Donald Trump and the Trump Administration

Seventy Years After Rosa Parks’ Arrest: How We Commit to Carrying the Work Forward

PUBLISHED 12/5/2025 by

Weekend Reading for Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation in politics, sports and entertainment, judicial offices and the private sector—with a little gardening mixed in!

This week:
—The 2025 elections prove that voters across the country want women as their leaders.
—Democratic leaders are exploring ranked-choice voting for the 2028 presidential primaries.
—In a Tennesee special election, Democratic nominee Aftyn Behn surpassed electoral expectations for her congressional district.
—Fort Collins, Colo., elected Emily Francis as mayor in its first use of ranked-choice voting.
—College student Any Lucía López Belloza was deported in Massachusetts on her way home to Texas for Thanksgiving.

… and more.

Where ACA Premiums Could Spike Most in 2026 if Congress Lets Enhanced Tax Credits Expire

PUBLISHED 12/4/2025 by , , , , and

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) offers premium tax credits to help make health insurance more affordable. Under original Affordable Care Act provisions, an income cap for premium tax credits was set at 400 percent of the federal poverty level. Above that threshold, federal financial assistance was not available, creating a “subsidy cliff.”

Enhanced premium tax credits expire at the end of this year. Enrollees currently receiving premium tax credits at any level of income will see their federal assistance decrease or disappear if enhanced premium tax credits expire, with an average increase of 114 percent to what enrollees pay in premiums net of tax credits.

The impact will be greatest for those whose unsubsidized premiums are highest: older Marketplace enrollees and those living in higher-premium locales.

Trump’s Silence on World AIDS Day Revives a New Lavender Scare

PUBLISHED 12/3/2025 by

Last month, the State Department warned employees not to commemorate World AIDS Day through official work accounts, including social media, nor should they use government funds to mark Tuesday, Dec. 2, as World AIDS Day. The day came and went in a quiet, cold Washington, D.C., without the president marking what it represented—the more than 700,000 Americans who died from HIV/AIDS-related causes in the United States since 1981. 

If his intentions were unclear, Trump’s budget proposed ending all CDC HIV prevention programs this past June, and Congress continues to negotiate next year’s budget, proposing massive cuts to HIV programs. 

For many young people who never lost friends or family, there may be the misconception that the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s was localized and small, but nearly 300,000 men who have sex with men have died from AIDS-related complications, with over 6,000 deaths in 2019 alone. To put this in perspective, this would be as if over half of Wyoming’s population disappeared, or if everyone in Pittsburgh, Penn., vanished overnight. 

Even Madonna criticized Trump’s move, posting on Instagram, “It’s one thing to order federal agents to refrain from commemorating this day, but to ask the general public to pretend it never happened is ridiculous, it’s absurd, it’s unthinkable. I bet he’s never watched his best friend die of AIDS, held their hand, and watched the blood drain from their face as they took their last breath at the age of 23.” 

Sex, Power and Impunity: Epstein’s Legacy in Historical Perspective

PUBLISHED 12/3/2025 by

The scandal that has preoccupied much of mainstream U.S. politics has, been, at one level, delightful: We have seen extremist Republicans—Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Thomas Massie and Nancy Mace—break with their party and its president in an effort to force into light the U.S. Department of Justice files on convicted sex trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. 

The story is almost irresistible for critics of the current national administration, feminists among them: Will we finally get to items from Epstein like the CD labeled “girl pics nude book 4”? What might these materials reveal? And whose misbehavior might they reveal?  

Fire the starting gun on analyses from every liberal, left, critical corner. Claims abound of shifting coalitions, changing tides, pages turned, a president’s authority shredded. 

But there are still as many questions stirring in the Epstein pot as there are answers. Why did these particular Republicans break from the pack? Is this a contemporary Republican version of feminism? 

And beneath them all: What good does it actually do us—or Epstein’s particular victims, or the scads of other victims of sexual coercion, trafficking and other mistreatment—to raise the heat so high on this particular scandal?

They Came for Nurses. What They’re Really Coming for Is Women’s Power—and Your Healthcare

PUBLISHED 12/3/2025 by

In a quiet regulatory maneuver with seismic consequences, the U.S. Department of Education—under the direction of Republican members of Congress—has proposed reclassifying all graduate nursing degrees as “non-professional.” What sounds like an obscure bureaucratic shift is, in reality, a direct attack on the women who make up nearly the entire nursing workforce and who hold together America’s fraying healthcare system.

War on Women Report: Antiabortion Extremist Charged in S.C. Shooting; Army OB-GYN Accused of Abusing Over 85 Women Patients

PUBLISHED 12/1/2025 by and | UPDATED 12/4/2025 at 9:06 A.M. PT

MAGA Republicans are back in the White House, and Project 2025 is their guide—the right-wing plan to turn back the clock on women’s rights, remove abortion access, and force women into roles as wives and mothers in the “ideal, natural family structure.” We know an empowered female electorate is essential to democracy. That’s why day after day, we stay vigilant in our goals to dismantle patriarchy at every turn. We are watching, and we refuse to go back. This is the War on Women Report.

Since our last report:
—North Dakota’s Supreme Court reinstated a total abortion ban, making it the 13th state with a near-total ban on abortion.
—Trump ordered Catherine Lucey, a woman reporter for Bloomberg, to be “quiet, piggy.”
—The U.S. moved to categorize countries with state-sponsored abortion and DEI policies as violators of human rights.
—Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has sued Planned Parenthood over allegedly “misrepresenting the safety” of abortion pills.
—On Thursday, Dec. 4, an unprecedented law banning doctors from shipping abortion pills takes effect in Texas.
—”The country’s most respected newspaper hosted a conversation about whether women’s equality and freedom was a mistake.”
—Doctor Maj. Blaine McGraw, an OB-GYN at Fort Hood military base in Texas, the third-largest base in the country, is under investigation for sexual abuse against patients. As of Monday, 85 victims have come forward.
—With Jeffrey Epstein survivors watching from the gallery above, the House agreed in a near-unanimous vote to force the release of all files related to the investigation of the convicted sex offender.

… and more.

We Can No Longer Tinker With the Machinery of Death: New ACLU Report Exposes Fatal Flaws in Capital Punishment

PUBLISHED 11/26/2025 by

On the first day of his second term President Donald J. Trump issued an executive order entitled Restoring The Death Penalty And Protecting Public Safety. In doing so he chose to ignore the mounting and irrefutable evidence, recently highlighted in a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), that the death penalty is riddled with human error and poses the undeniable risk of executing innocent people.

At least 150 countries have abolished the death penalty, by law or by practice. Resisting the humanitarian trend around the world, the United States remains part of a gruesome club, along with China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

Antiabortion Militants Open Training Facility in Memphis, Aim to Restart Large-Scale Clinic Blockades

PUBLISHED 11/26/2025 by and

Randall Terry, the founder of Operation Rescue, is trying to make a comeback by teaming up with antiabortion extremist group PAAU (the so-called “Progressive” Anti-Abortion Uprising group associated with dozens of clinic and pharmacy invasions), to kick off “Rescue Resurrection.” Their stated goal is to revive large-scale clinic blockades with a formal kick-off training and series of events starting Dec. 3 in Memphis, Tenn.

Terry was one of the leaders of mass clinic blockades that took antiabortion extremism to a new level in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Operation Rescue’s (OR’s) orchestrated blockades in Atlanta, Memphis and Wichita drew massive media coverage. During the sieges, accessing a targeted abortion clinic meant getting through a gauntlet of bodies blocking clinic doors and driveways. Antiabortion activists traveled state to state in order to participate, blockading clinics, going limp when arrested (to represent the “unborn”) and requiring three to four police officers to remove each protester arrested and carry them to waiting police buses.

What to Know About the CDC’s Baseless New Guidance on Autism

PUBLISHED 11/24/2025 by

The rewriting of a page on the CDC’s website to assert the false claim that vaccines may cause autism sparked a torrent of anger and anguish from doctors, scientists and parents who say Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is wrecking the credibility of an agency they’ve long relied on for unbiased scientific evidence.

The revised CDC webpage will be used to support efforts to ditch most childhood vaccines, said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Vaccine. “It will be cited as evidence, even though it’s completely invented,” she said.

What Boys Learn When Powerful Men Face No Consequences

PUBLISHED 11/21/2025 by

For decades, Donald Trump has modeled a version of masculinity rooted in entitlement, impunity and the casual degradation of women—and he has done so from one of the most visible platforms on Earth. That visibility matters. When the most powerful man in the country repeatedly evades consequences for misogynous acts, it sends a potent cultural message to boys and young men about what manhood looks like and what women’s lives are worth.

This is why the stakes of the Epstein files extend far beyond Trump’s personal exposure. His ability—or inability—to finally face accountability is inseparable from the broader crisis of male socialization and the normalization of men’s violence against women.

At the same time, focusing solely on Trump risks missing the larger system that made Jeffrey Epstein’s predation possible. As feminists have long argued, these abuses were not aberrations but expressions of a patriarchal network that exploited girls and women with impunity. The Epstein saga is not simply a story of individual bad actors; it is an indictment of the cultural, financial and political institutions that protected them. Whether the public and political leaders confront that reality—or once again look away—will reveal as much about our collective values as it does about the men at the center of this scandal.