How Far Will 8 Years of Trump Set Back American Women?
The president and his cronies are committed to rolling progress back to the Stone Age. The effects could outlast his second term.
For years, I’ve resisted the idea that feminism was in retreat. Sure, there are always trend stories to be written about backlash fads—“trad wives,” for instance, the latest variation on women who achieve fame and fortune by telling other women to stay at home. But I always thought women’s liberation was unstoppable, however slow the progress might seem at any given moment. Women are too essential to the modern economy to park them back in the kitchen. Look at how far women have come in education, political representation, the mainstreaming of once marginal and radical feminist views. Look at how many women can support themselves and the effect of that on marriage. Look at #MeToo. Right. Look at #MeToo. Oh, brother.
We now have an adjudicated sexual abuser, self-professed pussy grabber, and misogynist in chief as president, elected by the votes of men, including supposedly more liberal young men. Among his many unqualified cabinet appointments are Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services—each of them accused of sexual assault. (Matt Gaetz, Trump’s first pick for attorney general despite being investigated for sexual misconduct and drug use, stepped aside.)
Admittedly, their personal misdeeds are dwarfed by their terrible stands on the issues before them: Hegseth has blamed “woke” policies for making the military “effeminate” and opposes many military roles for women. In February, he fired the only female and Black members of the joint chiefs of staff. Trans people, whom Biden permitted back in the military after they were banned by Trump during his first presidency, are on uncertain grounds, with federal judges staying an executive order to bar them again. Following Hegseth’s DEI order, Arlington National Cemetery removed from its website pages about women, African American, and Puerto Rican soldiers. Other military websites removed information about Navajo Code Talkers.
As for RFK Jr., in his congressional hearing, this supposedly pro-choice candidate for the nation’s highest healthcare post deplored abortion (“Every abortion is a tragedy”) and refused to say he would protect emergency abortions and the legality of mifepristone, the abortion pill. (And, in fact, his appointment means that he can attempt to revoke FDA approval of abortion pills.) He refused to say that the HPV vaccine was safe, even though it has drastically lowered the rate of cervical cancer, instead claiming that it was “dangerous and defective” and has actually raised the rate of the disease. If parents follow his advice (“No loving parents would allow their daughter to receive this vaccine”), this deadly cancer will eventually kill many women—maybe even more than the unvaccinated children who will die from measles.
During the campaign, Trump said that he would protect women, “whether the women like it or not.” What does that strangely double-edged stance mean in practice? Millions of dollars in funding for domestic violence programs have been frozen. Unelected Bureaucrat in Chief Elon Musk is slashing staff at Head Start and the Office of Child Care. That doesn’t sound like protection to me. Trump’s executive orders against “DEI” have directly harmed the rights of millions of women and non-white people—basically everyone but white men—everywhere from federal agencies to college campuses. With a stroke of his pen, rules and regulations intended to promote fairness for long-disadvantaged groups are gone, and the federal workers charged with overseeing DEI policies are gone as well.
But it’s not just policies intended to benefit women that are being abolished. Even those that are neutral on their face can affect women more. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, aka food stamps, is on the chopping block—the majority of adult recipients are female, while 40 percent of all the beneficiaries are children. And Trump’s attempt to limit or abolish the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid will directly harm women, who are again the majority of recipients. The ACA also covers birth control, no-copay gynecological and preventive care, and preexisting conditions like, um, pregnancy.
Internationally, things are even more dire. USAID programs that save millions of lives, mostly women and children in poor countries, have been ended with no warning. The global gag rule, which banned groups that receive US funds from so much as mentioning abortion, is back.
Well, you can see why: equality, gender, and women are now on a government blacklist of some 250 words that will get your grants canceled and your scientific research defunded—along with racism, Black, LGBT, and disabled. (Men is OK.)
These developments are just a sample of the threats to the enormous progress women have made in the past 60 years. It’s as if since the day Trump took office, all the different troops of misogyny have come together in a single Monstrous Regiment of Men. There’s the pronatalist Christian conservatism of JD Vance and Russell Vought, author of Project 2025 and now head of the Office of Management and Budget. There’s Christopher Rufo, who is waging war on universities, with their gender studies programs and women presidents. There’s the manosphere, where young men on the Internet flock to hear that women have all the power, and which includes Trump’s new best friend, Andrew Tate, who tells them that women are mindless sex dolls to be beaten and prostituted. There’s Musk, the eugenicist with 14 children and who knows how many baby mamas and nannies.
And presiding over it all is Trump himself, who manages to keep all these contradictory forces happy. Think about it: You never hear the Christian right-wingers attack the manospherians as would-be libertines who need to find Jesus and a wife. You never hear JD Vance express doubts about Musk’s family values. They can fight about that later. Right now, they’ve got bigger fish to fry: Making America Guyland Again.
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In solidarity,
The Editors
The Nation
