Disney American Princesses (DAPs): On the Kloots Sisters & Trisha Paytas

I don’t feel like I have the right to criticize Disney adults, because as a Taylor Swift fan, it would be like the pot calling the kettle black. Swifties and Disney adults, I’ll venture to say, are after similar things. They relish childlike wonder. It brings them solace to look at the world in binary. And most importantly, they’re nostalgic for things that never existed: Swifties and Disney adults both know the purest version of a fantasy is the one you had when you were younger.

When I evoke these Disney adults, I’m talking about the people who have season passes to the theme parks, the lanyards with collectible pins. Those whose Disney Adultness is founded on their interaction with and experience of the Disney machine; the theme parks, the culture, the commodity; the buying of the dream. Disney adults are happiest at Disney, because it’s the happiest place on earth. And who doesn’t love a theme park!

But there’s another, more pervasive Disney identity floating around, one that is more of a life philosophy than it is about community. I’ve given this identity the name the DISNEY AMERICAN PRINCESS, or DAP. Not all Disney adults are DAPs, but all DAPs are Disney adults. Let me explain: to DAPs, the entire world is a Disney theme park.

Just Cuz: A photo of Taylor Swift dressed as Olaf from Disney’s “Frozen” while performing her 1989 world tour.

You won’t find DAPs at Disneyland or World, not always. To DAPs, life is the theme park: a colorful offering of adventures, food, opportunity, and shopping. DAPs have extraordinary self-confidence, for one reason or another: perhaps they are the daughters of dentists or lawyers or other types of strivers, and were raised with main character energy. Or maybe their DAPness has taken a more aspirational role, a label they grow into… a destination title. Your typical DAP (or DAP-to-be) is extremely optimistic and believes that happiness is the tabula rasa; that the very reason for our existence is to feel those rush of endorphins that come with finding yourself face-to-face with some sort of lovely surprise. DAPs think of themselves as adventurous and fearless: they can suspend reality in favor of how they believe things should look and feel like. They’re annoying- but I’m not saying they’re necessarily bad. (I’d quickly lump Taylor Swift into the DAP category if she weren’t so singularly talented— I’m of the mind that all her frivolity and fancy exist to support the higher power of her songwriting.)

You see a lot of DAPs on the internet because DAPs make great influencers. A following on social media functions as the fabric of their life’s fantasy; maybe it’s both the backdrop and the theme park, and it’s what enables them to pretend, pretend, pretend. DAPs with followers are given opportunities to do paid brand partnerships and pretend some more, creating an ouroboros of attention that we know is not easy to monetize. DAPs are girl bosses, definitely, but their ambition exceeds careerism.

Unless you follow me on Twitter you’ve likely never heard of Anna Kloots. And there’s no reason why you should have. But you’ve probably heard of her sister Amanda, who became famous for her daily Instagram updates when her husband Nick Cordero, a handsome Broadway actor in his 40s, was admitted to the ICU with COVID in the early days of the pandemic. Cordero was in the ICU at Cedars Sinai as Amanda rallied her growing follower count to pray and sing for his recovery via her story updates— sadly, he eventually succumbed to the virus. Amanda was already manifesting fame, it was clear. Before, she’d had a modest but growing fitness brand that centered around her signature jump rope workouts. After Nick’s death, she was offered a daytime TV job as a host for The Talk; she became a contestant on Dancing with the Stars; and she co-wrote the NYT best-selling memoir Live Your Life about Nick’s battle with her sister, Anna. (I will admit: I’ve read the book, and you learn Cordero was kept on life support at Amanda’s request longer than at least one frustrated doctor would have liked. There’s a cynical way to look at it, but I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt that she was praying for a miracle.)

Live Your Life, the memoir Amanda and Anna co-wrote, is anchored around Nick’s COVID, but undoubtedly, the heroes of the story as its written are Amanda and Anna, his never-give-up sunshine soldiers. They recount proudly their family visits to the ICU (having famous friends + a trending Instagram presence granted them special privileges like being able to visit your loved ones IRL, I guess) to blast music and dance around to transform the “dreary and sad” ICU into a dance party. (God bless, but imagine being a doctor and watching this.) That Nick did not leave the hospital alive is genuinely tragic, but you see how delusional this positivity that supersedes reality is; only a Disney miracle could have saved Nick. When it doesn’t, Amanda is granted another miracle instead: fame.

Amanda introduced us to Anna as her temporary roommate; her younger sister who had recently gone through a divorce and had recently moved to Paris. Once she left Amanda’s home of Laurel Canyon for Paris, I did not continue to“follow” on Anna; she did not interest me. Her grid was pure Travel Girl Instagram— real basic stuff. Her in a sundress posing in front of the Eiffel Tower. Another one in front of a castle in Italy. You know the vibes. Caroline Calloway with no self awareness; a girl who takes her role as “content creator” seriously (another term that would perhaps be more apt: “career creator”) and considers this synonymous with “being writer.”

And yet, despite my initial disinterest, I fell down another Kloots hole. Perhaps it was a bit of a hate follow from the beginning, or a spectator follow that quickly pivoted into utter bafflement and, often, disgust. Within days, I found myself addicted to her banal content clearly made for followers I felt she regarded as cultureless, clueless, landlocked fools. In one post, she instructs her followers how to shop at neighborhood markets (marchés) and flea markets (brocantes), as if knowing how to thrift or go to the market were exotic activities only the cultured could understand. In another post, she helps you discern a good croissant from a just OK croissant (good croissants are flaky on the outside). When she goes on paid partnership vacations to places like Greece and Italy, she gives her followers fundamental language “lessons” on her stories (buongiorno = good morning. buonasera = good night). She’s the expert, you know— she explains that she always makes sure she learns how to say “hello and goodbye— at least” in the country she’s visiting. She wants to be regarded as part of a culturally privileged in crowd— really badly.

DAPs write themselves into narratives that already exist, with the goal of arriving at or maintaining a certain status. For Anna, the coveted status is of a Traveled White Woman—an American in Paris— an American in Paris who can pass as Parisian— an American girl from Ohio who, despite the odds, can pass, to her Instagram demographic, as “city chic.” What I see as central to the identity of the DAP is how much they relish in the fact that they have already arrived. (Anna’s memoir My Own Magic comes out this week, in which she details how she learned to live her truth and book her own vacations after her marriage ends. I’ll admit, I’ve read this one too. If a Kloots sister writes something, I will anthropologically study it. In a chapter early on, Anna admits she hates public transit. If you’re a serious person, I don't know how much you want to trust her when it comes to “seeing the world.” Though I’ve never read Eat, Pray, Love… does Elizabeth Gilbert ever get on a city bus, or venture to commute on an underground rail?)

Of course, every label, especially one that I literally made up, must be interrogated. So let’s talk about another, more nonconformist Disney American Princess — Trisha MFing Paytas.

Trisha dressed as Glinda from Wicked (not Disney) on her birthday, holding her daughter Malibu Barbie.

Trisha Paytas has risen through more ranks than most of us can ever imagine rising through. She seems to have been born completely attuned to her DAP status, but was just waiting for people to catch on. I was embarrassingly late to the Trish phenomenon, and only learned who she was after the Queen of England died, because people thought the Queen reincarnated as Trisha Paytas’s unborn baby, whose due date was the Queen’s death. Trisha Paytas, the personality, is as absurd and as inconceivable as the concept of birthing the Queen reincarnated. The video I’ve embedded below, an incredible compilation of every TV show Trisha Paytas has ever been on, has 8 MILLION views, and may just be the best ten minutes of YouTube I’ve literally ever watched.

Born in Riverside, CA and raised between Illinois and SoCal, Trisha started her YouTube account blndsundoll4mj in 2007 and has since amassed almost 1 billion total views. She’s been featured on Ellen as an impressively fast reader, America’s Got Talent as a rapper with a crush on Howard Stern, and My Strange Addiction as a tanning bed addict. (She once came out as a trans man to her followers, too soon after coming out as identifying as a chicken nugget, and it caused controversy. Look, her Wikipedia packs a punch. Just read it.) Trisha has historically no problem subjecting herself to ridicule and humiliation for the sake of entertainment; her effervescence and positivity rarely falter.

A screenshot of a Trisha Paytas TikTok where she’s cosplaying as the princess from Disney’s “Princess and the Frog”

Much has been written about her cult of personality— here’s something interesting from 2017, at a time when Trisha was suffering what she’s since described as a dark era, during her raging pill addiction. She’s been up, she’s been down: you could fall down a hole of Trisha Paytas content, as I have, and you’ll be overwhelmed trying to make sense of it all. Trish is savvy, she’s a provocateur…more than anything, she’s a savant, and her talent is keeping people’s attentions. During the pandemic, her followers were overjoyed to learn Trisha fell in love and, even better, got sober and began taking care of her mental health. 2023 Trish is happily married in LA to her husband Moses Hacmon (whom internet describes as an “Israeli artist” but I’ve yet to figure out his preferred medium), and their daughter, who they named Malibu Barbie. Trisha Paytas is no longer underground — she is currently more famous than she’s ever been.

There’s this one clip of Trisha from her short stint on Celebrity Big Brother UK, where the host tries to slut-shame her for having once accepted $17K to spend the night with a professional athlete. This was back when she worked as an escort. Trisha, explain yourself, her coworker urges her. Unwilling to be bowled over, she says matter-of-factly, right after getting slimed: “I think 17,000 for a night with someone is great. I’m proud of it…I’d have sex for free, so why not get paid for it? He was married, he was an asshole, so I took his money….Nice dick!” Her co-stars are shocked at her self-possession.

If you go to Anna’s Instagram (@annakloots), you’ll notice she is cannot bring herself to pose for a photo in which she is not grasping her new book tightly in her hands. You also might notice that she's moved on from the ex and that her new boyfriend is French; if you go searching, I guarantee you’ll find a caption where she gushes about how he treats her like a princess.

Lucky for us, Trisha also has a book coming out. She says she’s finished writing her own memoir, but that the publishing timeline is TBD. It will be her first book in ten years — if you can believe it, she actually self-published a book ten years ago in 2013 titled The History of My Insanity. (When I tell you I gasped when I found this out!!!!!!) There may be more to explore here about DAP narratives, something to say about the inherent “main character energy” in the DAP archetype. But I think my point’s been made: here we see two very different DAPs getting their “happily ever afters.” We who live in reality know that happily after afters are not real, but DAPs are not trying to tell a new story or break the mold of theirs. All they really want, we know, “is to love and be loved in return.” That’s from Moulin Rouge, but, like Taylor Swift, it’s all the same shit. ✨✨✨