It wasn’t the first time that the Technicolor worlds of MAGA and beauty pageants—both image-conscious, soaked in nostalgia and adroit with hair spray—have intersected.

In January, Abbie Stockard, the reigning Miss America, turned up at Donald Trump’s inauguration wearing a MAHA gown. When it came time to select a cabinet, Trump tapped South Dakota’s 1990 Snow Queen, Kristi Noem, as secretary of homeland security. Anna Kelly, a former Miss State Fair of Virginia, was appointed deputy press secretary.

Last month, when the president needed someone to push through criminal charges against James Comey, the former FBI director, another beauty queen came to the fore: Lindsey Halligan. The one-time Miss Colorado semifinalist did the job after Trump pushed out the top federal prosecutor for eastern Virginia and elevated her.

Halligan’s turn in the spotlight has paled beside the glow of another pageant veteran. Erika Kirk, the widow of slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk, was Miss Arizona USA in 2012. At her husband’s funeral last month, she demonstrated preternatural poise addressing a stadium-sized crowd, extolling a traditional view of marriage in which he was the family’s spiritual leader while she maintained the home.

To Brittany Hugoboom, the editor of Evie Magazine—a kind of conservative Cosmopolitan that is a bible for “trad wives”—the MAGA-pageant axis was further evidence that America is turning the page on a progressive era in which such concepts as body positivity and gender fluidity entered the mainstream.

“We’re shifting from the era of Hillary Clinton pantsuits into one that celebrates femininity again,” Hugoboom declared, adding, “The current administration has always understood the influence of aesthetics.” (Said a recent Evie headline: “Make Miss America Great Again: Can Conservative Culture Save The Century-old Pageant?”)

To their proponents, pageants are a training ground for young women to succeed in a world beyond the swimsuit competition. They learn discipline and poise and how to think on their feet. The life of a Miss America—crossing the country to appear at events, speaking in public, developing a platform and smiling for endless pictures—isn’t so different from that of a campaigning politician.

“You’re learning to present yourself. You’re learning to have a stump speech, for lack of a better word…You’re learning to be media-savvy,” said Hilary Levey Friedman, author of the book “Here She Is: The Complicated Reign of the Beauty Pageant in America.” Her mother, Pamela Eldred, was Miss America 1970.

But critics cannot quite get past the idea of women standing on a stage to be judged on their appearance. As in Trump World, they say, contestants may demonstrate strength, talent and ambition—but always on men’s terms.

“The pageant world rules for success are similar to the Trump World rules of success,” said Kimberly Hamlin, a professor of women’s history at Miami University of Ohio. “Always look your best, always be ready for the bikini contest. Be charming. And always do what the boss wants.”

Margot Mifflin, author of the 2020 book “Looking For Miss America,” believes pageants and MAGA are “consonant” in their inclination to maintain the status quo. “MAGA culture is rewarding a certain kind of woman that beauty pageants reward,” Mifflin said. Both “revere conventional, traditional representations of women.”

Hulse, who at 27 is South Dakota’s youngest-ever state senator, is aware of the contradictions. While she credits pageants for her professional success, she also acknowledges that it’s not ideal to be “parading women around on a stage in their underwear, essentially, to win a scholarship.”

Ironically, modern pageants trace their roots to events staged by suffragists to showcase women’s talents and contributions to society. In 1921, hoteliers in Atlantic City subverted that idea by creating their own revue of “bathing beauties,” held the week after Labor Day as a way to extend the summer season. What had been a women’s production in the service of women’s rights turned into a way of promoting the interests of wealthy businessmen.

Seventy-five years later, Trump, another Atlantic City hotelier, would become the pageant world’s king when he bought the organization that owns the Miss USA, Miss Teen USA and Miss Universe competitions. If Miss America is prim and studious, competing for university scholarships, think of Miss USA as the racier sister. Or as Mifflin put it, “It’s a little more of a skin show.”

More than once, contestants complained about Trump going backstage when they were undressed—something he did not deny in a 2005 interview with Howard Stern. “I’ll go backstage before a show and everyone’s getting dressed and ready, and everything else, and, you know, no men anywhere, and I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant, and therefore I’m inspecting it,” he told Stern. “You know they’re standing there with no clothes…And you see these incredible looking women.”

By the time Trump sold the pageants in 2015, such events were in decline. In the 1980s Miss America was one of the year’s biggest television events, drawing tens of millions of viewers. Last year its audience dropped to under a million loyalists, who had to stream it online.

As Hamlin observed, “It’s not really a thrill anymore to turn on your TV and see a woman in a bikini.” Even that may not be on offer: In 2018, Miss America ended its swimsuit competition under the direction of its then-chair, Gretchen Carlson. (Amid a backlash, it has since introduced a “sportswear” competition.)

Carlson is regarded, seemingly in all corners of the pageant universe, as a transcendent figure. After winning Miss America in 1989—three years after the competition stopped releasing contestants’ measurements—she used the scholarship money to pay for her Stanford education. In the first week of her reign, Carlson recalled, she was at a dinner in Atlanta when someone tapped her on the shoulder and asked her to give a 30-minute impromptu speech before 5,000 people. She ran to the bathroom to prepare.

“Being Miss America was the toughest job I’ll ever have, and that’s saying something,” said Carlson, who became a Fox News star and then a women’s empowerment advocate, after suing the network’s chairman, Roger Ailes, for sexual harassment.

A dirty secret about pageants is that behind the smiles and the ogling, a great part of their fuel is female ambition. Long before “American Idol” and its ilk, pageants were a means for a small-town striver to vault herself into a bigger world. Feminist icon Gloria Steinem and journalist Diane Sawyer both competed in pageants. So did Sarah Palin, the proto-MAGA governor of Alaska and 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate. Palin was crowned Miss Wasilla at age 20 and then finished second-runner-up for Miss Alaska.

In a 2016 interview with a South Dakota newspaper, Noem reflected on her eye-opening reign as Snow Queen. “It was the first time I had sat down and done an interview with multiple people,” she said. “It was very educational. To stand up and speak in front of individuals or a large amount of people at the Snow Queen contest was a first as well.”

To Hulse, who boasts degrees from the University of South Dakota and Georgetown Law School, there are two types of women who win a pageant crown: The one for whom it will be her life’s greatest achievement, and the one for whom it will be a launchpad. “I hope one day that the Miss South Dakota thing falls off the bottom of my résumé and that’s not what people know me for,” she said, placing herself in the latter category.

Hulse entered her first local pageant at 13 because a friend did. To her surprise, she won. Since she already had the dress, she entered a bigger pageant and won that one, too. Along the way she met a pageant executive named Sara Frankenstein who had won the 1998 Miss South Dakota pageant. (“Child of Frankenstein Vies for Miss America,” read the Orlando Sentinel headline).

Frankenstein is now one of South Dakota’s foremost election lawyers, and she became Hulse’s mentor. “I would not be a state senator today had it not been for that woman,” said Hulse, who grew up on a hunting ranch, far from the corridors of power. “And I would not have been exposed to [her] if not for pageants.”

Over the years, Hulse has encountered plenty of boundary-pushing contestants who were determined to use the crown to advance progressive causes, she noted. She has also met Trump, at the Iowa caucuses in January 2023, two months after she competed in Miss USA.

“He came up and he goes, ‘Now, you look familiar,’” she recalled.

She had been an intern in his first administration, Hulse replied. Trump went blank. Then she mentioned the Miss USA pageant.

“‘He goes: ‘That’s what it was!’” said Hulse. “It was a very him moment.”