Confessions of a ROTUS: What I Learned Playing the White House Receptionist with a God Complex
Ahead of taking her show to Edinburgh Fringe, Leigh Douglas shares her insights.
Written by Leigh Douglas
I was working as a barmaid in a North London pub when Alexandria Occasio-Cortez went seemingly overnight from New York City waitress to US congresswomen. I’m an Irish queer woman who was naturalised as a US citizen at seventeen. I have never lived in New York. My life story is nothing like AOC’s. But when she won her seat in congress, it felt like a victory for “us.” She speaks about the things I care about. She does it authentically, with passion. Her election felt like the political moment of my generation. I feel about AOC the way my Irish grandparents felt about JFK. She gave my work in the service industry dignity by showing that young women in minimum wage jobs are smart, capable and vital to society. It is the only time I have immediately related to an individual in global politics, until Cassidy Hutchinson.
She was wearing a suffragette white blazer, only twenty-six years old, standing alone in a US senate committee hearing taking the oath. I watched from my flat in London as a woman my own age stood against the might of MAGA and her ex-boss, Donald Trump. The now famous image of Cassidy Hutchinson raising her right hand before giving her landmark testimony in the January 6th hearings will stay with me forever. This was the image that drew me into the world of the glamorous young female foot soldiers of MAGA. I started looking into their stories and what happens to these women when Trump world chews them up and spits them back out.
The seed of my new show, ROTUS: Receptionist of the United States, was planted by Cassidy Hutchinson. I read her book, Enough, cover to cover twice. There seemed such urgency to her story knowing she that wrote the book in hiding. Such were the threats on her life after she betrayed Trump. I read it, not to understand where she found the courage. I know young women to be brave. I needed to know what could attract a smart, young woman to conservatism in the first place.
Cassidy Hutchinson looks like the kind of girl I could be friends with. In truth, the women around me lean more witchy coven than blow-dries and pantyhose. Yet, in another life, Cassidy Hutchinson might have been the kind of girl I befriended in a smoking area. She has the open, warm demeanour of the kind of girl you’d feel safe to approach at a party where you don’t know anyone. Yet here she was, on the world stage, standing up to one of the most powerful men in the world. Now, I should mention, Cassidy is still a proud conservative. She describes herself as a “Ronald Reagan Republican.” As a queer woman, I find this tough to stomach. Reagan was the president to preside over the AIDS crises. He did nothing. I cannot support the reverence now given to his presidency by Republicans looking to mark themselves out as moderates. I find it repugnant. Nancy Reagan left her friend, Rock Hudson to die and Cassidy Hutchinson was abandoned in the face of violent threats because she wanted to tell the truth about January 6th. At least Cassidy lived to tell the tale.
Two years after the January 6th hearings, I watched an even younger woman herald Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 US presidential election. Karoline Leavitt cut a striking figure as Trump Campaign Press Secretary. Her glossy lips pursed in a slight pout broke into a wide Miss America smile as she called Donald Trump’s victory “the greatest comeback in political history.”
Speaking with Newsmax in January 2024, Karoline Leavitt was happy to dismiss Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony against Donald Trump and his previous administration as “spewing these lies that are right out of the Democrat’s playbook.”
Karoline Leavitt was an Assistant Press Secretary in the first Trump administration. In that role, she worked alongside Sarah Matthews, then Deputy Press Secretary. Sarah Matthews, like Cassidy Hutchinson, testified against Donald Trump in the January 6th committee hearings, saying of her former boss, “I lost all my faith in him that day.”
Karoline Leavitt called both her former colleagues “infuriating” and called their warnings about a second Trump term “pitiful.” Speaking collectively of the three most prominent women to break with Trump after January 6th, Cassidy Hutchinson, Sarah Matthews and former White House Communications Director, Alyssa Farah, Karoline Leavitt said, “These are three women who… went from Trump supporters to Trump haters very quickly because they learned that's the fastest way to get your face on television and sell crappy books these days.”
Alyssa Farah, the eldest of this group was born in 1989, the same year as Taylor Swift. Sarah Matthews was born in 1995, Cassidy Hutchinson in 1996. What you learn when you look at how White House Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt speaks about these women is that while the borders of Trump world are more porous for Trump’s older, male cronies, young women once cast out, are cast out forever. Old men are given grace to return to Trump land after a transgression. No such forgiveness is available to young women.
Karoline Leavitt was born in 1997. She is Gen Z. It has always been striking to me that she could vilify her former colleagues with her full chest without a fear that the same fate will not one day come to her. Her language regarding her former colleagues reeks of girl-on-girl crime. Yet, there are no prominent women of colour, queer women or gender non-conforming people in the present Trump white house. Long gone is Omarosa Manigault Newman, the most senior black woman in Trump’s first administration. She was unceremoniously thrown out of Trump world in 2018. Karoline Leavitt seemingly has not yet learned the lesson that when a scapegoat must be found or a lamb must be sacrificed on the altar of Trumpism, they always choose the young woman. She might hate women, but MAGA hates them more.
In ‘ROTUS: Receptionist of the United States’, queer Irish-American comedian Leigh Douglas plays Chastity Quirke – a rising Republican aide whose faith in the system begins to crack.
Blending political satire, theatre and stand-up, the show explores the role of conservative women in upholding patriarchal power.
Inspired by real-life figures like Cassidy Hutchinson (the former aide to President Trump’s White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who testified against the president regarding the January 6th Capitol attack) and Alyssa Farah (Trump’s former assistant).ROTUS is a sharp, darkly funny portrait of loyalty, ambition, and the courage to break ranks.
Dates: 30th July - 24th August
Venue: Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose (Snug)
Tickets: www.gildedballoon.co.uk
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