Your Tax Dollars Are Funding the Trump Administration’s Patriarchal Family Agenda

PUBLISHED 5/28/2026 by

“One in three Americans are under-babied,” declared Trump’s Medicare and Medicaid chief Dr. Mehmet Oz last week, echoing JD Vance’s contempt for “childless cat ladies.”

Guided by evangelical supporters, the Trump administration is eroding longstanding civil rights protections, restricting access to contraception and abortion, and weakening support systems for single mothers and their children. The goal is clear: to pressure women into marriage and motherhood while making the patriarchal family the center of American life.

The administration’s policies closely track the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda, which seeks to incentivize what it calls “natural marriage”—a heterosexual household with a breadwinner father, stay-at-home mother and biologically related children.

Meanwhile, the administration’s new Moms.Gov website directs pregnant women to antiabortion organizations that that have been widely criticized for their misleading information about options and for their collection of patients’ sensitive personal information.

Taxpayer dollars are increasingly being used to advance a vision of society rooted in patriarchal family structures and reproductive coercion.

Three Ways Trump’s Weird Fixation on DEI Is Hurting Women

PUBLISHED 5/28/2026 by

The Trump administration’s obsession with diversity, equity and inclusion has moved far beyond rhetoric. It is now reshaping how women’s stories get told, whose health crises are allowed to be named, and what kinds of research are permitted to survive.

Across history, healthcare and science, women are watching decades of hard-fought progress become collateral damage in a culture war designed to erase people in real time.

That damage is already visible.

Republicans derailed long-awaited progress on the American Women’s History Museum by inserting provisions policing which women count as women and handing Trump appointees sweeping control over the museum itself.

Meanwhile, the newly reintroduced Momnibus legislation—created in response to the maternal mortality crisis devastating Black women and families—has been forced to strip much of the word “Black” from its language in order to survive politically under an administration openly hostile to DEI initiatives.

And the consequences are not abstract: NIH grants focused on women’s health have reportedly dropped by 30 percent, while words like “women” and “gender” themselves are becoming liabilities in funding proposals.

Women’s health was already chronically underfunded and misunderstood long before Trump returned to office. But the administration’s escalating war on DEI is accelerating that neglect—and making clear just how much is at stake when political ideology begins dictating whose lives deserve to be studied, protected and remembered.

Black Women Political Candidates Are Expected to Be ‘Likable,’ Qualified and Tireless. Men Aren’t.

PUBLISHED 5/28/2026 by

What I experienced during my 2014 run for office wasn’t entirely unfamiliar to me.

The year before, I had run for president of the Young Democrats of America (YDA), a national political party office role, against a popular opponent. The opponent was a Black man, so race wasn’t a factor in the election; however, gender was.

Before my campaign, I was vice president of YDA and had heard only good things about my service: my fundraising efforts, the partnerships I had engineered with progressive organizations, and programming coordination for the membership. However, when I decided to run for president, I instantly became ‘difficult to work with’ and ‘mean.’

Research on women candidates confirms that voters are less likely to vote for a woman if they don’t like her; by comparison, voters don’t need to like men to elect them. But when I was running as the Black woman candidate in a seven-candidate primary for public office, with two other women in the race, I noticed almost nothing about my being ‘difficult’ and more about my ability and work ethic.

My experience running for public office reflected the systemic bias and double standards not just for women candidates, but Black women candidates who dare to aspire to any sort of political leadership—and that needed to change.

We need more progressive Black women in public office for a myriad reasons, but we also specifically need the younger generation of Instigators in office, candidates who understand the times in which we live currently.

Electing more Black women will take real investment in changing the biases and attitudes (conscious and unconscious) of mostly white donors, media, campaign staff, consultants and institutional leaders to help shift the culture and systems. But this support needs to be substantively increased so that we can rebuild an inclusive, multiracial democracy with the leaders we want and need.

(Excerpted from The Instigators: How Black Women Have Been Essential to American Democracy by Atima Omara.)

Election Conspiracies Are Moving From Rhetoric to Government Action

PUBLISHED 5/27/2026 by

Attacks on the legitimacy of U.S. elections are no longer confined to conspiracy theories circulating online—they are increasingly shaping government action at the local level.

In Riverside County, Calif., Sheriff Chad Bianco seized roughly 650,000 ballots from a 2025 special election based on fraud allegations that election officials say stem from misleading interpretations of preliminary voting data. Courts have since intervened, with the California Supreme Court ordering the investigation paused while litigation continues.

I spoke with Jill Garvey, co-director of States at the Core, about what these escalating “election integrity” efforts mean for democracy and public trust.

Garvey says many of the activists driving these claims understand election systems far better than they let on—and are intentionally using confusion around technical election data to sow distrust in the voting process.

Even when election officials fully explain the data and publicly refute the allegations, she said, demands for investigations continue, helping fuel a broader narrative that elections cannot be trusted.

Garvey sees these efforts as part of a larger strategy testing how far local officials can go in challenging election systems and democratic norms.

But she also points to growing community-level organizing and civic engagement in response. The groups advancing these claims, she noted, are relatively small compared to the hundreds of thousands of voters affected by their actions—a reminder that local communities still have significant power to push back against efforts to undermine confidence in elections.

Survivors of Torture Rewrite the Rules Banning It

PUBLISHED 5/27/2026 by

There is no shortage of cases of torture in the headlines. Across today’s crises—from Ukraine to Sudan, Myanmar to Gaza—the allegations are graphic and devastating. But once a legal case closes or the news cycle moves on, another story begins: What happens to those who survive torture?

As U.N. special rapporteur on torture, I have met survivors around the world who carry its effects long after the physical wounds have healed. Survivors spoke to me about stigma, economic struggles, permanent disabilities, fractured relationships and the exhausting fight to be believed, gain access to care and secure justice. Too often, torture is treated as an event that ends when the abuse stops. That is far from survivors’ realities.

That is why survivors themselves helped create the first global Charter of Rights for Victims and Survivors of Torture and other cruelty—a framework demanding access to specialized healthcare, long-term psychological support, legal recognition, financial stability and meaningful involvement in shaping the laws and systems that affect their lives.

The Trump Administration Isn’t Just Ignoring Violence Against Abortion Clinics—It Wants to Fund It

PUBLISHED 5/26/2026 by | UPDATED 6/5/2026 at 7:52 A.M. PT

The numbers are staggering: Between 2024 and 2025, death threats against abortion providers more than doubled. Stalking incidents more than doubled. Clinic blockades surged by 500 percent. There were four arsons. A planned assassination attempt against a Montana provider. And in the background of all of it, a federal government that has made unmistakably clear whose side it’s on.

Now, in an unprecedented move, the Trump Administration may be about to start writing checks to fund violent extremists. As part of a settlement to resolve his $10 billion lawsuit against his own Department of the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the creation of a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund.” The Fund is framed as compensation for people who claim they were targeted by politically motivated prosecutions under previous administrations, excluding Republican administrations.

Remembering War’s Impacts on Women and Girls on Memorial Day

PUBLISHED 5/24/2026 by

As we pause to mark Memorial Day on Monday, I’m thinking about the women affected by war—whether they’re fighting on the front lines, working in the service as nurses, or civilians saddled with the consequences of wars started by men living in far-off lands who barely know they exist.

Research shows that women and girls face unique and acute impacts in armed conflict situations. For women on the ground in Iran, who are already subject to increased policing at the hands of their own government, these impacts are multiplied. Since 165 girls were killed by an American missile in the bombing of an elementary school earlier this year, thousands more women and girls have continued to be displaced and killed in airstrikes. And as the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security points out, women also face increased environmental tolls from the bombing of oil and gas infrastructure—which causes pollution that can lead to health issues and reproductive complications.

Where to Watch ‘Ask E. Jean,’ a New Documentary on the Wit, Fury and Fearlessness of E. Jean Carroll

PUBLISHED 5/23/2026 by | UPDATED 5/29/2026 at 7:39 A.M. PT

E. Jean Carroll—the colorful author and advice columnist who beat Donald Trump in court twice—is finally getting the documentary treatment in Ask E. Jean, a film that is as poignant as it is entertaining.

Director Ivy Meeropol first reached out to Carroll after reading the devastating yet vibrant New York Magazine piece in which Carroll accused Trump of raping her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room decades earlier.

Carroll’s initial response: “I’d rather eat my shoe.”

But Meeropol persisted, eventually convincing Carroll she wanted to tell the fuller story of her life—not just the trials, but her remarkable rise during the heyday of glossy magazines and New York media culture.

The resulting film traces Carroll’s evolution from Indiana cheerleader to professionally fabulous Manhattan raconteur, weaving together archival footage, legal depositions and deeply personal interviews.

Some of the documentary’s most powerful moments come from previously unseen deposition footage, where Carroll recounts the 1996 assault while enduring invasive questioning from Trump attorney Alina Habba. Even in those moments, Carroll remains irrepressibly funny.

Meeropol says the footage reveals “what really happens when someone who’s brought a charge of rape or sexual abuse is deposed,” while also exposing the broader misogyny women confront “from the minute we’re born.”

Meeropol also describes struggling against “The Trump Effect”—fear within the entertainment industry about supporting projects that could provoke retaliation from Trump or his allies. Distributors hesitated, some producers reportedly asked not to be credited, and the film was repeatedly stalled despite strong festival reviews.

But Ask E. Jean is now expanding into theaters nationwide, bringing Carroll’s story to audiences at a moment when the politics of gender, power and public accountability remain impossible to ignore.

Black Women, Beauty Politics and the Power of Rage in ‘Is God Is’

PUBLISHED 5/23/2026 by

In one of the film’s most surreal scenes, the twins at the center of Is God Is—Racine, “the Rough One,” and Anaia, “the Quiet One”—pretend to be strippers for a room full of men. But while Racine is welcomed, Anaia is rejected because her scarred face disrupts the men’s fantasies.

That moment crystallizes one of the film’s central questions: What happens when Black women refuse to shrink themselves for the comfort of others?

In Aleshea Harris’ Gothic revenge thriller, ugliness becomes both a burden and a source of power, as the film transforms into a stereotype-busting meditation on misogynoir, beauty politics and righteous rage.

As the twins travel cross-country seeking vengeance against the father who burned their mother alive, Harris layers the conventions of the revenge genre with distinctly Black feminist aesthetics. The film moves between absurd comedy, trap music, intimate sisterhood and brutal violence while interrogating the ways Black women are expected to manage their pain, suppress their anger and perform acceptability. Anaia’s scarred face and Racine’s consuming rage become mirrors of the same misogynoir that shapes Black women’s lives—whether through beauty standards, domestic violence or the demand to remain silent.

What makes Is God Is so striking is its refusal to look away from the “ugly.” Harris insists that Black women marked by violence, scars and fury still deserve visibility, complexity and even divinity.

The film embraces the “angry Black woman” and the “ugly” Black woman as figures worthy of space, power and humanity. In doing so, it expands the tradition of Black feminist filmmaking by asking viewers to confront the realities dominant culture would rather ignore—and to recognize the beauty, dignity and selfhood that exist beyond respectability.

After Historic SNAP Cuts, America’s Hunger Emergency Is Already Here—and Trump’s Proposed Budget Would Make It Worse

PUBLISHED 5/22/2026 by

Even as communities across the country grapple with the fallout from last year’s devastating SNAP cuts, the White House’s proposed Fiscal Year 2027 budget threatens to deepen an already escalating hunger emergency.

The administration is pushing another $6 billion in cuts to SNAP, while also targeting WIC benefits, including proposals that would restrict access to fresh fruits and vegetables for women and children.

Rather than repairing the damage already done to America’s food assistance programs, the budget doubles down on policies that are pushing more families toward crisis.

The consequences are already unfolding nationwide. More than 4 million Americans have lost SNAP benefits over the past year, while states struggle under the unprecedented financial burdens shifted onto them by Republicans’ earlier cuts.

Some states are now considering whether they can continue participating in SNAP at all, raising the possibility that millions more people could lose food assistance simply because of where they live.

At the same time, congressional negotiations over the farm bill have largely failed to address the growing strain on hunger programs or the widening cracks in the nation’s social safety net.

(This essay is part of an ongoing Ms. series examining the real-world impact of President Donald Trump’s proposed fiscal year 2027 budget. Across sectors—from healthcare and childcare to immigration enforcement and food assistance—the series explores what the administration’s funding priorities reveal about who government serves, and who it leaves behind.)