Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared a CNN clip in which a pastor from his nominally Christian sect said that women shouldn’t have the right to vote, the 19th Amendment should be “repealed,” and women should “submit” to their husbands. Hegseth’s getting better at cosplaying a powerful man. The flopsweat of Pete’s early days – wandering with lawyers and aides through Senate offices spluttering away the roofie rape charges – is mostly gone. But his eyes are ever aglow with the terror of his imposter syndrome. In his profound insecurity and his utterly unearned global power, Hegseth is a mascot for all Trumpy and MAGA men.
With Hegseth to his right and Attorney General Pam Bondi to his left, Trump announced that National Guard troops are taking charge of “crime prevention” in the nation’s capital. This was an obvious attempt at distracting from the President’s weaponization of the U.S. government for an Epstein cover-up. And that case, as we all know, is about the status of American women.
The elections in 2016 and 2024 signaled the end of a period when women could assume that we were living in an era of steady progress welcomed by many –but not all –Americans. The Dobbs decision set women back medically, but we overlook the knock-on effects politically and culturally. Since Trump’s first election, surveys have found that decreasing numbers of teen boys believe that women and girls deserve equal pay.
On Election Night last year, Nick Fuentes, a neo-Nazi who had dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, tweeted: “Your Body My Choice. Forever.” To slam home the point, the administration arranged for the accused sex trafficker, rapist, “manosphere influencer” brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate to be flown out of Romania, where they were awaiting criminal charges, and into Florida on a private jet.
The achievements of Second Wave feminism, a movement that profoundly challenged eons of patriarchy with the help of the birth control pill, seem to have culminated in the empowerment of a claque of extreme right-wing women serving arguably the rapiest White House in modern history.
These often blonde, conspicuous cross-wearing women – Bondi, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, political strategist Susie Wiles, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Agriculture Secretary and longtime hard-right conservative think tank figure Brooke Rollins, lawyer and media star Jeanine Pirro, profane right wing influencer Laura Loomer, Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, media personality and lawyer Megyn Kelly and of course, mendacity phenom Karoline Leavitt, who stands steely-eyed before the entire world lying to vastly more experienced men and women – are the current de facto standard bearers for empowered American women.
Trump’s appointed eight women to his cabinet -- not a record but significant compared to the two in his first term. All are adept at the psychological and political jiu jitsu of serving a regime led by a convicted sex abuser, with a vice president who has seriously suggested that maybe single women shouldn’t vote. The disenfranchisement of women is just the beginning. Men’s rights cultists, religious leaders, and pandering legislatures fantasize about putting the “lock” back in wedlock, ending no fault divorce.
“Pastor” Doug Wilson is only one of the crackpot Men of God affiliated with Vance and Hegseth who openly proclaim that marital rape is impossible. (The “I do” in the vows constituted full and eternal consent, ladies. “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party,” Wilson has written in one of his books. “ A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts…True authority and true submission are therefore an erotic necessity.”)
The foundational premise of this regressive worldview is that men, not women, are capable of living lives of adventure, mission, and public purpose. It’s an archaic notion originating from the movement’s murkiest id of a brain trust including, on the secular side, the odious Bronze Age Pervert, on the supposedly Christian side, Wilson and his ilk. These men share the view that women’s “natural” qualities design them for domestic, indoor, mothering forms of labor, and are innately incapable of seeking worldly challenge, living with purpose, or practicing self-reliance.
Supporting this creed, the working women of Trumpworld must be simultaneously empowered and hobbled. They would have you believe that although they have babysitters and cooks, and leave the kids with their husbands while they work long hours and rack up frequent flier miles, they are in full agreement with the notion that mothering, bread baking, and serving male carnal needs constitute all of a woman’s primary purpose in life. (In a recent Wall Street Journal article about these women, some claim that “faith” distinguishes them from career women of the left, who they believe “are unhappy.”)
These women and their regime are quantifiably setting women back on too many fronts to list here, and the cognitive dissonance between their real lives and the ideology they serve is mind-boggling. One need only look at before and after photos of every woman over the age of 40 in Trump’s orbit to know that they remake themselves physically to conform to his “smaller bikinis, higher heels” archaic caricature of femininity. Like the nativists descended from immigrants (Stephen Miller, et al) who yank up the ladder behind them, the rock-ribbed ladies of Trumpworld rode feminism to the top of the power structure, only to latch themselves to a project to revert those gains.
The bargain these women make with the sexual assaulter in chief is this: pretend that he and his men are actually protectors of women in exchange for personal gain and access to power. During the last weeks of his 2024 campaign, Trump was explicit on this, in a menacing way. He declared he would be a protector of women “whether the women like it or not.” Of course, the real protection that Americans need is protection against the misogynist MAGAs and the manosphere influencers and loony church men like Pastors Doug Wilson and Joel Webber.
The sole upside of the current assault on our rights is that it must energize a new generation of young women whose upbringing and expectations are profoundly at odds with the regressive aims of this minority. Anyone born after 1970 was raised in a world molded by grandmothers who made epochal change. The societal reset that clicked in half a century ago cannot be so easily erased. In the months and (hopefully not too many) years to come, they will re-learn an old lesson: In the oldest conflict in human history—the war between the sexes—women can never leave the front lines unattended.
Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.
Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow.
