In November, RuPaul tweeted that he was “finding it hard to carry on ‘business as usual’ after America got a giant swastika tattooed on her forehead,” and he told New York magazine’s Vulture website that Donald Trump’s win felt “like the death of America.” By the time I met up with him in March, right before the premiere party for Drag Race’s ninth season, his mood had improved considerably, but his focus was still on the political scene. “My optimism is back. I understand what it is we must do,” he said. “We’re going to mobilize young people who have never been mobilized, through our love of music, our love of love, our love of bright colors.”

Such mobilization would seem to already be in progress, thanks to Drag Race. Tuning in is like entering a fluorescent cocoon of camp, where men who perform as women battle in a wild reimagining of Project Runway. Launched on Logo, Viacom’s queer-focused network, in 2009, the show is ubiquitous in many gay-friendly circles; this spring, it moved to VH1, in a bid to bring drag to a wider audience.

The moment seems ripe for it. An ad for Season 9 features the tagline “Drastic times call for dragtastic measures” and RuPaul saying, “We need America’s next drag superstar now more than ever”—the implication being that cross-dressing has taken on a special charge under Trump. Which isn’t to say the show wasn’t socially engaged before. In the Obama era, Drag Race cheered on gay rights and reveled in gender identity’s vagaries just as gay rights were making significant gains and many Americans were beginning to grapple in earnest with transgender people’s existence. Still, the rejection of a woman president in favor of a man who reportedly prefers his female staffers to “dress like women” and whose supporters rail against “cucks” and “the pussification of America” places drag in a more obviously defiant context: The pussification of America—the freedom of men to partake in that which society has marked as feminine and vice versa—is exactly what RuPaul wants.

The early months of the Trump presidency have seen drag flourish as a form of political critique. The signature pop-culture send-up of the administration has come not from Alec Baldwin’s pursed-lip Trump on Saturday Night Live but from Melissa McCarthy’s wild-eyed Sean Spicer—a parody of macho huffiness that reportedly infuriated Trump because, a source told Politico, he “doesn’t like his people to look weak.” This reaction led some critics to call for SNL to drag up the entire administration; Kate McKinnon has since portrayed Jeff Sessions, and Rosie O’Donnell has offered to play Steve Bannon. Underscoring the sense of gender panic in Trumpland, one of early 2017’s defining memes came when a conservative Twitter user added the words “This is the future liberals want” above a picture of a niqab-clad woman and a drag queen—two bogeyladies of the culture wars—sitting comfortably on one New York City subway bench. The fact that for many liberals this indeed was a perfectly lovely vision prompted much hilarity; one of Drag Race’s stars, a deranged-Russian-prostitute character named Katya Zamolodchikova, tweeted the same caption with a photo of herself crouching grotesquely in a green bodysuit and Birkenstocks.