Sydney Sweeney, the 27-year-old actress who rose to fame with roles in the hit HBO series Euphoria and The White Lotus, isn’t known for making political statements. True, she has signaled support for Black Lives Matter, women’s reproductive rights, and LGBTQ representation in media, but these have been fairly boilerplate statements, sometimes caveated with the reminder that she prefers not to wade into these topics in interviews. It seems that Sweeney is more focused on her work, which makes sense — the entertainment industry has kept her very busy in recent years.
And yet Sweeney has unwittingly become a lightning rod of sorts in the culture wars, an accidental avatar of American pride, or anti-wokeness, or [you fill in the blank], apparently just because she is blonde, blue-eyed, and blessed with ample cleavage. This strange co-opting of someone who is, after all, one conventionally attractive Hollywood star among many, spiked after Sweeney became the face of an American Eagle ad campaign for jeans last month, but it has been around for a good while. Here’s a complete rundown of how we got to this point.
August 2022: MAGA Hat-Gate
Sweeney and her family celebrated her mother’s sixtieth birthday with a hoedown in Idaho in August 2022, with most guests dressed in some kind of cowboy attire. (Sweeney hails from Spokane, Washington, which is just east of the neighboring state.) But in pictures that she and her brother posted to Instagram after the event, one person could be seen wearing a T-shirt that showed an American flag with a blue line, associated with the Blue Lives Matter movement, which functionally opposes Black Lives Matter through support for police. Others wore red MAGA-style hats that said “Make Sixty Great Again.” Liberal fans accused Sweeney of being too cozy with family members who backed Donald Trump, while right-wingers launched into the usual tirades about cancel culture (and entertained the idea that Sweeney might be one of their own).
Sweeney at the time asked that people “please stop making assumptions” but addressed the controversy further the following year. “There were so many misinterpretations,” she said in an interview with Variety. “The people in the pictures weren’t even my family. The people who brought the things that people were upset about were actually my mom’s friends from L.A. who have kids that are walking outside in the Pride parade, and they thought it would be funny to wear because they were coming to Idaho.” Alas, the explanation would do little to distance Sweeney from partisan discourse.
March 2024: Hosting Saturday Night Live
Sweeney had assuredly made it as an A-lister by 2024, coming off the 2023 film Anyone But You, a sleeper hit she not only starred in but co-produced, that was being hailed as a renaissance for the classic rom-com. As is typical for a breakout star, she was invited to host an episode of Saturday Night Live in March, and the sketch where she plays a Hooters waitress raking in a fortune in tips was a foregone conclusion.
While anticipation was high for Sweeney’s appearance on the venerated comedy show, the right’s reaction to a beautiful white woman on their TV screens was altogether bizarre. Columnists wrote thinkpieces with headlines like “Wokeness Is No Match for Sydney Sweeney’s Undeniable Beauty” and “Yes, Sydney Sweeney’s Boobs Are Anti-Woke.” She was also praised for bringing back “real” body positivity. This outpouring of affection apparently all stemmed from Sweeney wearing a tight black dress and smiling when she took the stage at the end of the night to say her thank-yous. If that’s all it takes to defeat wokeness, it couldn’t have been much of a threat.
Last month, clothing retailer American Eagle rolled out a major ad campaign for their fall line of jeans, with Sweeney featuring in a series of commercials that see her accentuating her curves (as almost any fashion model would). One spot included a scripted pun that raised eyebrows: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color,” Sweeney says. “My jeans are blue.” Then the tagline, which appears at the end of every ad: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” In the context of the Trump era, with its mass deportations and appallingly frequent white supremacist rhetoric, the quip about Sweeney’s superior genetics drew criticism from a small group of social media users who heard it as a racist dogwhistle.
The outcry was minimal, however, and most attention was focused — as ever — on Sweeney’s looks. In fact, the supposed “backlash” died out in a day or two, probably because everyone has bigger problems than a potentially tone-deaf denim ad. It was only because elements of the right were invested in the idea of liberals getting “triggered” and “melting down” over the campaign that the media cycle continued into the weeks beyond.
August 2025: Trump and Fox News weigh in
As July led into August, right-wing politicians and media sensed an opportunity to turn the American Eagle commercials into an ongoing issue. “Wow. Now the crazy Left has come out against beautiful women,” Sen. Ted Cruz posted on X. “I’m sure that will poll well….” Also on X, podcaster Megyn Kelly wrote, “I love how the leftist meltdown over the Sydney Sweeney ad has only resulted in a beautiful white blonde girl with blue eyes getting 1000x the exposure for her ‘good genes.’” White House communications manager Steven Cheung mocked an op-ed critical of the ads, posting, “Cancel culture run amok. This warped, moronic, and dense liberal thinking is a big reason why Americans voted the way they did in 2024. They’re tired of this bullshit.“ Vice President J.D. Vance brought up the jeans campaign on the podcast Ruthless, also predicting that the response to it would benefit Republicans. “My political advice to the Democrats is continue to tell everybody who thinks Sydney Sweeney is attractive is a Nazi,” he said. “That appears to be their actual strategy.” (To the contrary, polling suggests that Democrats largely don’t care about the supposed American Eagle controversy.)
Fox News, rather than meaningfully acknowledge the renewed scrutiny President Trump is facing over his relationship with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, found a way to make the “woke mob” vs. Sweeney a headline for days on end, mentioning her at least 766 times in one week (with Epstein earning only 53 mentions). After public records appearing to show that Sweeney is a registered Republican voter in Florida began making the rounds online, Trump fielded a question about her. “She’s a registered Republican?” he asked. “Oh, now I love her ad.” He added, “If Sydney Sweeney is a registered Republican, I think her ad is fantastic.” The next day, he took to Truth Social to post about the actress, deleting and revising the first few drafts of the statement, including one in which he misspelled her name several times. “Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the ‘HOTTEST’ ad out there,” he wrote. “It’s for American Eagle, and the jeans are ‘flying off the shelves.’ Go get ‘em Sydney!” He also bashed Jaguar and Bud Light for “woke” advertisements, as well as Taylor Swift, calling her “NO LONGER HOT” due to her political views and his past attacks on her.
Right-wing social media users meanwhile attempted to manufacture some more outrage by inventing a trend based on Sweeney’s ads. They claimed that college sorority houses were donning denim for dance videos on TikTok that nodded to the campaign. “Sorority sisters with good genes at the University of Oklahoma are getting geared up for rush with some cute and fun country dancing,” one widely followed X user wrote, sharing a clip. “They’re happy, wholesome, and classic America. Nothing is more triggering to leftists.” But the original video makes no mention of the Sweeney spots, nor does the caption. Others made similarly misleading claims about TikToks of sorority sisters dancing, using the phrase “great genes” in their captions when there is no indication that the college students intended to reference Sweeney or American Eagle.
It’s a measure of how far you have to go to extend the life of a right-wing trope when Democrats and leftists aren’t really taking the bait. The challenge is all the greater given that Sweeney shown no interest in being a darling of conservatives and has not encouraged that perception of herself. You can expect plenty of chatter about Sweeney and her good genes in the weeks to come — if Trump is right about anything, it’s that she’s a very popular topic of conversation — but it will all come from one side of our extreme political divide.
