Background reading:

• “Make no mistake: this Trump presidency will continue to attack abortion rights” — Moira Donegan (The Guardian)
• “Post-Election Reality Check: Tracking Feminist Setbacks, Resilience and Victories” — Katie Fleischer
• “Donald Trump Rides Patriarchy Back to the White House” — Rob Okun

Transcript:

00:00:00 Michele Goodwin:

Welcome to On the Issues with Michele Goodwin at Ms. Magazine. As you know, we’re a show that reports, rebels, and we tell it just like it is. On this show, we center your concerns about rebuilding our nation and advancing the promise of equality. So, join me as we tackle the most compelling issues of our times. On our show History Matters, we examine the past as we think about the future. And as it happens, we continue to reckon with the results of the 2024 election. We have so many questions and so many issues and concerns to sort through. How did abortion rights and women’s rights impact the election? And how will the next Trump Administration further shape those matters? What silver linings can be found amongst the election results? And as we face the next four years where do we go from here? 

And helping me to sort out these questions are two very special guests that have joined me before. With me is Moira Donegan. She is a feminist writer and opinion columnist with The Guardian US as well as a writer in residence for the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. Also with me is Fatima Goss Graves. She is the President of the National Women’s Law Center’s Action Fund and a cofounder of the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund. Sit back and take a listen. 

00:00:04 Michele Goodwin:

It’s such a pleasure to be joined by both of you and I want to start with asking just how you both are doing after the results have come in from the 2024 Presidential Election.

00:00:38 Fatima Goss Graves:

So, I tend to move through the various stages of grief fast, maybe faster than most, and I want to name that. I went to bed Tuesday night with a lot of certainty in what the outcome was going to be and knew that I had to gather with my staff, with board members, with people in community, and so I woke up Wednesday morning and readied myself to put on that face to be able to have that tough conversation. Because what I understood is that there weren’t a lot of people in a lot of rooms who remembered deeply in their bones of what it took and what it will take to move through a Trump Administration, and that I had to give myself time to be angry and sad and grief.

But honestly my deepest and highest calling in this moment is to get to work, and so I woke up Wednesday, and from day one really have been figuring out what I need to do to move people from despair to hope, from inaction and laying flat to action, and to a reminder that he is not king and that there are a range of folks, including everyone who may be listening in, who has an opportunity to stand in the way of an agenda that could undermine not only the things you care about today, but our future and our freedoms.

00:02:16 Michele Goodwin:

Thank you so much for that. Because what you’re flagging is both the importance of hope, but also getting to work, right, and that actually there is not a whole lot of time for moping. But I can’t help but think of that also in a legacy of the work that Black women do, and I can’t help but think that what still has not been tapped, not even after lessons from 2016, is tapping into the way in which Black women do democracy work, which is a legacy that dates back centuries. But still the real failure to take into account what that means and just the mismanagement of that all over media. 

We still have yet to have the right kind of conversations about that whatsoever, it’s about people who have a sense of constitutional principles, civil liberties, civil rights. It’s the work of a Ruby Bridges’ mother saying I will put my child in that situation so that you all can understand what the constitution is all about. But I digress, because Moira I’m wondering how you’re doing?

00:03:30 Moira Donegan:

Yeah, you know, I’m so glad that you mentioned this notion of sort of civic dedication and principled commitment to a cause that is necessarily greater than our own self-interest, right. Because as I move forward out of grief and out of anger, frankly, candidly a lot of anger, I have been really energized by seeing the people around me have this kind of stiff jawed determination to continue their commitment to what is right and to look for new resources and new strategies to move forward in pursuit of those principles. Even at moments when it really seems like our nation and the communities that have put their commitment and their energy into pursuing those principles are really facing a great big setback, right? 

So, what I’ve doing over the past week is trying to reaffirm my connections to other people who do this kind of work. Trying to reach out to the people who I know are hurt by this in terms of their personal vulnerabilities and also in terms of, you know, their disappointment hopes and the insult that this result might make to their dignity and to the work that they’ve been putting in. I’m just trying to reaffirm my own commitment to them, you know, I’m trying to shore up those connections, so that we all have enough strength to move forward.

00:05:08 Michele Goodwin:

So, Moira, right after the election you wrote, make no mistake this Trump presidency will continue to attack abortion rights. While another headline today is a day of despair for America, we are plunged into an anticipatory reef. But I’m wondering if we can start off with talking about that anticipatory grief and what you can unpack from that. Because I do think that there is some work to be done about anticipating what is to come. 

00:05:40 Moira Donegan:

Right. So, for the column that I wrote just after Trump’s election that went up the following morning, I talked about the position of thinking about the suffering that is to come as a result of this incoming administration, right. The material suffering, the suffering that’s going to be imposed on bodies and the indignity that’s going to be suffered by a lot of these targeted populations, right. So, I think one thing that we can do is look towards what Donald Trump has said he is going to do in terms of deportations, right, which he has outlined a really large-scale and sadistic scheme, right? And there’s one sort of pundit approach, which is to look at like, okay, well how much of this is realistic? How much he can actually accomplish, right? 

And I think something that is maybe less well represented is looking at, well, what are the mechanisms that we have available to us as the opposition, as activists, as people who are committed to a multiracial pluralist democracy to actually stop this from happening, right? And what are the resources that we have available to extend to the people who might be targeted? And that’s one thing I’ve been thinking about over this past week. And another I think, you know, much more relevant to my own expertise and work as a feminist has been about what is coming for abortion rights and access in this country? 

You know, even if Donald Trump does not succeed in signing a legislative abortion ban into law, which I think, you know, he might indeed do, there are a lot of avenues that the incoming Trump Administration has to make abortion much more onerous and difficult to get and to make pregnancy much more dangerous, right? So, I am looking at the rollback of FDA-approval of Mifepristone, either rolling back those 2021 changes that made Mifepristone much more accessible, or doing as some on the right have asked the FDA to do already and revoking the FDA’s approval of Mifepristone already, right? I am looking at potential enforcement of the Comstock Act, which would make abortion pills or indeed a whole slew of women’s health-related instruments, illegal to transport through the US Mail, right? 

Both of those strategies would have the effect of making it much, much more dangerous, and much, much more difficult for women to get abortions nationwide, but particularly in those banned states, which have really been relying on access through mailed abortion pills, and that is something that will become much more difficult and less legally protected if we enter this new regime in which those, those provisions are rolled back or reversed.

00:08:33 Michele Goodwin:

So, Fatima, questions for you, centered in part on what Moira was just saying. So, you wear multiple hats and one very important one and why you’re here is President of the National Women’s Law Center Action Fund. And so, in that capacity I’m wondering how you’re processing the work that lies ahead. And I have to say I also want to bundle that a little bit because maybe we could start with this, how in the world was it that there were states where ballot initiatives could pass to protect abortion rights and yet at the same time to elect antiabortion officials? How does that happen?

00:09:23 Fatima Goss Graves:

Listen, abortion was a top issue for voters and was discussed more in this election than ever before. The narrative I would say was changed. Voters were educated voters about abortion. The abortion storytellers their stories were heard and felt, and changed hearts and minds, and that resulted in huge wins at ballots, right? In the majority of states where abortion was on the ballot directly, where people could participate in citizen-driven initiatives, they made clear that they wanted to protect abortion access. And that’s true even in Florida, which had to put in a super threshold, right, to prevent the majority will of the state from going into place, right? Very few places do 57 percent of the state directly say they want something and then the answer is you don’t get it because rules we put in place, right?

So, millions of people voted in favor of reproductive freedom and expressly said that including in states like Missouri, which went and overturned a complete ban. So, they knew what they were doing when they were making this decision. It was not just some narrative that are saying blue states being more protective in that moment, it was very much a cross-section, but Donald Trump also won this election. So, Donald Trump won the election and so did abortion and people need to, in my view, hold this incoming administration to its word. Because I think that’s what happened, in part, at the very end of the election it was hard to say, to know and understand what Donald Trump and JD Vance would stand for when it came to abortion, right? 

All of a sudden, they were declaring, Donald Trump, that he would not pass a national abortion ban, that he was either the father or the grandfather of IVF, I’m not sure, but he was an IVF parent of some sort. He was a leader on reproductive freedom. He would provide more protection than not, right, and they did that on gender, generally. He and JD Vance they said we’re for caregivers and caregiving policy, we’re for childcare, we’ll put out a homecare policy too, and they were never held to the details. So, if you are someone who cares about this issue, he muddied the waters pretty clearly, and the last way he muddied the water that I think we just have to sit with, right, as people who care about reproductive freedom, but also care about this movement and how it bills itself, he said I left it to the states and that is a good thing. 

So, voters had a chance to protect themselves in their states, and did so and also voted for Donald Trump, and so that tells us maybe a little bit of something around empathy, around how far people are going to protect someone who do not see as them, protect that other person, fight for that other person who may be in need. The truth of the matter is, you know, and I think, thank you for detailing the range of things. I have the very same list and maybe a few other items on the list of things that are coming, things that we will contend with given that the majority of the public has said that they want abortion access, that they want reproductive freedom. So, we may soon find ourselves in a situation where people who had thought they had done enough to protect themselves, to protect only themselves and maybe their very direct neighbors, find that their access has ended and are surprised. 

00:13:21 Michele Goodwin:

What then comes next for how you organize around this? It seems to me that in part, well both of you, you know one from the angle of journalism and reporting at a time in which there will be, already happens to be attacks on journalists. On the other hand, really setting in motion and continuing, because you’ve already been doing this Fatima, is leading in this space. So, what does it look like to lead in this space coming forward? Are you concerned about Project 2025 and how that might materialize? What are the things that are sort of top of mind for you now as you think about the agenda for the National Women’s Law Center?

00:14:07 Fatima Goss Graves:

Well, here’s the thing, we have been preparing for this time. We, you know, we have I guess the gift of Project 2025. We also know what Donald Trump did the last time he was in office, and we know the types of things that some states have been driving. So, we have some hopefully good guesses about the types of things that we could see come and we are preparing for that and have been preparing for this. We, on our website you can find a whole guide to Project 2025 in gender justice where we detail a range of policies, we want people to know about. 

At the same time, a worry I have, and maybe this is a question more for Moira, is around how we breakthrough, in a very different media landscape, the thing that we know about the way in which the last Trump Administration worked. It was an effort to have a dizzying array of things, especially in the beginning so that the media couldn’t keep up, and that was when media operated, I would say, differently than now. And so how we get people information when really what they will be trying to do is keep these deeply unpopular ideas under the covers, not so that folks have a way to weigh in and be upset or not about them. That is a worry that I have. 

00:15:44 Michele Goodwin:

Okay, well, Moira take up that question. Because that actually is a brilliant question, what comes next in this space and are you worried as a journalist?

00:15:56 Moira Donegan:

Well, the short answer is yes, I’m worried. I think Fatima is correct to point out that there’s been a lot of changes to the media environment over the course of the past eight years since Trump ascended to prominence in our national politics, right? Like what you see is that we used to have a media ecosystem that had large credible players with really substantial audiences, right, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CBS News. You know, these were mega-giant media entities that could employ a lot of journalists that had high standards and that really understood themselves as having a responsibility to democracy itself, right, they were the Fourth Estate.

They were part of how we kept our politicians and those in power accountable. And what has changed over the past eight years is that those big institutions have lost a lot of their credibility, right, their audiences don’t trust them as much anymore, and they have lost a lot of their financial stability, right? They are now much more indebted to billionaire owners or to the vagaries of an attention economy that is very, very difficult to break into with good information that is not alarmist, right? And what we have taking its place is an ecosystem of independent journalists and creators, right, some of whom are doing amazing work that has a great loyalty to the facts and a commitment to holding the powerful to account and some of whom are not, right? You also have this vast ecosystem of media creators who often have really intense, loyal relationships with their audiences, often very large audiences, and not all of them are giving out good information, right? 

So, you have a siloing of the media landscape, right? There’s a lot of different media’s that are doing lots of different types of work and which are creating for their audiences really different realities, right? So, part of the tasks for journalists, and for those of us who consider ourselves storytellers, is going to be about trying to find ways to make the truth as compelling as lies and trying to find ways to puncture those other alternative realities that a lot of our electorate is inhabiting. And to try and make them see the stakes of what’s happening in Washington, especially at a time when I think a lot of people, fatigued by the extremity and craziness of a second Trump Administration, will have an inclination to sort of turn away. 

00:18:41 Michele Goodwin:

Okay. In quick order, first, what do you think is going to be happening with our courts now? Do you see the possibility that there are going to be retirements from the court, perhaps Justice Thomas and Alito, and the potential that this is going to be an opportunity for new appointments? Fatima?

00:19:00 Fatima Goss Graves:

So, I think we will see at least one, if not two, Supreme Court justices retire during his term and there are already big campaigns that are coming from the right to put the pressure on that to make that more likely to happen. I also just want to name that it’s not just the Supreme Court to be worrying about it is the circuit court and district court judges. And the Biden Administration has a very good record, they still have work to do before they leave, and I hope they use every single one of those days along with the Senate. But when Trump was last here, he did not appoint Black women to the bench, any bench. I just want us to be super clear about the record of making the judiciary generally more male and more White than it had been and he did so in a very short period of time. 

00:20:05 Michele Goodwin:

Of course, what that also has meant in terms of the cases that have come up over the, even during the Biden Administration that were purposely targeted through Trump-appointed district court judges, right, such as Matthew Kacsmaryk in Amarillo, Texas, right, I mean, getting a whole lot of heavy play being the only person who is in that district. All right, Moira, what about this administration? Matt Gaetz attorney general? 

00:20:35 Moira Donegan:

Matt Gaetz was nominated for attorney general just before we began recording. I think you see some very prominent right-wing judges clearly auditioning for those top court vacancies, eyeing a potential retirement by either Sam Alito or Clarence Thomas, in particular. You know, there’s a lot of vacancies on our federal courts right now and if I was the Biden Administration or if I was a democratic senator I would be looking to fill those in the lame-duck period as quickly as possible, right. Because those are lifetime seats. And the right-wing has been very clear on how valuable those are, and I think that there is a growing recognition of that on the left as well, which I am happy to see. 

But yeah, I do think we are going to see the legal regime lurch further to the right, that will be an evitable consequence of this presidency, and that will be a legacy that we are left with for quite a long time, and we don’t, we don’t quite know how bad it can get yet. That’s something that we’re not going to learn for a while. 

00:21:42 Michele Goodwin:

All right, we always ask about a silver lining, so before I let you go, I’m going to ask about that. But before I do, agencies, any quick takes on what that’s going to look like? Because it’s an area where now there’s more attention being paid to the courts, but still agencies are incredibly important. What do you, any predictions there? Concerns? 

00:22:03 Fatima Goss Graves:

I mean, personnel matters, the cabinet matters, for sure. And I just want to remind everyone that just because Donald Trump has nominated someone that does not mean they are confirmed, and each senator who is up in 2026 will have to stand by their record of each of these confirmations, including whether Matt Gaetz is the appropriate person to be the Attorney General of the United States given his own record. But the second thing I just want to say, very quickly before we wrap up, is that there are also the roles, the personnel roles that don’t have to be confirmed and Stephen Miller as Deputy Chief of Policy is the person to watch. He is the one that will have an unlimited amount of power here in terms of a broad policy agenda and that’s very worrisome given what he built on the outside in his last tenure in the administration. 

00:22:58 Michele Goodwin:

See, that’s exactly why I love having you on. Because you’re like dropping this wisdom and knowledge where people aren’t necessarily even looking and sadly where it’s not necessarily being covered in that way either. Moira, did you want to weigh in on any of that in terms of you know where we need to be paying attention, even though the courts are important, other areas that are high on the agenda in terms of a far-right agenda?

00:23:26 Moira Donegan:

Yeah, I would definitely be paying more attention to how the incoming Trump Administration will staff the FDA, the CDC, and the Center, I’m sorry, the Health and Human Services Department. I would be on the lookout for the future of the Biden FTC Chair Lina Khan and see how the incoming Trump Administration, which has made a lot of noise about its populace commitments, responds to her antitrust agenda. But I would also, in terms of a silver lining, like to keep in mind that this is a group of people with a lot of malignant intention and not a lot of self-control or professionalism. 

So, if we’re looking at a silver lining, I think, one lesson we can definitely learn from the past Trump Administration is that these people have short tempers, big egos, and a tendency to recycle out quite quickly out of these federal agencies and out of this White House. So, just because somebody is nominated, as Fatima reminds us, doesn’t mean they’re going to be confirmed and also just because somebody is confirmed or is placed in a job doesn’t mean they’re going to stay there for very long.

00:24:43 Michele Goodwin:

Okay, so your silver lining is that they’re a hot mess and that’s actually a benefit to our country because they’ll just burn themselves out and they’ll just be infighting. All right, Fatima, last word from you, silver lining?

00:24:57 Fatima Goss Graves:
I actually think our movement has a lot more experience. There are a bunch of folks who were on the ground organizing in the Trump years who have been studying and preparing for this moment. We are better coordinated than we were at the top of the Trump Administration, we have theories around how we get this done, and so that is my silver lining that we know how to do this. 

00:25:24 Michele Goodwin:

Well, I’m grateful to both of you for your wisdom, for your expertise, for what you give to the work that you do, which benefits so very many. Thank you so much for joining me. 

00:25:38 Moira Donegan:

Thank you, Michele, it’s a pleasure. 

00:25:40 Fatima Goss Graves:

Thanks, Michele.