The Ex-MAGA Influencer Who Now Hates All Things MAGA—and Herself Too

Clair is mostly conducting her multipart exposé with Catskills-style comedy. She’s well suited to it, as she resembles a young Fran Drescher, and has something of Drescher’s manner, manicures, and nasality. In this costume, St. Clair delivers MAGA lore and tea to an increasingly intrigued audience. You might call this a redemption tour, except that her shtick is that she’s way, way beyond redemption. And lately she’s been drawing viewers in with the four words that have become a favorite opener on the app: “Get ready with me.” To her following, this curtain-raiser signals that St. Clair will put on a millefeuille of makeup in a sublimely expert way, transforming herself from girlish smart aleck to indomitable broad, all while dishing about the women of Mar-a-Lago, the right-wing media group Arsenal, “the rack on Kristi Noem’s husband,” the “Stop the Steal” hoax, the former North Carolina Representative Madison Cawthorn, Benny Johnson, Alex Jones, and how MAGA influence campaigns work. Why is this at all compelling? I think it comes through in the makeup application itself, as this exhausted and broken-hearted young woman, who has both engineered suffering and suffered herself, self-consciously masks her extreme fragility with extreme bravado. St. Clair is clearly experiencing a form of how-did-I-get-here despair that mirrors the nation’s. In one video (now unfindable) she contrasted images of her heavily made-up self with her private one—raw, red-faced, sobbing. I find her both insightful and untrustworthy. “Bitch, I’m at rock bottom,” she posted. “There’s not an embarrassed bone in my body. I care about literally nothing.” So here’s the rock bottom she’s referring to. In 2023, St. Clair’s relationship with Musk rocketed from their D.M.s to her pregnancy to his madness. “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse,” Musk texted St. Clair about his breeding plan for her, according to The Wall Street Journal, “we will need to use surrogates.” Not long after, St. Clair announced the birth of their son Romulus on X, and named Musk as the father. He had evidently hoped to keep this quiet. A beef ensued. “You withdrew most of [the child support] to maintain control and punish me for ‘disobedience,’” St. Clair tweeted at Musk, saying she was facing eviction. Musk then decided St. Clair had somehow entrapped him, and went insane. A tsunami of horrific, pornographic, xAI-generated images of St. Clair as a minor hit X. St. Clair sued xAI. Now xAI has bashed back. Or rather, as she puts it, “my ex’s fuck-ass racist robot company is suing me.”For a new mother in precarious circumstances to go toe-to-toe with Musk, the RMITW, took cojones. To do so on Musk’s own Satan-site, and in the presence of his zillion bloodthirsty acolytes—this gives you a sense of St. Clair’s risk nonaversion. So she took her rock bottom to TikTok. When she arrived, she mostly lip-synched to internet memes. These videos are surprisingly funny, and she still does them. But only last August when she warned about Palantir, and the dangers of “simping for the military-industrial complex,” did she get true engagement. These days, some 70,000 of us are following. The tea is hot, as they say. The apparent debauchery, recklessness, and casual brutality of some of the nation’s leading conservatives is really something. St. Clair chips off jokes about everything she did and had done to her in her early twenties, and her tough-as-nails posture is, by design, only half-persuasive.Then St. Clair can also turn downright somber, as in a video last week. In this one (now removed), St. Clair addressed Erika Kirk, the widow of Charlie who had just released a weird video of her own. St. Clair urged Kirk to log off the internet for a time and get better people to advise her. St. Clair then thought better of the post and took it down. “As a mother,” she said in the next video, she didn’t want to encourage people to “dogpile” on Kirk. Once a “brand ambassador” for Turning Point USA, St. Clair also wanted to underscore in this follow-up video that she vehemently opposes the ideology of the Kirks—and the whole movement she once embraced. To this end, she has taken her name off an anti-trans children’s book she published a few years ago. She further aims to take responsibility for having, as she says, dehumanized the trans community—and so many others.“I encourage people within MAGA to really look at what’s happening in this country and what you’re a part of,” she said in a Get Ready With Me video last Friday, with apparent anguish. She went on to say she’s not a grifter or a makeup influencer. She hopes, in fact, to go to law school one day.“I am speaking openly and honestly about my experiences. I understand that there’s a lot of skepticism and critique, and I am open to that, and I am understanding that there are a lot of people that are still going to be angry at me. And I don’t fault them for that because of my role in harm.”Gen Z MAGA—how will we ever understand you? The sincerity crossed with the oddball memes with the deep suffering with the mean-girl zingers. But the GRWM video was done. The makeup was done. In the captions, St. Clair had helpfully included a 15-item cosmetics product list, including Rare Blush in Wisdom, Nars Blush in Dolce Vita, and One Size Liner in Outta Line. What a mess. But maybe the list held a clue to Ashley’s, MAGA’s, or even America’s trajectory. Dolce Vita to Outta Line to some Wisdom at last? What was I doing? I finally scrolled away.