Reducing women’s rights — in the name of protecting them — is central to Trump’s agenda

A growing chorus of commentators warns that the Trump administration is dragging the country toward authoritarianism. A central feature of President Trump’s efforts to dismantle, or at least degrade, our liberal democracy, is an attack on women’s rights and freedoms.

Authoritarianism – past and present – is paternalistic. It promotes the myth that a nation’s problems can only be solved by a strong man. The strongman’s authority comes from God or genetics or individual genius, but it is, above all, a masculine mandate. In an authoritarian regime, no norms of fairness or compassion can restrain such a leader and the law becomes an instrument of his power.

The elements of democratic life that Americans hold dear – equality before the law, the right to vote, participation in civic life without undue restriction – are targeted by strongmen. First for weakening, and then destruction. We’ve seen this recently in Trump’s confrontations with the judiciary, higher education and the civil service.

The strongman’s authority comes from God or genetics or individual genius, but it is, above all, a masculine mandate.

Authoritarians (and aspiring authoritarians) view women in two ways. First, they are seen as dangerously independent. Women who can decide to bear children, support themselves financially and exercise autonomy through decision-making must be returned to more traditional gender roles. This is done through imposing restrictions, not only on abortion, but health care in general, as well as employment and other pathways to independence. Second, and perhaps paradoxically, women are also seen as uniquely vulnerable and in need of protection – violent protection, if necessary, provided by strong men. To sustain itself, authoritarianism dismantles women’s autonomy. The frequent consequence is that women are confined to domestic roles and at the mercy of male heads of households.

We have seen this play out in history.

The Confederacy of the American South held a noxious idea of white supremacy that went hand in hand with male supremacy. White men enslaved Black women and subjected them to sexual violence while claiming to value white women for their piety, virtue and submissiveness. This ideology was known as the cult of true womanhood and it enabled white male supremacists to oppress all women in the name of protecting some women.

Black men and women were oppressed through this ideology, and white women received only the protections that served white male supremacy. When Trump asserted during the 2024 campaign that he would “protect the women whether they like it or not,” he echoed this ideology. Reducing women’s rights in the name of protecting them is central to Trump’s MAGA agenda and the vision articulated in Project 2025.

We also see this ideology in current authoritarian regimes.

In Hungary, Viktor Orbán speaks of “traditional families” with patriarchal nostalgia. In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğa declares that “a woman is above all else a mother,” collapsing female identity into reproductive function. Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s first female prime minister, embraces the language of nationalism and family values. In the U.S., Trump demeans women, normalizes their degradation and uses misogyny as political currency. Trump’s first presidency was notorious for its misogynistic outbursts: Stormy Daniels was “Horseface,” Mika Brzezinski was “Crazy Mika,” Hillary Clinton was “a nasty woman.” This rhetoric was a notable feature of the last weeks of the campaign for his second term. Trump was found liable for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll and for defaming her by calling her a liar. In the unsealed deposition, it was revealed that he also called her a “nut job” who was "mentally sick."

This convergence of rhetoric is no accident. Authoritarian leaders are reviving and circulating a lexicon of dominance – “real women,” “natural roles,” “motherhood,” “family values” – which they present as benign, even affirming. But through this language, they aim to fix identity in place and turn gender into fate.

Here is a snapshot of how the Trump administration is working on multiple fronts to undermine and control women’s autonomy through its own version of paternalistic authoritarianism.

Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, purged women and men of color from military leadership. He fired the head of the Coast Guard, the first woman to hold this position, as well as the first woman to serve as the highest-ranking officer in the U.S. Navy. He named a single attribute – physical strength – in the absence of all others as a pretext to remove women from combat roles. The White House instituted sex-neutral physical tests for the Army. And to remove information about the history of discrimination, the Naval Academy has purged hundreds of books from its library about race and gender. Hegseth ended the Women, Peace and Security program, overturning bipartisan legislation that Trump signed into law in 2017. The program encouraged women service members to pursue strategic security aims with women overseas (which their male counterparts are not able to do for cultural or religious reasons).

In February, the National Science Foundation began using a list of keywords to comb through active research programs deemed to run afoul of Trump’s executive orders aimed at decimating DEI programs and asserting that there are only two genders. Among the flagged words now guiding the review of current and ongoing research are “women,” “gender,” and “victim.”

The administration is also removing statistics about health, defunding research programs and dismissing review committees on maternal health. They cut funding for a landmark decades-long study of women’s health, before deciding to restore it (following an outcry by scientists and medical researchers). The National Women’s Law Center has tracked the harm to women, girls and LGBTQ+ people in Trump’s first 100 days. It notes that the administration has cut funding for domestic violence nonprofits and NIH grants for research into maternal mortality and domestic violence.

At the same time, the Trump administration is considering ways to encourage women to have more children.

From $1,000 baby bonuses to establishing a White House Faith Office to protect women and children and strengthen marriage and family, the Trump administration promotes a pronatalist agenda. But Trump’s proposed budget cuts to Head Start and SNAP benefits will make economically vulnerable families even less stable. Children will go hungry. And note that they aren’t pursuing solutions such as universal free childcare which supports working women.

Platitudes about protecting women or strengthening families ring hollow in the absence of health research, medical care, education and employment. Play out this agenda, and you’ll see that women in Trump’s vision of America are valued primarily as wombs. For grim evidence of this happening look to Georgia, where a woman who suffered a medical emergency that resulted in her being declared brain dead is being kept alive because she was eight weeks pregnant at the time. Georgia has a 6-week abortion ban and the courts decided that although she is brain dead and the fetus’s prospect of surviving to term is questionable, she must be kept on life support.

Trump needs women to be victims in order to protect them and ample examples from the history of authoritarianism teach us how this story ends.

No one is freer and women pay a heavy price.

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