President Trump’s cabinet has been breathtakingly incompetent and horribly destructive, but the members who are suffering the biggest consequences seem to be women.
Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security; Pam Bondi, the attorney general; and Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the labor secretary, either were fired or stepped down under pressure this year; Trump picked men to fill their spots. Beyond cabinet positions in the second Trump administration, only 12 percent of Senate-confirmed appointees are women.
Trump’s second term in office has been less volatile than his first, and some high-profile men have been canned. Nonetheless, some of the women hired to run large parts of the federal government have already flamed out.
I don’t mourn the loss of their service, but the anti-woman bias of many in our current leadership is overt and constant, and it will have lasting effects on female political achievement — not just for Republicans.
Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, has gone out of his way to demean women in the military and block their promotions, and the founder of his religious denomination thinks women with husbands shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Trump attacks the female reporters who ask him tough questions, commenting on or criticizing their looks — just recently he stomped out of an interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker, telling her, “You’re either crooked or you’re stupid.”
But Trump and his cronies aren’t content just to put down actual women. Anyone whose behavior is deemed insufficiently manly is trashed. James Talarico, the mild-mannered seminarian Democrat who is running for a Senate seat in Texas, has been called “James Talafreako” by his opponent, the corrupt Republican Ken Paxton, in part because Talarico has embraced meat alternatives. The Trump henchman Stephen Miller has gone further, repeatedly claiming that Talarico is “transitioning” to female on both Fox News and his X account.
If that weren’t awful enough, some leftists and liberals seem to be aping Republican-style insults, implying that anything outside an old-fashioned vision of masculine behavior is weak, womanly and should be avoided. In response to new revelations about the Maine Senate hopeful Graham Platner’s past relationships, prominent progressive Matt Stoller defended him, posting on X that “Graham Platner represents a rejection of Dem HR lady politics.” Which is to say, any objection to Platner’s history is somehow coded as female.
This defense tactic from Platner’s staunchest supporters is not new. Moira Donegan, writing in The Guardian in October, noted that many liberal men loudly defended Platner then, in spite of his Nazi tattoos and his Reddit comments about women and minorities, on the ground that the party had become too feminized. “The idea is that in catering too much to women, and in being insufficiently deferential to domineering, gruff, physically imposing and implicitly white, rural men, the party has come to seem hectoring, inauthentic and whiny, and lost the voters they need to most recruit.”
If I lived in Maine, I would certainly vote for Platner over Susan Collins in a general election, so that Democrats can have a chance to take back the Senate and oppose Trump. I also understand why people are excited about Platner’s progressive stances and his ability to connect in person, and I get the calculus around choosing him as the nominee among the other options.
But it isn’t even true that it’s “Dem HR lady politics” to look askance at his behavior — according to Gallup polling from 2025, 89 percent of Americans think adultery in a marriage is morally wrong, and Republicans and independents are more likely to think it’s morally wrong than Democrats. Adultery is not just a subject of interest to women.
While I know that Trump has broken our sense of ethics when it comes to political behavior, it’s actually pretty normie and not especially feminine to worry that Platner sexting as many as a dozen other women while married could be a liability for him in a general election, and to wonder if there are going to be other shoes dropping for him in the next few months.
I also find it impossible to believe that a female, gay or nonwhite politician with Platner’s background would be given the amount of grace that he is receiving. Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, got dragged across the internet last year for simply holding a folder in front of her face in the Oval Office, with one headline asking, “How Politically Devastating Is The Blue Folder Picture?” and some speculating that her future in politics was basically over.
It is profoundly depressing to see people on both sides imply that only “masculine” behavior, defined in the narrowest, most chest-thumping way, is worthy of power and respect, and the only way to win elections. It makes the expectations for female candidates even more onerous and complicated. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in the past year, the few female Democrats — Governor Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, Governor Abigail Spanberger of Virginia and the New Jersey congressional hopeful Rebecca Bennett — who have been able to break through tend to have traditionally masculine career backgrounds in the military or the C.I.A.
I called Amanda Litman, the president of Run for Something, an organization that recruits young progressive candidates like Talarico to run for office, to ask her if she was seeing some of the same barriers for female candidates that I have noticed. “I think one of the broader challenges is that we do not have a definition of authentic or compelling that includes women,” she said. And the second a female Democrat does eke out a place for herself, Litman added, the right-wing media ecosystem makes her into a monster, the way it has with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi.
I usually try to end my newsletters on a hopeful note, because I am generally optimistic about the state of gender relations in this country. But I am not feeling bullish on female politicians gaining real power on the national level in the near future.
We’re still more than two years out from the next presidential election, but none of The Washington Post’s “standout” candidates on either the left or the right are women. On “Pod Save America,” a podcast hosted by former Obama administration staffers, the co-host Dan Pfeiffer recently came to a similar conclusion, saying, “You could end up with an all-male field, which would be kind of gross in 2028.”
It may be gross, but it’s also a logical conclusion, if you’re paying attention. If we’ve defined authentic power as male, then there’s no way for a woman to claim it.
End Notes
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Another true crime recommendation from me: the documentary and book “American Pain.” The documentary premiered in 2022 and is streaming on HBO Max, and it is based on the book by John Temple, which was published in 2015. Both are about how a handful of Florida pill mills became the epicenter of opioid sales, with addicts traveling from many states away to get their fix. It’s a truly devastating story, but both versions of “American Pain” serve as a potent explanation of how lax legislation and corrupt doctors and businessmen took advantage of a growing epidemic.
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I personally wish we would focus less on politicians’ romantic relationships and families in general. We’re not electing their spouses or kids, and I would be perfectly happy to get rid of the idea of a first lady or a first gentleman. But that’s a subject for another column, or me yapping on a podcast.
Feel free to drop me a line about anything here.
The post The Bipartisan Hatred of All Things Feminine appeared first on New York Times.
