Lena Dunham Says She Saw MAGA’s Rise Coming

“I was experiencing those voices in 2012,” Dunham said of the far-right’s rise. “In the way that there were so many angry, seemingly men and some women, dissecting the show in these incredibly conservative terms.”

By Claire Guinan  |  July 11, 2025 | 12:46pm
Screenshot: 'Girls Rewatch' podcast CelebritiesPolitics
Lena Dunham Says She Saw MAGA’s Rise Coming

Back in 2016, when Donald Trump won and liberals everywhere gasped, Lena Dunham wasn’t surprised. The country’s backslide into barefaced bigotry, far-right conservatism, and Christian nationalism wasn’t sudden to her—she’d seen it festering for years in the Girls’ comments section.

The award-winning HBO series created by and starring Dunham premiered in 2012—four years before that infamous election night. And this week, in a long-awaited appearance on the Girls Rewatch podcast, Dunham reflected on the subtle warning signs she noticed years before the country elected a reality TV star to be president.

“There were so many people who, when the voices of—whatever we want to call it—really alt-right, or MAGA, or conservative voices, Proud Boys or whatever started to rise, and people were like, ‘I’m so shocked by the way people are talking.’ I was like, ‘I’m not,’” she said. “Those voices were in a comment section; I was experiencing those voices in 2012 in the way that there were so many angry, seemingly men and some women dissecting the show in these incredibly conservative terms.”

“Yes, there were people in Brooklyn who found us irritating,” she added, admitting that she understood what they were annoyed about. “I always had a lot more respect for that.” But she said she noticed a more ominous audience tuning in, and they weren’t critiquing the white privilege; they were condemning the show’s very essence.

“There was also a big contingent of conservative people really looking at it as evidence of a sort of moral decrepitude,” she continued, remembering the comment sections filling with harsh attacks on the cast’s bodies as well as the characters’ choices and values.

Apparently, the rest of us were too busy complaining about Dunham at the time to notice the resentment simmering and ideologies festering in the then-ignored corners of the internet—now we have a fascist president and troves of far-right podcasters corrupting your otherwise-OK cousin.

“We had a moment of sexual openness and body positivity, a moment of loosening boundaries, then felt them tighten again,” Dunham added, summing up what it’s felt like to come of age in this century.

Maybe this is one reason why Gen Z mobilized the mass rewatch of the show. (That, and Adam Driver). Even knowing it’s satire, it’s refreshing to see young women bumble around Brooklyn in a world before Roe fell and before the fascist-police-state-of-it-all became impossible to ignore. It’s like looking back on childhood with rose-tinted glasses, not because everything was good, but because you didn’t yet know how bad it could get.

If we’ve learned anything from all this *gestures vaguely at the past 25 years*, it’s that freedom, especially in female form, is always threatening to someone. So if nothing else, maybe this is your sign to rewatch Girls again. If you haven’t already… what are you doing? Do it for cultural preservation. And also Adam Driver. Obviously.

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