Remember when our president attacked a female reporter for asking uncomfortable questions with a casual, honest, “Shut up, pig”?
That was five months ago, a lifetime into the turmoil of the Trump administration, but it was a pivotal moment that not only our president but those who make his policy look at women and their place in society. Hint: No top.
While I have no sympathy or dismay at the fact that Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem – former US attorney general and former Secretary of Homeland Security, respectively – have been given the ax by President Trump in recent days, it should not be lost that this is another “quiet, unleavened” week in a government that continues to be openly hostile to women in power.
“I see a theme,” Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett wrote on social media. “You’re going to throw incompetent women under the bus much faster than incompetent men.”
When democracies decay, and especially when movements like Christian nationalism rise, the decline of women’s equality almost always comes first. Bondi and Noem are part of an erosion in the US that should alert us all, regardless of your gender.
First, the obvious. Good life. Noem seemed to enjoy brutality, and treated his work like a costume party, always robbing cameras with guns and a false intensity as if destroying lives and arresting even children was a game. Never worry about the bad.
Bondi, meanwhile, was always seen as the football team’s favorite third-stringer, vying for the attention of the jock gods around him, whether it meant jockeying for approval, or selling out all the women with his analysis of the Epstein files.
But while Bondi and Noem were apparently incompetent, incompetence has never been a fireable offense for Trump. Just ask Pete Hegseth, whose thoughts on Thor are currently playing an all-encompassing war. Or Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who dismantled American science while popularizing beef tallow and exercising in jeans. Don’t even get me started on Kash Patel.
It is no accident that the top women of the Trump administration are being purged. They were useful in the early days of the empire, when power was consolidated and the shimmers of diversity were useful. But as the sexist and racist nature of the MAGA machine has gained mainstream approval if not acceptance, the need to maintain the appearance of diversity is less and less.
Take, for example, the attacks on Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett after her direct and skeptical questions recently on Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship.
“A woman as a mother is a precious gift, but a woman as a public magistrate is the death of a nation,” wrote right-wing preacher and anti-equality activist Joel Webbon, who is popular on social media.
This is a gentleman from Texas who recently announced, “Women, shut up!” It is indeed true that it is a sin against God for women to have an influence in ruling society.
He’s also part of a group of far-right religious leaders — including a pastor associated with Hegseth — who support eliminating women’s suffrage and replacing it with a single “family” vote with, you guessed it, men.
Bondi and Noem may be the most high-profile examples of how this misbehavior plays out in the real MAGA, but they aren’t the only women being targeted by Trump and his allies this year. It’s a much more organized and subtle push than we give them credit for. Hegseth has even removed women from the military’s senior ranks – he recently removed two women from promotion lists.
RFK Jr. and others, on the other hand, are busy driving women out of science. The Washington Post pointed out that last year at this time, the feds purged women and people of color from science and research review boards at the National Institutes of Health- 38 of the 43 experts fired were women and minorities.
A report released last month also revealed that all these incidents of attacks on universities last year, and the cutting of grants even in areas such as cancer research – had an incredible impact on female scientists. Many of those women scientists, especially young ones, will never recover from those aborted research projects and the possibility of losing jobs in a field that requires results and published work, which means we are looking at a loss of women’s talent in science.
And let’s not forget Renee Nicole Good, who was shot by an ICE officer in Minneapolis who, with Trump’s “calm, pig-like” nonchalance, said “f—ing b—” after he shot her and walked away.
Bondi and Noem aren’t just the misfit criminals the department has shown them to be. They are arrogant.
The Trump administration knows the difference, and so should we.
