The Unspeakable Misogyny of the Trump Regime

Hatred of women is a weapon and a strategy

One of the reasons we’re in the mess we’re in is because this country fails to face up to its shortcomings. Just as we have never grappled with our deeply embedded racism, we have never acknowledged our misogyny, both prejudices so deep that they are woven into the fabric of who we are in a way that makes it almost impossible to unravel.

There are so many ways in which the Trump regime is using the knee-jerk misogyny of most Americans to continue its assault on women, particularly women of color.

Unemployment for black women rose nearly two percentage points in 2025. Men, on the other hand, joined the labor force at three times the rate of women. During the same time, the Trump regime has dismantled the Women’s Bureau at the Department of Labor, gutted diversity programs, and instructed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission not to prioritize gender discrimination charges. It’s also advanced what the National Women’s Law Center calls a “false and dangerous narrative” that the success of working women constitutes reverse discrimination.

Negatively impacting the economic independence of women is not ancillary to the Trump regimes agenda, it’s a goal. After all, women who are financially dependent are easier to control. The Trump regime, of course, isn’t solely interested in rolling back rights, it wants to rewrite history. MS Now reported last week that Donald signed an executive order declaring the accomplishments of transgender women to be, in his words, “an improper ideology.” He’s also ordered the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum not to recognize transgender women or risk losing its funding. House Republicans pass an amendment banning transgender women from the museum entirely, erasing women like transgender activists Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, and Lynn Conway from the national record.

There is significant overlap between misogyny and homophobia. Donald has signed executive orders that officially recognize only two sexes in the US, male and female; banned transgender people from military service; and outlawed gender affirming care for minors. The corrupt, illegitimate super-majority of the Supreme Court allowed both bans to take effect. Prisons have been allowed to replace hormone therapy with conversion therapy, which as of today, in an eight-to-one ruling has been legitimatized by the Supreme Court in a shocking 8-to-1 ruling thanks to Justices Sotomayor and Kagan. Demonstrating just how comprehensive the assault on LGBTQ+ rights have been, the LGBTQ+ option was eliminated from the national suicide and crisis lifeline.

Hundreds of NIH grants have been cut because they contain the word “gender.” Pam Bandi has directed the FBI to offer cash rewards for the arrest of transgender activists she called domestic terrorists.

The outrageous tactics of the Trump regime aside, it’s really quite simple: Transgender women are women; their rights are women’s rights; their history is women’s history. This is a human rights crisis being perpetuated by our own government against our own citizens.

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According to the World Health Organization, an organization from which Donald withdrew the United States of America on the first day of his second term, about one in three women worldwide have experienced physical or sexual violence in their lifetime Let me repeat that: One in three women has experienced physical or sexual violence during the course of their lifetime. That suggests that there are a lot of men out there who have committed physical and/or sexual violence against women. Many of them have never been and will never be held to account.

It’s likely that more than 33% of all women have been assaulted because of the likelihood of underreporting due to fear, stigma, or the very real risk of retaliation. In recognition of this massive problem, the Violence Against Women Act was passed in 1994. As a result, domestic violence fell by more than 60% over the next three decades. It worked. It saved lives. But the 2026 Republican budget cut funding for the Violence Against Women Act by nearly 30%.

The people currently running our government are hardcore misogynists who do not care about the wellbeing of women. Donald’s Department of Justice has terminated hundreds of grants, representing more than $800 million in support for shelters for victims of domestic violence, domestic violence hotlines, emergency housing, and law enforcement training. New guidelines have stripped funding from organizations serving the most vulnerable among us including transgender and undocumented women.

In this country, 20 people, mostly women, are assaulted by an intimate partner every minute. When survivor’s support systems are weakened, domestic violence homicides increase by up to 26%. That means more women are murdered by their intimate partners because funding has been stripped from the very programs that are designed to prevent such assaults.

Donald, because he’s a vile, unapologetic hater of women, had the audacity, while speaking to religious leaders at the Museum of the Bible, to dismiss domestic violence incidents characterizing them as “a little fight with the wife.” He said:

There’s no crime. They said crime’s down 87%. I said, ‘No, no, no. It’s more than 87%, virtually nothing.’ And much lesser things. Things that take place in the home, they call crime. They’ll do anything they can to find something. If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say, ‘This was a crime.’ see? So now I can’t claim a hundred percent.

“A little fight with the wife,” is not the appropriate way to describe the fact that every day in the United States of America, three women on average are killed by a current or former partner. Only a misogynist who himself is unbothered by the sexually assault or harassment of women would refer to domestic violence as “a little fight,” not worthy of including in crime statistics.

Three women being murdered every day in America by a current or former partner constitutes an epidemic of violence and the Trump regime seems hell-bent on making this problem worse. It is a particularly bitter irony that the man who is simultaneously gutting the Violence Against Women Act and exposing the names of Epstein survivors while claiming he’s protecting women is also the man who was found liable by a jury of his peers for raping E. Jean Carroll.

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The Heritage Foundation, the same organization behind Project 2025, has now released what is being called Project 2026. The updated agenda is to ban abortion pills, weaponize the 150-year-old Comstock Act in order to criminalize sending abortion medication by mail, establish fetal personhood, and strip every federal safeguard protecting reproductive freedom.

Project 20206 also calls for lowering the average age of marriage; encouraging colleges to function less as places of education and more as places for young people to meet future spouses; and proposes removing employer requirements for bachelor’s degrees, arguing that higher education causes women to delay marriage and children.

The Heritage Foundation’s agenda is out in the open, and the organization is deeply embedded within the Trump regime. Donald hired at least 18 Project 2025 contributors to serve in his administration. This is the infiltration of the federal government by an extremist organization with which the Trump regime is completely in line.

What’s so disturbing is that this has been out in the open since Project 2025 was published in the months before the 2024 presidential election. Many of us were shouting from the rooftops that this was the blueprint Donald would follow if he got back into office, but too many people believed him when he said that he had no knowledge of Project 2025. So the question is, do people still believe him now?