Sydney Sweeney, Donald Trump and the ad Republicans believe marks the end of Woke America

“The tide has seriously turned - Being woke is for losers,” Donald Trump declared on Tuesday. “Being Republican is what you want to be.”

Such a presidential proclamation would normally be unexceptional. In this case, though, Mr Trump decided to join a debate raging across the US over race, beauty and jeans.

His inspiration was an ad. Not just any ad. But a promotion for American Eagle jeans featuring a sultry Sydney Sweeney that raises a question as profound as it is unlikely: can the celebration of a blue-eyed, blonde woman be racist?

The suggestion would have been considered weird five years ago. Today, the right and the left celebrate and denounce what they both see as the powerful racial messages emanating from the young woman’s image and a script she was paid to read.

“Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality, and even eye colour,” Sweeney says in one version of the ad. “My genes are blue.”

Turning point

On the right, the wildly popular ad is seen as an overdue reversion to a celebration of a traditional type of beauty that dominated Western culture from the dawn of mass media a century ago to the murder of black man George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020. In a development made possible by the election of a Republican president, the ad marks a shift away from a cultural movement that began with protests against the police and criminal justice and moved through institutions across society including the entertainment industry.

“We are f...ing sick and tired of the nonsense where we are not entitled to celebrate someone who is white and blonde and blue-eyed,” exclaimed ex-Fox television presenter Megyn Kelly, whose blonde highlights, fair skin and skinny frame once epitomised traditional television beauty. “That we have to walk into a room apologetic for those things. This ad is the final declaration than we are done doing that s....”

To reinforce her complaint, Ms Kelly referred to the trend of casting black and brown-skinned actors in roles previously reserved for whites. She cited the choice of black actress Jodie Turner-Smith to play Anne Boleyn, the Queen of England from 1533 to 1536, in a British miniseries. And the first play based on the Harry Potter books cast a black actress, Noma Dumezweni, in the role of Hermione Granger, who was based in part on author JK Rowling, a white woman.

In Australia, 71 per cent of main characters on television dramas in 2023 were Anglo-Celtic, according to Screen Australia.

Zenith

As for Mr Trump, he compared the American Eagle ad with last year’s hugely criticised ad for Jaguar cars featuring androgynous models in avant-garde pink, red and yellow clothing - but no vehicles. Seen as the zenith of the trans-gender movement’s impact on popular culture, Jaguar Land Rover fired its ad agency when sales tanked. The CEO resigned this week.

“That is a total disaster!” Mr Trump said in his Tuesday post on X. “Who wants to buy a Jaguar after looking at that disgraceful ad. Being WOKE is for losers, being Republican is what you want to be.”

(Mr Trump also criticised one of his critics, singer Taylor Swift, who he said was “NO LONGER HOT.”)

News Sweeney registered as a Republican in Florida last June prompted praise from Mr Trump, in turn contributing to a 24 per cent jump in American Eagle’s shares on Monday.

Racism?

Left-wing cultural commentators see barely concealed racism in the ad. The 19th, a liberal media outlet financially supported by Rupert Murdoch’s Democrat-supporting daughter in law, Kathryn Murdoch, argued it echoes the eugenics movement, a pseudo-science used to justify and expand official prejudice in the US, Germany and elsewhere before World War II.

“White women were an integral part of the propaganda, both as symbols of genetic purity referenced by men and as organizers actively working to spread eugenics teachings,” wrote Candice Norwood, a black woman.

The New Yorker magazine, a powerful cultural force on the left, unfavourably compared the American Eagle ad with another for Levi jeans, which showed Beyoncé in a blonde wig undressing to her underwear in a laundromat.

The magazine’s Haitian-American writer Doreen St. Félix also made a Nazi allusion, which has become a common insult on social media. Sweeney “has an adoring legion, the most extreme of whom want to recruit her as a kind of Aryan princess,” she wrote. But “the Negroes, the queers, the hairy feminists” are not threatened by Sweeney’s beauty, because they have their own sex icons.

Those who should fear comparisons with the 27-year-old actress are “cis women,” Ms St. Félix wrote.

Sweeney has not expressed a public view on the controversy, which does not seem to be hurting her career. Her last movie, Echo Valley, came out in June and remains third on the Apple TV+ global movie chart.

But the actress is not what she seems. “The biggest misconception about me is that I am a dumb blonde with big tits,” she said a a TikTok video a year ago. “I’m naturally brunette.”