she admitted was true).
She married Duffy, who co-starred with her on another MTV reality show, ‘Road Rules: All Stars’, in 1999.
After trying repeatedly to get a spot on daytime talk show ‘The View’, she was hired as a full-time presenter on Fox & Friends Weekend in 2021.
That was after delivering a trenchant on-air defense of the Trump administration’s policy of separating immigrant families who’d illegally crossed the US border.
She’s not short of controversial positions. Two years ago, she claimed that the US had provoked Russia to invade Ukraine.
The Surfer Dude: Abraham Williams
It must be hard being married to a professional politician at the best of times, but spare a thought for the husband of Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence.
Cinematographer and camera operator Abraham Williams has had to contend with his wife going from being a Democrat congresswoman and 2020 presidential contender, to sensationally swapping sides and becoming a dedicated Trumpite.
How do you explain that to workmates in the true-blue land of TV?
After a divorce, Gabbard – an observant Hindu – married Abraham, the son of her Honolulu office manager and of Maori/Samoan descent, in a Hindu wedding ceremony in 2015 after he’d worked as her campaign photographer.
Williams had proposed while they were out surfing.
The couple went through several rounds of IVF but were unsuccessful in their attempts to conceive.
The Anti-Woke Firecracker: Katie Miller
Stephen Miller is Trump’s long-time speechwriter and senior policy adviser, and now his nominated Deputy Chief of Staff.
When Miller was quizzed on Fox News earlier this year on his dating tips, he advised men wanting to attract women that ‘the best thing you can do is to wear your Trump support on your sleeve’.
It seemed dubious advice from the man who has called Trump a ‘style icon’ but, then again, it seems to have worked for him!
Katie, who became the proud Mrs Miller in 2020, is as Trumpian as her husband, regularly sounding off on social media about woke pre-schools, the wonders of migrant deportations and the awfulness of Trump’s one-time rival for the 2024 Republican nomination, Nikki Haley.
Some Democrats say Katie is even more terrifying than her husband. And the 32-year-old former communications director to Vice President Mike Pence certainly sounds like the sort of woman who could stiffen the political backbone of the top-table MAGA spouses.
In 2012, when she was standing in student government elections at the University of Florida, she was seen throwing away hundreds of copies of the school’s newspaper in which it had endorsed a rival candidate. You can’t buy that sort of ruthlessness.