Last week, a federal judgeblockedthe justice department from canceling $3.2m in federal grants to the American Bar Association (ABA). The court agreed with the ABA’sclaimthat the administration was retaliating against it for taking public stances against Donald Trump.
But how had the US president retaliated? Which grants had he clawed back? Those supporting programs that train lawyers to defend victims of domestic and sexual violence.
It was just one of Trump’s many acts of aggression against perceived enemies that just happen to – or quite deliberately – target women.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, after the release of the “grab ’em by the pussy” tape,Vox’s Libby Nelson noted that there was something fundamentally different about Trump’s sexism from the sexism of his predecessors. “Usually, the critique of Republican candidates has been based on policy – healthcare access and abortion rights – or on attitudes heavily influenced by religion,” she wrote. But “Trump’s anti-feminism owes more to the gleeful vulgarity and implicit threats of violence of 4chan than the traditional debate over what a woman’s role should be in the public square.”
Trump II is both a personal and a political misogynist – a chimera with the soul of a snake and the brains of a policy wonk, transplanted from the authors of the Heritage Foundation’sProject 2025.
The widest target of Trump’s aggression is the universe of people capable of having babies. Four days after the inauguration, his administrationdirectedthe justice department’s civil rights division to cease enforcing the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (Face) Act, which prohibits harassment or blockage of patients entering abortion clinics. His administration dismissed three ongoing cases,pardoned23 convicted violators of the law, and limited future prosecutions to “cases presenting significant aggravating factors, such as death, serious bodily harm, or serious property damage”.
In March, he beganwithholding tens of millionsof dollars from Title X, the only federal program supporting reproductive healthcare. The move was not explicitly anti-abortion – the Hyde Amendment banned federal funding for abortion 50 years ago – but it was surely aimed at pleasing religious fundamentalists who oppose all interference with “natural” baby-making. Lots of providers, including some Planned Parenthood affiliates, immediately collapsed, leaving millions of people with no family planning, cancer screening or prenatal services. Now, having failed repeatedly to defund Planned Parenthood through legislation, Republicans are trying tohide the dirty deed in the budget. And like much of the “waste, fraud, and abuse” targeted by the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), these cuts would cost taxpayers far more than they would save: according to theCongressional Budget Office, the cost will be $300m over the next 10 years in unwanted births and shifts of reproductive services to other providers.
Trump president isn’t sparing mothers who want to be mothers, either. A week ago, funding to study maternal mortality was rescinded and most of the workers who monitor and improve maternal and child health at the Centers for Disease Control and Preventionwere placed on leave. The cuts came just after researchers at the National Institutes of Health published apaperdocumenting a huge rise in mothers’ deaths in childbirth or within a year afterward, most notably among Native American and Black women; the authors urged the government to make combatting these deaths “an urgent public health priority”.
Where women’s bodies are now subject to harm by intentional neglect, they will also be more vulnerable to harm by violence. Before his inauguration, Trump called for the execution ofrapists. A few months later, the justice departmentsuspended grant applicationsfrom non-profits providing emergency shelter, legal assistance, and crisis services to victims of domestic and sexual violence under the Violence Against Women Act. The agencies were caught promoting “woke” agendas – evident from the word “gender”, as in “gender-based violence”, in their mission statements. Thegrant program appears to be back upon the justice department website, but no one knows for how long.
In late April, the administrationzeroed out all fundingfor training, auditing, data collection and victim support under the Prison Rape Elimination Act (Prea), which Congress passed unanimously in 2003. Prea does not protect migrants in detention, but the Department of Homeland Security was nevertheless subject to oversight, and that included investigating sexual abuse by Ice employees. Not any more. In spite ofthousands of complaintsof sexual violence against detained women and children, the Trump administrationclosed the department’s three watchdog agencies, including the offices through which detainees could lodge complaints.
As part of its elimination of anything suggestive of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), the administrationhaltedthe military’s sexual assault prevention training. The defense department reported in 2023 that nearly a quarter of active-duty women were subject to sexual harassment – and they are just the ones who risked coming forward.
The policies that smash the legal bulwarks against sexual violence and those that put pregnant people’s lives at risk make for the most compelling subject lines on fundraising emails from advocates for women, people of color and other legally protected classes hardest.
But the disproportionate harm these folks are suffering from the decimation of the federal workforce by Doge is possibly most consequential, because it may not be reversible.Women and Black peopleare more likely to work in government jobs than in the private sector; a recent McKinseyanalysisfound that women, particularly women of color, are promoted at higher rates in public institutions than in private corporations. But government jobs also provide union representation, job security, pensions and other benefits that lift people of color into the middle class and allow them to accumulate the property and wealth denied them since slavery – benefits that do not accrue to home health aides, chambermaids and workers in the other low-paid, precarious occupations where women and people of color predominate.
“For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,”vowedcandidate Trump at the Conservative Political Action Conference early in 2023. But it is Trump himself who feels most wronged and betrayed, with women – the pussy-hatted protesters who overran Washington on the second day of his first administration, the sex worker Stormy Daniels, who publicly poked fun at his self-celebrated endowment, the magazine writer E Jean Carroll, awardedtens of millionsof dollars in damages for his sexual assault and defamation – perhaps the greatest wrongdoers and traitors.Even Melaniais no longer pretending to like him.
Like his woman-hating followers, this man, who has used his wealth and his body to impose his will on women, feels sorely victimized by them. Now he has more power than any other man in the world to exact his revenge.
Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept and the author of five books. Her Substack, Today in Fascism, is atjudithlevine.substack.com