Conservative commentator Charlie Sykes says the Trump administration is having a "Marie Antoinette" moment — pushing "tone-deaf" messaging that clashes with the economic pain felt by many of the president's own voters. The comparison invokes the French queen whose reputed "let them eat cake" indifference to the hungry made her name a lasting symbol of rulers detached from everyday hardship.

Sykes, a longtime GOP insider, noted that even MAGA loyalists were put off by a weekend post from White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino: an AI-generated video showing him alongside Eric Trump and Laura Trump popping bottles of champagne and celebrating as golden confetti rained from above.

"Marie Antoinette, who lost her head over this sort of thing, would have blushed," Sykes wrote in a column on his Substack. "Even right-wing influencers were gobsmacked by the crassness of the thing."

Among them was conservative activist Carrie Prejean Boller. "You really have no shame, do you?" she wrote. "Many Americans can't afford groceries, gas or their mortgage payment, and you post a tone-deaf AI video of you and your buddies partying at the People's House."

Another self-proclaimed Trump voter account voiced similar frustration: "Wow... This is really going to resonate with everyday Americans. They are so out of touch. It's astonishing."

That dynamic sits at the center of Sykes's column: the sharpest criticism he cites comes from inside the president's own coalition — the voters most exposed to the grocery, gas and mortgage costs Boller named.

A wider pattern

According to Sykes, the episode fits a broader trend in which the Republican Party has abandoned all sense of "shame" and "virtue" under the influence of President Donald Trump. He pointed to other examples, including Trump's use of taxpayer dollars to pay for an "unhinged new MAGA ad," a Trump loyalist-turned-ambassador to Greece boasting about the engineered collapse of another government, and a MAGA lawmaker taking to the Senate floor to freak out over "furries." All of it, he argued, forms part of the GOP's abandonment of the "morality" that the framers of the Constitution asserted lay at the heart of American government.

'Character mattered'

"Until recently," Sykes wrote, "it wasn't a matter of partisan dispute that character mattered — and that it mattered a great deal. This is not to say that we were always a 'Republic of Virtue,' because our polity has been filled with knaves, fools and crooks. But, at least until recently, we embraced the pretense that things like honesty and decency mattered. There were guardrails that held the grifters accountable; there were consequences for corruption —, moral and political. Many of the scandals of the past now seem quaint, but at one time we took them very seriously. They were followed by disgrace, indictment, defeat, ostracism, shame and impeachment. But then the folks who thought that 'Character Mattered' changed their minds and their stripes. Cynicism is the handmaiden of corruption, because it insists that everyone and everything is corrupt; and therefore, appeals to character are hypocritical eyewash and mere pious posturing. Demands to support the 'Lesser Evil' and 'Whataboutism' crowded out arguments about character and virtue."

As the Trump administration and its allies "riot and exult in their grift," Sykes concluded, "the Age of Shame feels like ancient history. The devolution culminated with Trump."