It’s been a tough couple of months for women officials in Washington — or, more accurately, in Trumpland. In early March (Women’s History Month, by the way), in a Truth Social post, the president fired Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, the second woman ever to hold that title. Weeks later, also in a social media post, he fired Attorney General Pam Bondi, the third woman ever to serve as head of the Department of Justice.
While in the first year of his first presidency, Trump 1.0 had fired numerous officials, this time around, Bondi and Noem, who ran the two largest law enforcement agencies in the country, were the first cabinet officials to be dismissed. Both — no surprise — were replaced by men. And just as I was writing this piece, Trump removed another female cabinet official, Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer. Meanwhile, speculation lingers about the possible firing of a fourth female cabinet member, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the second woman to hold that job. And whether or not Gabbard is formally dismissed, she has recently been effectively sidelined, as her absence from White House meetings on the war in Iran suggests.
Notably, Noem, Bondi, Chavez-DeRemer, and Gabbard are, of course, all women. As Jasmine Crockett, a Democratic House of Representatives member from Texas, recently tweeted, “Well… first it was Kristi Noem, now it’s Pam Bondi… it would be too much like right that Pete [Hegseth] be next. I see a theme. He [Trump] will throw the incompetent women under the bus a lot faster than the incompetent men.”
Equal Opportunity Failure
Crockett has a point. Pete Hegseth’s leadership at the Department of Defense (now all too appropriately retitled the Department of War) has erased time-honored rules and norms in staggering ways. He has, for instance, drastically reduced media access to the Pentagon, purged employees who disagreed with him, as well as those he deemed to be DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) appointees, and is now exerting his leadership in a war against Iran for which the exit strategy seems elusive at best, despite his assurance that, as the Guardian reported, “the U.S. would not get bogged down in the conflict.” The U.S. operation, he insisted, was not a “democracy-building exercise,” adding that ‘this is not Iraq. This is not endless.’”
Hegseth’s behavior has led Arizona Democratic Representative Yassamin Ansari to file articles of impeachment against him on six charges. They include the commission of war crimes, especially the killing of at least 165 people, including many children, at a girls’ primary school in Iran hit by a U.S. missile; negligence with sensitive information; and conducting an unauthorized war without congressional approval. In the Senate, Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren has followed up with a letter to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins asking for an investigation into whether Hegseth attempted to profit from his financial investments in the run-up to the war in Iran.
Crockett might just as easily have highlighted the wayward behavior of FBI Director Kash Patel, recently exposed in a piece in The Atlantic describing “excessive drinking” that interfered with his job (an article over which Patel immediately filed suit for $250 million in damages), or the trashing of health standards by Health and Human Resources Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
But whatever the future of those reprehensible men in cabinet positions, it’s unfortunately difficult to defend either Bondi or Noem for their actions while in office. Like their male counterparts, both defiantly tossed professionalism and decency to the winds. Under Noem, with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) leading the way, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was weaponized and transformed into President Trump’s version of a homeland militia. It’s hardly a stretch to make the comparison to Hitler’s Brownshirts.
So far, in Trump’s second term in office, ICE has terrorized schools and businesses, while cruelly imprisoning migrants without due process of any sort. It has held children in detention centers under abhorrent conditions, attacked peaceful protesters, and killed citizens on the streets of America. Worse yet, Noem appropriated tens of millions of dollars to cover the costs of a pro-ICE ad featuring herself riding a horse in front of Mount Rushmore saying, “Break Our Laws, We’ll Punish You.” (Nor should we imagine that things will get any better without her.)
Bondi’s ouster followed failures of a different order — namely, her stumbling, wildly inept efforts to fulfill Trump’s agenda. She proved unable even to make the case of Trump pal Jeffrey Epstein go away, while what she had to say when releasing documents related to him led to accusations that her statements were riddled with falsehoods. Meanwhile, prosecutions under her watch of federal prosecutor Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey, high-priority items for the president, fell apart.
And when called before Congress to explain herself, her rank lack of civility resembled the behavior of a spoiled teenager berating her teacher, knowing that, since her parents wielded power over the school, she should fear no reprisals. Under Bondi, the sacrosanct mission of the Department of Justice as an agency independent of the White House was summarily tossed aside (as the roof-to-ground-floor Trump banner that hung from its office building demonstrated).
Female Purges
Focusing on Noem and Bondi, however, misses the larger point. This first year of Trump 2.0 has seen women, one after another, summarily gone from their posts (some fired, some resigning) as part of a larger DEI purge. As I pointed out in a TomDispatch piece in January, the military has led the way with a full-scale attack on women. And that trend started on the administration’s very first day in office when Trump removed Linda Fagan, the first female commandant of the Coast Guard.
Fagan was, in fact, the first woman ever to serve as a military service chief and, among other things, she had exposed “Operation Fouled Anchor,” a previously covered-up investigation into sexual harassment and assault in the Coast Guard. Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead the Navy, was fired as well. Both have now — no surprise — been replaced by men. As it stands, there are no longer any four-star women generals in the military. And only this month, we learned that Secretary of War Hegseth had reportedly removed two women from a promotion list to become one-star Army generals.
Outside of the Department of Defense, the resignations or firings of women in leadership positions have abounded across agencies ranging from the National Labor Relations Board to the Federal Trade Commission and the CDC.
This widespread purge of women stands in stark contrast to their presence in office during the Biden years. Under President Joe Biden, women held just under 50% of all cabinet or cabinet-level positions. And let’s not forget Kamala Harris, the first female vice-president in American history. It’s worth noting as well that, under Biden, the Deputy Attorney General and the Deputy Secretary of Defense were both women.
Trump is not unmindful of those statistics. Last year, he boasted about the presence of eight women among his 24 cabinet officers, or a third of his cabinet. As Business Insider reports, he was “thrilled to say that we have more women in our Cabinet than any Republican president in the history of our country.” Following the removal of Noem, Bondi, and Chavez-DeRemer, however, women occupy just over one-fifth of the cabinet positions — admittedly an improvement on his first term when, after two years of resignations and firings, women held only 13% of all cabinet-level positions.)
Project 2025
It’s worth noting that the path to the current backlash against women, including all the purges and punishments we’re now witnessing in real time, didn’t come about by mere happenstance. In the run-up to the 2024 election, the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation published a Project 2025 report entitled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, a 900-plus page blueprint for overhauling the federal bureaucracy. It called for gutting DEI programs, eliminating and reducing the size of any offices that didn’t serve a conservative agenda, and enhancing the powers of the president. Among its many recommendations, Project 2025 touted an anti-female message, including removing “gender equality” language from government websites, emphasizing “family planning,” and recommending limitations on access to contraception and cuts to federal funding for abortions.
Although Trump repeatedly distanced himself from Project 2025, many of its recommended policies have indeed become our new reality, including matters affecting women. In the first months of Trump’s second term, images of women, as well as persons of color and LGBTQ+ individuals, were systematically erased from government websites. So, too, protections for women’s health were tossed to the winds. As the abortion rights group Reproductive Freedom for All has reported, as of January 2026, “53% of [Project 2025’s] policies attacking reproductive freedom are completed or in progress.”
And now, there is a brand-new Heritage Foundation report devoted to the need to counter the declining birth rate and the fragility of the American family. “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 20 Years” calls for the restructuring of incentives to promote childbearing and “revive the institution of marriage.” Signaling its message, the report makes the case for privileging marriage and children over career advancement and less traditional family arrangements caused by divorce and single-parenthood. While the report underscores the family roles incumbent upon both men and women, the fact is that reforms aimed at incentivizing childbearing will fall primarily on women, while those aimed at privileging childrearing over career choices would likely fall most heavily on women as well.
MS NOW’s Ali Velshi and University of Massachusetts professor Amel Ahmed summed up the report well, pointing out that its overall takeaway is: “the freedoms fought [for] and won by America’s women aren’t progress; they are the problem.”
Of course, in the era of Donald Trump, none of this should come as a surprise, not when you consider the histories of the men who are now running the show: a president who, in addition to once touting the fact that he could “grab them by the pussy,” has been convicted in E. Jean Carroll’s civil suit over accusations of sexual abuse and defamation to the tune of $83.3 million in damages, a decision upheld by an appellate court; a secretary of war, whose earlier leadership of Concerned Veterans for America led to a report about the mistreatment of women during his time at the helm, and who was accused of sexual assault, leading to a civil suit in which he reportedly paid out damages to his 17-year old victim. And let’s not forget that Trump’s first nominee for Attorney General, Matt Gaetz, withdrew his name from consideration under a cloud of accusations of wrongful behavior, including sexual misconduct. Not to mention the shadow cast by the number of individuals within the current administration whose names are said to appear in the Epstein files. While no formal charges of sexual misconduct have been issued against them, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is reportedly being pressured to resign over his alleged ties to Epstein.
A Future Government Without Women?
It’s hard to predict which women will come under the axe from Trump and crew in the coming months. But the onslaught has understandably led women from both sides of the political spectrum to sound the alarm. Months before she announced her resignation from Congress, former Trump supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene had already expressed her own misgivings about the misogyny of the Republican leaders in Congress.
When Trump rescinded New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s nomination to be the U.S. Representative to the United Nations and replaced her with Michael Waltz (who had embarrassed himself by adding a reporter to a private Signal chat about possible future strikes against the Houthis in Yemen), Greene saw it as a sign of a general trend of sidelining women. She summed it up as a case where Stefanik “gets shafted,” while Waltz “gets rewarded.” For Greene, it was proof of an overwhelming Trump administration mood of: “She’s a woman, so it was OK to do that to her somehow.”
Greene’s dissatisfaction wasn’t just over Stefanik but over the general trend that has led to only one Republican woman chairing a committee in Congress. Notably, alongside Greene, Republican representatives Nancy Mace and Laurent Boebert signed a petition pressuring the Department of Justice to release information on the Epstein files.
The signs are everywhere. Expectations are disappearing that women will hold leadership positions inside the Trump administration or in the halls of Congress (unless the Democrats win decisively in November). If you didn’t realize it before, you really can’t hide from it now. The attack on diversity in government has become pervasive and (at least as yet) is undeterred, targeting with abandon females, as well as people of color, immigrants, and critics of the president. In other words, the fate of women leaders should provide us with an insight, however dispiriting, into just how quickly the values and assumptions that guided this nation’s progress in matters of race, gender, and ethnicity for decades have disappeared.
What once amounted to progress is indeed now seen as the problem. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the exorcising of women from the halls of government.
This article was originally published by TomDispatch; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above. America’s Un-Christian Autocracy
Image by The White House/Wikimediacommons, in public domain
The intersection of religion and politics is a sensitive realm, but the global conversation has undeniably arrived there. The recent conflict between the Pope and the US President was not a personal tiff or a celebrity feud. Fundamental principles of 21st Century authoritarianism drive explicit rejections of core Christian beliefs. Specific actions of Donald Trump that are otherwise difficult to understand fit well with these rejections. One can draw a straight line from doctrine to apostasy to behavior.
According to the philosophical godfather of 21st Century dictatorship, Carl Schmitt, politics is about the distinction of friend versus enemy, and “The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism.” He maintains this is not about mere competitors, for “the antagonist intends to negate his opponent’s way of life…” Friend and enemy “refer to the real possibility of physical killing.” This enmity is present for any group involved in politics and, implicitly, lack of intent to kill makes one politically nonexistent. (p. 26-33, Concept of the Political)
Not shrinking from the implications for Christianity, Schmitt asserts that when Jesus told his followers to love and pray for their enemies (Matthew 5:44 and Luke 6:27) he did not mean political enemies. This might pass for ordinary philosophical hairsplitting, except that the tradition includes a fairly decisive illustration of the intended meaning. Jesus is tortured to death by a foreign empire and yet, at the moment of his death, prays forgiveness for executioners who have no personal reason to kill him. Schmitt falsifies the teachings of Jesus to excuse his own concept of politics as murder delayed.
Drawing the line across to the actions of today, Mr. Trump’s sermon on hating one’s enemies was not impulsive or frivolous. At the memorial service of Charlie Kirk, one of Mr. Trump’s most valuable supporters, Erika Kirk embraced the core message of her faith by publicly forgiving her husband’s murderer. Mr. Trump essentially spit in her face, eliciting a chorus of boos from the audience by insisting that he does not forgive. He hates his enemies. Here, he gives fair warning to a key constituency. He does not need their support. Politicians need constituencies. Dictators abuse everyone.
Another core autocratic idea is that, in commanding the state, authority is all and truth nothing. In support of this Schmitt focuses on miracles as the test of sovereign power. European kings were able to perform miracles, he asserts, because they could decide what was a miracle. “Auctoritas, non Veritas. Nothing here is true: everything is command. A miracle is what the sovereign state authority commands its subject to believe to be a miracle…Miracles cease when the state forbids them.” Further, he argues that it is a mistake for government to allow people to have freedom of thought and belief even within the confines of their own private thoughts. Enforcing outward belief is not good enough. The sovereign commands even the inner lives of its subjects. (p. 54-7 The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes)
When Mr. Trump depicts himself as Jesus Christ performing a healing, he is not delusional. He is claiming turf in people’s souls. If he shows himself miraculous, he is. If he says it is not a miracle, he is not backing down, but doubling down.
Religion is more than doctrine. Being spiritual, the spirit of the thing matters. Christianity is largely defined by divine forgiveness of sins, but has largely held at least the Ten Commandments (of all the many laws laid down in the Jewish tradition) to be enduring rules for earthly behavior. Some denominations hold that one is saved from sin, once and forever, at a single moment of conversion. It is hard to think of any sect or theologian that transposes this framework directly onto purely human relations. What Christian tradition permits mere mortals to forgive earthly criminals in advance of their crimes?
Yet Schmitt, having argued that all modern political thought is secularized theology, held that sovereign government essentially forgives itself for all crimes beforehand. It is the exception to all rules. (p. 1-10, Political Theology) Somehow, he still spoke as if government had some sort of responsibility, an obvious contradiction.
When the Trump administration tells ICE officers that they are completely immune from the law, it pretends to forgive their crimes in advance. When it trains them to violate the Constitution (as a former trainer, turned whistleblower, has revealed), it indoctrinates them to criminality paid for by their victims’ taxes, ordained and sanctioned from on high – but not genuinely all that high.
Mr. Trump’s proposal to erect a golden idol of himself in the land of Baal is, of course, somewhat different. No theory of dictatorship is needed to see him writing himself into the role of the villain in numerous Biblical stories.
Christianity rarely declares anything heretical in our times, but there is no better candidate than the teachings of Carl Schmitt and his acolytes. The politics of murder, the divinity of dictators, and the doctrine of permanent self-forgiveness, all clash with the faith, and are all illustrated by the current President. Implications for adherents to the theory of the exception are profound. The primary locus for promotion of this thinking in the United States is the Federalist Society. Six out of nine Supreme Court Justices are associated with Federalist. Six Justices are Catholic. Four members of the Court are both.
Still, as often happens, poets tell it better than priests, politicians, or lawyers. John Milton was a great advocate and defender of republicanism but, as a member of Oliver Cromwell’s administration, he had a front row seat on the degeneration of England’s “The Revolution of the Saints” into an outright dictatorship. Bitter years later, in his epic poem Paradise Lost, he describes how Satan, the fallen archangel, discovers his trade. Traveling across the void toward Earth, he lingered for a while in the company of Chaos and Night where he learns to sow contradiction and uncertainty, and so, “by confusion rule.”
Satan must learn the implements of chaos and darkness because, as a creature of heaven, he has no prior knowledge of what evils might plague mortal beings. His own fall was driven not by any sordid desire, but by rebellion against heaven. Like the new model dictators of the 21st Century, he was victim of the sin that came before sin. He envied God.
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