Who is Megyn Kelly, really? The confusing psychology of a woman who polices other women
Por Holly Baxter — – World RSS Feed
Analysis Who is Megyn Kelly, really? The confusing psychology of a woman who polices other women
She savaged Trump’s new press secretary then immediately defended her and she insulted the Cornell 7 alleged rape victim but also says she wants to champion women. Kelly has descended into a very weird role, writes Holly Baxter, and it’s unclear where she goes from here
Thursday 15 October 2026 17:08 BST
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I wasn’t particularly moved by Katie Zacharia’s first appearance as press secretary this week. Neither was Megyn Kelly.
Zacharia put in a bad performance. She read from the paper in front of her in a stilted, awkward way and then she ended the briefing after just 14 minutes, having accidentally referred to “my president — I mean my husband.” Trump staffers reportedly weren’t happy with her performance, either.
But none of this was Megyn Kelly’s main concern. Kelly’s concern was that Zacharia wore heavy makeup and OTT hair extensions, as well as “some chest showing,” because what she really wants, apparently, is a job on Fox News. “You’re not there to turn anybody on,” Kelly piled on, before adding on her YouTube show that you can “sex it up” later if you want to(?!) but you need to “earn it.”
Therein was probably the most confusing part of Kelly’s critique. Because why would a woman want to “sex it up” on the job anyway, and how would one “earn” the ability to do that? Do six weeks of collarbone-covering shirts equal one month of cleavage? If you run a few press conferences with your hair in a demure bun, do you get to wear some naughty, slutty curls at a rally? And what do these rules look like when they’re applied to men? Did Donald Trump have to “earn” his right to that suggestive little permatan and canary-yellow hair dye, and if so, how?
I’m being facetious, of course, because I know how misogyny works. And there is a particular kind of authority available to women who have learned the rules of a misogynistic world and decided that the answer is to enforce them against everyone else. They can tell you which women are asking for trouble, which are playing the victim, which are too ugly to have been assaulted and which have become a little too pleased with themselves.
open image in galleryThe verdict comes with the added credibility of female experience: this isn’t sexism, they tell us, it’s just how the world works. Megyn Kelly, who once found herself on the receiving end of Donald Trump’s fury precisely because of her pushing back against misogyny, has now become remarkably adept at handing down such judgements herself.
Weirdly, Kelly did a follow-up short segment on Zacharia where she said that the press secretary’s disastrous first briefing actually “didn’t go particularly well, but it was fine” and then attacked the “leftists” who are “going for her.”
“People are damn nasty” because Zacharia is “blonde” and “pretty,” Kelly added, before finishing off with the eye-opening assertion that if you’re the press secretary, “you’re not there to tell the truth. Please, stop it, Pollyannas.” The flavor of the narrative had changed, but the narrative was still the same: The main issue here is how Zacharia looks. And if you don’t accept that, then you’re just naive.
One gets the impression that being Megyn Kelly is exhausting. A zillion years ago, when she got under Trump’s skin enough that he famously said she must’ve had “blood” coming out of her “wherever,” it seemed like she might break away from the usual mold. But the Megyn Kelly of 2026, who on Oct. 5 said that the Jane Doe who alleges she was gang-raped by seven men at Cornell was too ugly to have been raped anyway and that she probably enjoyed the attention, is a very different beast.
Kelly followed up in a later show by claiming that Alex Cooper, the podcast host for ‘Call Her Daddy’, should personally say “sorry” to the nation for the Cornell 7 story, because Cooper apparently led people like Jane Doe toward “raunchy, immoral, disgusting, nasty behavior” (in Kelly’s generation, by the way, it was Sarah Jessica Parker who did the same damage.) If only Cooper had instead schooled women in how to walk the line properly, like Kelly does, then perhaps rapes simply wouldn’t happen.
Kelly is flailing in a very peculiar way. She has enough conservative followers that she needs to be tell-it-like-it-is misogynistic, espousing enough women-as-objects stuff that it keeps the middle-aged men on board. But she has also clearly experienced sexism herself, as well as the consequences — both personal and professional — that it can have. She has 4.16 million subscribers to her YouTube show, which represents a significant income stream, and she has to keep them coming back. People have begun openly questioning whether she really believes this stuff or whether she’s stuck in a ragebait-coated cage of her own making.
open image in gallery
open image in galleryThis is a question that could be applied to all of MAGA as it becomes increasingly radical and increasingly obsessed with purging the disloyal. But it’s particularly interesting to track Kelly’s downfall from person calling out misogyny to person advising women that they should navigate misogyny correctly. She has now become a kind of self-appointed HR department for sexism, espousing the lines you’d expect from a man in charge in order to “tell it like it is” and then doling out nonsense advice about when you can and should “sex it up” on the job and how much makeup or hair styling you should do in order to be taken seriously. In some ways, she’s the final iteration of the Lean In-style “girlboss”, internalizing the status quo so much that she has now become an instrument of the patriarchy, complete with clippable quotes and a “sorry not sorry” little shrug.
This is all good tactics if you’re a brand that relies on a right-leaning audience but you still want to present a veneer of reasonableness, or at least seem different enough to the administration that you keep people interested. Kelly now presents herself as a voice of hard-won wisdom, someone who’s been through the ringer and can now tell women what’s up. In doing so, she can also decode for men what women are really thinking, what they’re really hoping and doing and saying. Pretty women are unfairly attacked by ugly women because they’re pretty, ugly women pretend sex they actually wanted was rape because they’re ugly, but pretty women should also check themselves for a thousand little things because they can’t expect to be taken seriously anyway. Tune in next week for more of the same, or risk social annihilation!
Like most of the modern American right, Kelly’s main calling card now is grievance. Weaponized grievance means she can mock a woman for showing cleavage (why don’t these green young things get it right?!), defend that same woman from legitimate criticism (why are these socialists so judgey?), then suggest that an alleged rape victim is too unattractive to have been assaulted (why does everyone jump to believe one woman anyway?) She can denounce the supposed cruelty of the left while participating in a particularly vicious form of cruelty herself in the guise of helpfulness. And she can gesture wildly toward supposed “cover-ups” and conspiracies — about Ilhan Omar, about Jane Doe, about Russell Brand and James Talarico and even about a “trans death cult” — enough that she positions herself as the only source of truth in an upside-down world.
The problem is that it’s unclear where Kelly goes from here, if the tide is turning against far-right populism, which midterms polling suggests it may be. Grievance clicks are getting harder to chase, and the rage spiral you end up perpetuating when you keep chasing them could lead to a career-ending place.
So far, she’s been good at pulling just back from the brink. But spending your life on a precipice — no matter how you style your hair, or how much cleavage you show, or how carefully you navigate the expectations of a deeply unfair world you gesture towards but apparently don’t want to change — is always a risky move.
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Megyn KellyKatie ZachariaDonald Trump
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