Abortion

Subterms

    More stories

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Wyoming’s Abortion Bans Are Unconstitutional, Judge Rules

      by

      The ruling found that two state laws — one barring use of abortion pills, and one banning all forms of abortion — violated the state Constitution’s “fundamental right to make health care decisions.” A Wyoming judge ruled on Monday that two state abortion bans — including the first state law specifically banning the use of pills for abortion — violated the Wyoming Constitution and could not be enforced.Judge Melissa Owens of Teton County District Court wrote in her ruling that both the ban on medication abortion and a broader ban against all methods of abortion “impede the fundamental right to make health care decisions for an entire class of people, pregnant women.” She added, “The abortion statutes suspend a woman’s right to make her own health care decisions during the entire term of a pregnancy and are not reasonable or necessary to protect the health and general welfare of the people.”Enforcement of the two abortion bans, passed last year, had been temporarily halted by Judge Owens while the court case proceeded. Her decision on Monday blocks the laws permanently, although the state is expected to appeal. Efforts to reach the state attorney general’s office and the governor’s office were unsuccessful on Monday night.The suit to block the bans was filed by a group of plaintiffs that included two abortion providers in Wyoming; an obstetrician-gynecologist who often treats high-risk pregnancies; an emergency-room nurse; a fund that gives financing to abortion patients; and a woman who said her Jewish faith required access to abortion if a pregnant woman’s physical or mental health or life was in danger.An amendment to the Wyoming Constitution, approved by an overwhelming majority of the state’s voters in 2012, guarantees adults the right to make their own health care decisions.In court last year, the state, represented by Jay Jerde, a special assistant attorney general for Wyoming, argued that even though doctors and other health providers must be involved in abortions, there were many instances in which abortion was not “health care” because “it’s not restoring the woman’s body from pain, physical disease or sickness.”Mr. Jerde also argued that the constitutional amendment allowing people to make decisions about their own health care did not apply to abortion because terminating a pregnancy affected not just the woman making the decision, but the fetus as well.Judge Owens rejected both of those arguments. She wrote: “The uncontested facts establish that the abortion statutes fail to accomplish any of the asserted interests by the state. The state did not present any evidence refuting or challenging the extensive medical testimony presented by the plaintiffs.”Dr. Giovannina Anthony, an obstetrician-gynecologist and abortion provider who was one of the plaintiffs in the case, said on Monday night that she was “grateful and relieved that the judge agreed that abortion is health care and that abortion bans violate the rights of pregnant women.”Dr. Anthony said she expected the state to appeal. “This is not the end of the fight in Wyoming, but for now we can continue to provide evidence-based care without fear of a prison sentence.” More

    • 200 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      We’ll need to fight to protect US reproductive rights. Here’s what to expect | Sophie Brickman

      by

      At around 10pm ET on election night, with prediction needles listing rightwards, and various friends’ group chats starting to become inundated by the river-of-tears-down-my-face emoji – even that early, we were collectively way beyond a single tear – I left Steve Kornacki frantically bobbing and weaving around a map of Georgia, and went to bed. Somehow, I slept through until the morning, when I awoke in “Trump’s America”, as news organizations were calling it, and to a torrent of emails and notes from friends bemoaning, among other things, the very real possibility of a federal abortion ban.“Are we still gonna have birth control?” one friend texted, in disbelief.“Sorry for the US you’re waking up to,” another wrote from Oxford. “Confounding,” his wife echoed, from across the pond.And so, to get a clear-eyed, postmortem picture of what might be facing women and their loved ones in America, two days after the election I called up Nancy Northup, the president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, an advocacy group with a stated mission of “using the power of law to advance reproductive rights as fundamental human rights around the world”.In practice, that means unleashing an army of seasoned litigators to fight for abortion access, among other things, in courtrooms across the country and around the world – they currently work in five continents. She began as CEO in 2003, 30 years after Roe v Wade constitutionally protected abortion rights. Twenty years later, after fighting the good fight for decades, she and her litigators are revving up for what might be the fight of their careers.“We were always accused before Roe v Wade was overturned [of] crying wolf,” Northup told me on the phone from her office in Manhattan. “People don’t need to worry about whether or not we’re crying wolf now.”There are the women who have died when denied abortions by healthcare providers who are unsure of the legal ramifications of performing abortions unless the mother’s life is at risk. There are those who have spent days in the ICU after being denied care, and emerge with their future fertility forever compromised. There are the obstetricians fleeing states with strict abortion bans (over 20% of practitioners in Idaho, and over half of high-risk obstetricians), feeling that they are unable to safely, and properly, do the job they trained years to do. There are the downstream consequences of bans in restrictive states affecting states with robust abortion protections, simply because those who can travel to receive care end up taking appointments away from local residents.The question that kept circulating among my friends in the hours after the election results became clear was: How come seven out of 10 measures to protect reproductive rights passed at the state level, and Trump still won?Northup chalks the dissonance up to two things.“There’s a difference between what policy do I want, and what candidate do I like,” she said. “Of course they should be linked, but we can see that they aren’t.”On top of that, Northup fears there are too many mental leaps to make.“Most people think, You know what, if the right to abortion is protected in my state, I’m good. They don’t realize a federal abortion ban could override their state’s rights.”While she wrote in a statement after the results came in that Trump’s first term “lead to the deaths of numerous women who are likely the tip of the iceberg”, she said it was too early to paint a picture of just how large that iceberg might loom in his second. Still, she underscored that even if a bill isn’t signed into law – something she pointed out Trump has said he wouldn’t do, though “consistency isn’t the hallmark of the president-elect” – there are ways to threaten abortion access at a national level.Northup and other colleagues at the Center held an open video meeting a few hours before we spoke, the tone of which was sober, with lots of “no way to sugarcoat what we’re facing right nows”s, and “serious situation”s and “tough road ahead”s.Among her top concerns are, first, the fear that new laws will threaten patients’ access to medication abortion – something she calls “a lifeline”, as two-thirds of patients in the US use it – either by the FDA restricting mifepristone, or states using a 1873 chastity law known as the Comstock Act, which bans “any drug, medicine, article, or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion” from being transported by a mail carrier; and, second, the targeting of populations in states with bans. She recently found herself on the phone with a woman whose family was leaving Texas to get an abortion in New York, and wasn’t sure if her husband should come with her or not.“That’s a culture, or a climate, of fear of prosecution, and intimidation, and silencing,” she said. “It has a chilling effect.”And it’s a chilling effect that the minority of American voters want to cast over the country. One exit poll noted that while voters in 10 “key states” believe by a wide margin that abortion should be legal, only 14% considered it their most important voting issue.I reached out to a friend who works in the reproductive rights space for help parsing through this disconnect.“The lack of urgency that voters placed on this issue may reflect an erroneous belief that state protections can save them; misplaced faith in Trump’s softened messaging on abortion; or simply a reality that many are struggling to make ends meet and feel abortion is an issue they can’t afford to think about today,” she wrote. “Who knows.”Whatever the reason, it means the litigators at CRR have their work cut out for them, as they fight for what the majority of Americans want.Right now, Northup is revving up for a case that will start on Tuesday in Idaho, arguing that the state, by refusing to give stabilizing care to pregnant women in emergencies, is violating the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (Emtala), a federal law that ensures access to emergency care. And she is gaining strength from success stories, like Missouri, which overturned its near-total abortion ban on Tuesday, despite electing Trump, something she called “stunning”. (She remembers having a conversation with a senator in Missouri years ago, and bringing up the question of just how to talk about abortion rights in the state. The senator’s advice: “Don’t.”)How does she feel?“Armored up and ready to go.”For those of us who might not feel that way, there are other ways to help. On the video call, one colleague offered three action items: First, take care of yourselves and your communities. Second: sign up for alerts from the Center. Finally, find and donate to a local abortion access fund.Godspeed.

      Sophie Brickman is a contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Times and other publications, and the author of Baby, Unplugged: One Mother’s Search for Balance, Reason, and Sanity in the Digital Age and the novel Plays Well With Others More

    • 188 Shares149 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘Your body, my choice’: what misogynistic Trump supporters feel about sexual power | Moira Donegan

      by

      You can’t say it was a fluke. If in 2016, Donald Trump’s novelty, combined with his loss of the popular vote, allowed liberals to retain a bit of plausible deniability about what his presidential win meant about America, this time, there is no such comfort. Donald Trump is no longer a mystery or an amusing diversion: no one can claim that they do not understand full extent of his malignant corruption, or the seriousness of his movement’s hostility to pluralist democracy. And he won the popular vote.Many postmortems of last week’s election have tried to preserve the notion that Trump’s voter’s did not endorse him and his vision – that they know not what they do. This is dishonest, and a bit patronizing toward Trump’s supporters. Trump’s voters, for the most part, know exactly what he is, and what voting for him means. They are not ignorant or mistaken about him. They endorse him and what he is.A large part of what a majority of Americans voted for last week was the Trump campaign’s virulent misogyny. Trump himself, an adjudicated rapist who has bragged about both committing sexual assault and engineering the reversal of Roe v Wade, speaks of women in vulgar, degrading terms. He picked a running mate who has denigrated childless women as “psychotic” “cat ladies”. His adviser and funder Elon Musk, who seems to have designs on becoming something of a shadow president in Trump’s second term, is a techno-fascist pro-natalist who goes around offering women insemination.The Trump campaign positioned itself as a champion of a hierarchical gender order, aiming to restore men to a place of wrongfully deprived supremacy over women. Many of his voters cast their lot in with Trump hoping that he would do just that.Now, in the wake of Trump’s victory, some of his supporters have adopted a slogan which neatly joins the movement’s twin projects of forced sex and forced pregnancy: “Your body, my choice.”“Your body, my choice,” was coined by the far-right, pro-Nazi internet troll and Trump dinner guest Nick Fuentes on the night of the election. “Your body, my choice,” Fuentes tweeted. “Forever.” It’s a taunting inversion of the pro-choice slogan “my body, my choice”, meant to assert women’s autonomy: instead, “your body, my choice” presents women’s full citizenship and freedom as laughable, asserting, in gleeful terms, the male supremacy that will now carry for the force of policy and law under a new Trump administration.In response to Fuentes’s post, pro-Trump men have adopted the slogan en masse to troll women online. An analysis from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that the use of the phrase soared on social media in the days following the election, along with similar misogynist phrases like “get back in the kitchen”, and the use of sexist slurs directed at liberal and progressive women like Kamala Harris and Rachel Maddow. Female TikTok users reported a flood of such comments, with “your body, my choice” chief among them on the platform. And young girls in schools, along with their teachers and parents, reported incidents of the phrase being yelled out by boys in taunting jeers of harassment and intimidation in the days following the election.“Your body, my choice” is a rejection of women’s rights to control their own bodies in more ways than one. In addition to the phrase’s sneering inversion of a pro-choice phrase, rejecting the abortion right and claiming the overturn of Roe as a victory for men, the phrase has a second, dual meaning: as a rape threat. The men and boys who use it are not merely taunting women with the threat of an unwanted, forced pregnancy. They are taunting them with the threat of forced sex.It is not always a connection that the misogynist right has made so explicit. In other eras, the anti-choice movement has adopted an overtly religious attitude of sexual repression, aiming to restrict abortion as a means of restricting sexuality across the board. But this preacherly, sexually repressed masculinity is not the masculinity of today’s misogynist rightwing movement. Rather, the Maga right is one that sees sex not as something that must be rendered shameful and pushed out of the public sphere, but as a weapon that can be used to punish, humiliate and dominate women.This new, avowedly and vulgarly sexual rightwing masculinity is what Fuentes was crystalizing in his snide little coinage of “your body, my choice”: it is one that aims to use physical and sexual force to coerce women into a degraded gendered role, one subject to men’s domination and only partial, limited and conditional in its citizenship and access to the public sphere. In this sense, their projects in joyfully celebrating rape and restricting women’s access to abortion are two sides of the same coin: the right seeks to dominate women and to commandeer the inside of their bodies so as to force them into a gendered role against their will, be that role as sex object or as mother.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis is why it is fitting that Trump, who was found liable for the rape of one woman and accused of sexual assault by two dozen others, was the president to secure the overturning of Roe v Wade; it is why it is fitting that two of the justices who voted to overturn Roe, Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, have been credibly accused of sexual misconduct, each by more than one woman. It is because the sex politics of the right is not an anti-sex, puritanical politics. It is a politics of sexual domination.There is no use pretending that this is not what the Trump movement is. And there is no use in pretending that this is not what many of the men who voted for Trump hoped to achieve when they supported him. Much of the pre-election coverage of the gender dynamics of Trump’s campaign has disappeared in the days following the election, and perhaps this unpleasant reality is why: most Americans voted for a man they have every reason to believe is a rapist. For some of them, at least, that was not a liability, but an asset.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

    • 225 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      ¿La elección de Trump fue un revés para las mujeres de EE. UU.? Ni ellas están de acuerdo

      by

      Kamala Harris habría sido la primera mujer presidenta en los casi 250 años de historia del país. Pero muchas mujeres eligieron a Donald Trump, a pesar de su historial de sexismo.Para muchos estadounidenses de izquierda, está rotundamente claro que las mujeres que apoyaron a Donald Trump en las elecciones presidenciales votaron en contra de sus propios intereses.Las mujeres liberales, en particular, han pasado los últimos días prácticamente atónitas, dándole vueltas a cómo otras mujeres podrían haber rechazado a Kamala Harris, quien habría sido la primera mujer en dirigir Estados Unidos en sus casi 250 años de historia. En su lugar, eligieron a un candidato que desperdiga misoginia aparentemente con regocijo. Por segunda vez.Una votante de Maine, entrevistada después de que Trump declarara la victoria, ofreció una reflexión compartida por muchas personas. En sus palabras: “La hermandad no apareció”.En muchos sentidos, los resultados de las elecciones parecieron contradecir generaciones de avances hacia la igualdad de la mujer y para el feminismo en general. En las últimas décadas, las mujeres han avanzado en casi todas las facetas de la vida estadounidense, representan en general una mayor proporción de la mano de obra que en el pasado, ocupan puestos de trabajo bien remunerados y superan a los hombres en la educación superior, aunque siguen estando infrarrepresentadas en los niveles más altos de la empresa y el gobierno.Ahora se encuentran en un país donde Trump ganó decisivamente con una campaña que enfrentó a hombres contra mujeres, sentándose con conductores de pódcast que comercian con el sexismo y eligiendo a un compañero de fórmula que había criticado a las mujeres solteras como “señoras con gatos y sin hijos”. Trump se atribuyó el mérito de nombrar a los jueces de la Corte Suprema que anularon el derecho constitucional al aborto, pero pareció pagar un bajo precio en las urnas. Inmediatamente después de las elecciones circularon por las redes sociales publicaciones de hombres que decían: “tu cuerpo, mi elección”.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 188 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Make no mistake: this Trump presidency will continue to attack abortion rights | Moira Donegan

      by

      Abortion rights initiatives were on the ballot in 10 states on Tuesday, and won in seven of them. One of the losers was prop 4, Florida’s abortion rights measure, which received a whopping 57% of the vote but failed to meet the state’s unusually high 60% threshold, meaning that the state’s six-week ban will remain in place. Asked about the Florida abortion rights proposition ahead of the election, Trump said that when he went to cast his ballot near Palm Beach, he would vote against it.It has always been a little hard to believe that Donald Trump personally hates abortion, even if it is abundantly clear how little he thinks of women. Trump, after all, has claimed to have numerous conflicting positions on abortion rights throughout his life. And his brand of masculinity is boorish, vulgar, and above all, sexually entitled – far from the priggish, repressed moralism of more classical anti-abortion figures like Mike Pence.Maybe this is why, though Trump appointed three of the six justices who overturned Roe v Wade and has boasted about his role in ending the right to an abortion, many voters seem to not quite believe that he will continue to suppress the procedure further in his coming second term. Abortion rights measures won in several states that Trump carried on Tuesday – including Arizona, Nevada, Montana and Missouri, all states that Trump won. A lot of people, it seems, voted for abortion rights in their own states, and then also voted for Donald Trump – who, make no mistake, will move to restrict abortion access nationwide when he returns to the White House next year.Trump, of course, has insisted that this will not happen – which on its own might be a decent indication that it will. But there is evidence that the new Trump administration will pursue a broad agenda restricting women’s rights, including nationwide attacks on abortion access, even beyond that offered by Trump’s habitual pattern of self-serving dishonesty.Republicans have won control of the Senate and are likely to capture the House of Representatives; if they do, they may well advance legislation to ban abortion nationwide. (And to pass it: there is no reason to believe that a Republican governing trifecta will preserve the filibuster.) A bill like this would probably not be termed a “ban” by its sponsors: Republicans, wary of the public disapproval of abortion bans, have started calling their new abortion restrictions by chillingly imprecise euphemisms, such as “standard” or even “protection”. But the effect of the laws are the same: to outlaw abortions. This could take the form of a gestational limit, or of the federal recognition of fetal personhood. Trump may well sign such legislation into law, eliminating abortion rights even in Democratic-controlled states and those that have recently passed abortion rights referendums with the stroke of a pen.But Republicans do not even need to manage to pass a bill through Congress to make abortion much more difficult to get. Trump can simply restrict abortion through federal agencies. He will soon be in control of the FDA, for example, which regulates the abortion drug mifepristone, part of a two-drug regimen that now accounts for most abortions in the United States. Mifepristone is a safe, effective drug that allows abortions to be performed in the privacy of patients’ homes, with little of the expensive clinical involvement and overhead that makes surgical abortions more time-intensive and costly for providers and patients alike.Naturally, the anti-abortion movement hates it. Since Dobbs, a coalition of anti-choice groups and Republican attorneys general have been suing the FDA, seeking to overturn the agency’s 2000 approval of the drug. Trump will be able to rescind access to it almost immediately, taking the drug off the legal US market. If he gives the anti-choice movement what they want, he may also direct the FDA to revoke approval of the most reliable forms of female-controlled contraception, like Plan B, IUDs, and certain birth control pills, which the anti-choice movement falsely claims cause abortions.Trump is likely to also revive enforcement of the Comstock Act, a long-dormant 1873 law that bans the shipment of anything that could be used to induce an abortion through the US mail. The Comstock Act has not been enforced in decades – parts of it were repealed in the 20th century, and other sections were long rendered moot by supreme court precedents like Roe and Casey – and would have the effect of criminalizing much abortion care. Since Dobbs, several Democratic-controlled states have passed what are called shield laws, which protect doctors who mail abortion drugs from states where the procedure is legal into states that have bans. This mail-order abortion operation is, for now, technically legal: it has preserved women’s independence and dignity and no doubt saved thousands of lives.But when the Comstock Act is enforced, much of this sector of abortion provision will disappear. Combined with the revocation of FDA approval for mifepristone, this will inevitably mean that many women seeking abortions will turn to black market surgical abortion providers, and suffer the risks attendant to such procedures. A return to pre-Roe levels of abortion ban-related mortality could probably follow.Trump is also likely to reverse the Biden administration’s guidance on Emtala, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, a federal law that requires emergency rooms to provide stabilizing care to all patients facing health crises. Emtala has been the subject of much post-Dobbs litigation, as states like Idaho and Texas have sought to argue that their abortion bans supersede the federal law, thus requiring hospitals in their states to withhold emergency abortions from women in medical emergencies who will suffer or die without them. The US supreme court declined to decide the issue last summer; a Trump administration may help to resolve it for them.This is all just what Trump could do on his own in his first years back in office. But the impact of a Trump term on American women’s access to abortion will be felt long after Trump himself is no longer with us. Trump will probably appoint at least two supreme court justices to lifetime seats in his coming term; he will also fill an unknown number of vacancies on the lower federal courts, whose judges also serve for life. These judges are all likely to be anti-abortion zealots, as are the federal bureaucrats Trump will bring in to staff agencies such as the FDA, CDC and Department of Health and Human Services.We are already living in an era when abortion access is restricted more than it has been in decades. Now, it will be restricted more. We may well never have as much reproductive freedom as we do now ever again.American women are well advised to prepare for this, to not wait for the Trump administration to restrict the tools they use to control their own bodies. Sterilization and long-acting birth control remain accessible, for now; women who want these should move quickly to get them. Plan B and abortion pills can both be purchased ahead of time and kept on hand in the privacy of a medicine cabinet; such purchases may provide security and peace of mind to those staring down the barrel of another Trump term. Abortion, as we know, will never be eliminated; it can only be less safe, and less dignified. But there are few things as strong as women’s determination to control their own lives. That determination is certainly stronger than the law.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Wisconsin supreme court seems hostile to 1849 abortion ban in oral arguments

      by

      During heated oral arguments on Monday morning, the Wisconsin supreme court appeared poised to find an 1849 law banning most abortions cannot be enforced.The legal status of abortion in Wisconsin has been contested since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade and ended the right to abortion nationwide, triggering bans across the country – including in Wisconsin, where a 175-year-old ban immediately went into effect.Democrats in Wisconsin have seized on abortion as a campaign issue, with Justice Janet Protasiewicz expressing her support for abortion rights and winning a seat on the court in spring 2023. Protasiewicz’s election to the court helped flip the ideological balance on the bench, which is now controlled by a narrow liberal majority.It is highly unlikely the liberal-controlled court will uphold the ban.The 1849 statute, which was nullified by Roe v Wade and then reanimated when the landmark decision was overturned, declares that ending “the life of an unborn child” is a felony, except when required to save the life of the mother. In July 2023, a Dane county judge ruled that the 1849 ban applies only to feticide and not “consensual” abortion, citing a previous ruling that interpreted the statute as an anti-feticide law, and in September, providers including Planned Parenthood resumed offering abortion care.The Sheboygan county district attorney Joel Urmanski appealed the ruling, which is now before the Wisconsin supreme court.“The position of the circuit court below … is ultimately indefensible,” said Matthew Thome, an attorney representing Urmanski, during his opening argument. Thome argued that the 1849 law should be interpreted to “prohibit consensual abortions from conception until birth, subject to an exception when it is necessary to save the life of the mother”.Justice Jill Karofsky interrogated Urmanski’s interpretation of the law, asking if it would provide exceptions for rape, incest, the health of the mother, or fetal abnormalities.“Just to be clear, a 12-year-old girl who was sexually assaulted by her father and as a result, became pregnant, under your interpretation … she would be forced to carry her pregnancy to term?” asked Karofsky. She noted that the “penalty for aborting after a sexual assault would be more severe than the penalty for the sexual assault”.In response to a question about the medical consequences of a ban, Thome responded that he was unsure, given that he is “not a doctor”.“I fear that what you are asking this court to do is to sign the death warrants of women and children and pregnant people in this state, because under your interpretation, they could all be denied life saving medical care, while the medical professionals who are charged with taking care of them are forced to sit idly by,” said Karofsky.The court weighed the question of whether laws that were passed regulating abortion while Roe was in effect “impliedly repealed” the 1849 ban and rendered it unenforceable.“All of those statues” passed after 1973 and before it was overturned, “just go to the dust pile?” asked Karofsky.Justice Brian Hagedorn, a conservative-leaning judge, argued, of the 1849 ban, that “the law is still there”, adding that “the judiciary doesn’t get to edit laws, the judiciary doesn’t get to rewrite them, we didn’t delete it, we prevented its enforcement”.The assistant attorney general Hannah Jurss disagreed, arguing that “there is nothing in the text of these statutes that says in the event that Roe is overturned we somehow go back to the old law and throw out all of the new ones,” drawing a distinction between Wisconsin’s more than a century old law and “trigger” laws passed in certain states that were specifically designed to go into effect after Roe v Wade was overturned.A separate case, which the Wisconsin supreme court has also agreed to hear, would decide whether the right to abortion is protected under the state’s constitution – possibly opening the door to challenge other laws regulating abortion in the state. More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      At Women’s March Event, Organizers Say They Are Preparing a ‘Comeback Tour’

      by

      At a demonstration on Saturday, the crowd was small and enthusiasm was lacking. But organizers are planning a big march ahead of the inauguration.On Saturday, after former President Donald J. Trump’s re-election dashed progressives’ hopes of a new era for women’s rights and other left-wing causes, Women’s March held a hastily arranged protest-cum-dance party outside the headquarters of a conservative think tank in Washington. Only about a few hundred people showed up.The first Women’s March, held in the aftermath of Mr. Trump’s 2017 inauguration, drew hundreds of thousands of people to the National Mall in Washington to protest what they feared would be an assault on reproductive rights, immigrants and civil rights under his administration. But this week, Women’s March organizers are grappling with despair among their base that the president they oppose has been elected to a second term, and questions about where the movement is headed.The goal of the Saturday afternoon event was to reinvigorate the organization’s progressive base after the election and perhaps to unleash some anger at the Heritage Foundation, the think tank that had designed a policy playbook for a second Trump administration, Project 2025, whose goals included aggressively curtailing access to abortion. The foundation did not immediately respond on Saturday evening to a request for comment.“You are not going to take our joy,” said Rachel O’Leary Carmona, the executive director of Women’s March, before singing along to the music.But while a band and a D.J. played upbeat songs at top volume, the crowd did not do much more than sway to the beat.The hastily arranged protest doubled as a dance party outside the headquarters of a conservative think tank.Tierney L. Cross for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump’s ‘golden age of America’ could be an unrestrained imperial presidency

      by

      At 2.25am, Donald Trump gazed out at his jubilant supporters wearing “Make America Great Again” hats. He was surrounded by his wife, Melania, and his children, the Stars and Stripes and giant banners that proclaimed: “Dream big again” and “Trump will fix it!”“We’re going to help our country heal,” Trump vowed. “We have a country that needs help and it needs help very badly. We’re going to fix our borders, we’re going to fix everything about our country and we’ve made history for a reason tonight, and the reason is going to be just that.”Having risen from the political dead, the president-elect was already looking ahead to what he called the “golden age of America” – a country that had just shifted sharply to the right. And at its core was the promise of Trump unleashed: a radical expansion of presidential power.The 45th and 47th commander-in-chief will face fewer limits on his ambition when he is sworn in again in January. He returns as the head of a Republican party remade in his image over the past decade and as the architect of a right-leaning judiciary that helped eliminate his legal perils. Second time around, he has allies across Washington ready to enforce his will.Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist and former Republican congressional aide, said: “What we’re going to have is an imperial presidency. This is going to be probably the most powerful presidency in terms of centralising power and wielding power that we’ve had probably since FDR [Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was president from 1933 until his death in 1945].”Trump won big in this week’s presidential election against Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice-president. He became the first Republican in 20 years to win the national popular vote. He improved on his 2020 performance in every state except two (Washington and Utah) and made gains in nearly every demographic. A third of voters of colour supported him. Whereas Joe Biden won Latino men by 23 percentage points in 2020, Trump won them by 10 points in 2024.Emboldened by this mandate, Trump, who said he would be a “dictator”, but only on “day one”, is promising a second act more sweeping and transformational than the first. He is backed by a Republican party that regained control of the Senate, might retain the House of Representatives and is more acquiescent than ever. The opposition Democratic party is demoralised and lacks an obvious leader.Trump, who arrived in Washington as a political neophyte eight years ago, is less likely this time to be surrounded by establishment figures and steady hands curbing his darkest impulses. His allies have spent the past several months pre-screening candidates for his administration, aiming to ensure key posts will be filled by dependable foot soldiers. His pugnacious son Don Jr intends to have a say.Bardella added: “It’s going to be a more competent version of the first term. This time Donald Trump and his team know how the White House works. They know what type of personnel they need where to achieve what they want to achieve. They have, unlike last time, more of a complete hold of Congress.”Trump sceptics such as the House speaker Paul Ryan or the congresswoman Liz Cheney are gone, he noted, replaced by Maga devotees primed to do his bidding. “There’s going to be more continuity, more synergy, everyone’s going to march to the beat of the same drummer. There is no resistance within the Republican party any more and they are now facing a Democratic party that is leaderless, that is searching for its own identity, that’s going to have to recalibrate.”Trump will also expect compliance from a conservative supreme court that includes three of his own appointees. The court has loosened the legal guardrails that have hemmed past presidents in thanks to a July decision that gives presidents broad immunity from criminal prosecution.The 78-year-old businessman and former reality TV star also hopes to exploit a new universe of rightwing podcasters and influencers who were instrumental in his election and could help him shape the information ecosystem. Chief among these is X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who played a key role in the Trump campaign.Despite the daunting outlook, however, some commentators are optimistic that checks and balances will remain.Elaine Kamarck, a former official in the Bill Clinton administration, said: “For him to expand presidential power, Congress has to give up power and they’re not in the mood to do that. They’ve never done that. There are plenty of institutionalists in Congress.”Kamarck also expressed faith in the federal courts, noting that judges appointed by Trump only constitute 11% of the total placed on the bench by former presidents. A Trump dictatorship is “not going to happen”, she added. “Now, there might be things that the president wants to do that people don’t like that the Republican Congress goes along with him on but that’s politics. That’s not a dictatorship.”Trump will return to power with an aggressive agenda that includes what his ally Steve Bannon called “the deconstruction of the administrative state”. He has proposed a government efficiency commission headed by Musk that would gut the federal bureaucracy. Trump plans to fire federal workers by classifying thousands of them as being outside civil service protections. They could be replaced by what are essentially political appointees loyal to him.On his signature issue, illegal immigration, Trump has vowed to carry out the biggest deportation operation in American history, starting with people who have criminal records or final orders of deportation. He has called for using the national guard and empowering domestic police forces in what he has said will be “a bloody story”.He told Time magazine that he did not rule out building new migrant detention camps but “there wouldn’t be that much of a need for them” because people would be rapidly removed. His running mate, JD Vance, told the New York Times that deporting 1 million immigrants a year would be “reasonable”.During the election campaign Trump played down abortion as a second-term priority, even as he took credit for the supreme court ending a woman’s federal right to terminate a pregnancy and returning abortion regulation to state governments.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAt Trump’s insistence the Republican platform, for the first time in decades, did not call for a national ban on abortion. Even so, Trump has not explicitly said he would veto a national ban if it reached his desk. He has also indicated that he would let Robert F Kennedy Jr, the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, “go wild” on public health matters, including women’s health. Trump has promised to extend his 2017 tax cut, reversing Joe Biden’s income tax hikes on the wealthiest Americans and scrapping levies that fund energy measures to combat the climate crisis. Trump also has proposals aimed at working- and middle-class Americans: exempting tips and overtime wages from income taxes.Steve Schmidt, a political strategist and former campaign operative for George W Bush and John McCain, said: “He’s going to have a Republican Congress go through a deregulatory frenzy; they’re going to propose brutal spending cuts that will affect the people primarily that voted for them but also a lot of other poor people in the country.”Trump has vowed to eliminate the Department of Education and slash federal funding “for any school or program pushing critical race theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children”. The Trump campaign made opposition to transgender rights a central part of its closing argument, with the president-elect vowing to “keep men out of women’s sports”. He plans to end Biden’s policy of extending Title IX civil rights protections to transgender students and ask Congress to require that only two genders can be recognised at birth.On the world stage, Trump touts an “America first” ideology that would make the US more isolationist, non-interventionist and protectionist than at any time since the second world war. He has proposed tariffs of 10% to 20% on foreign goods despite economists’ warnings that this would drive up inflation.Trump has repeatedly praised authoritarians such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Russia’s Vladimir Putin and not ruled out withdrawing from Nato. He has said he would end Russia’s war on Ukraine within a day, prompting fears of a a deal that compels Ukraine to surrender territory, and reportedly told Israel’s president, Benjamin Netanyahu, that he wants the war in Gaza to be finished by January.Schmidt commented: “They will act very quickly in Ukraine to end the war while escalating the situation with Iran and you’ll see very quickly a tremendous amount of instability with Mexico. It’s going to be horrendous. It’s going to be shocking.”Trump, who falsely claims that the climate crisis is a “hoax”, has said he will again remove the US from the Paris climate accords and dismantle Biden’s climate agenda. He has promised to increase oil production and burn more fossil fuels – “Drill, baby, drill!” was a regular chant at Trump rallies – and weaken regulatory powers or eliminate bodies such as the Environmental Protection Agency.The ascent of Trump, the first convicted criminal to be elected president, is also a crisis for the rule of law. The justice department is moving to wind down the two federal cases against him after he vowed to fire the special counsel Jack Smith “within two seconds” of becoming president. Trump has vowed to bend the department to his will, pardon January 6 rioters and target journalists, election workers and other perceived political enemies.Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, said: “Will people who he believes broke the law in trying to persecute him and his friends be investigated? Yes. Will they be subject to all of the defense mechanisms and the fair trials that he was afforded? Absolutely.“I’m sure he looks at it and says, ‘I could have gone after Hillary, there’s a lot of reason to; I showed you an open hand and what did you do? You persecuted me for eight years. The gloves are off.’ That doesn’t mean anything other than, ‘OK, you decided to use these weapons, I now own the weapons. I’m going to use the weapons too.’ It’s not the end of American democracy.”Others, however, are less sanguine. Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman who campaigned for Harris this year, said: “It’s going to be a revenge tour on steroids. I don’t think people realise what’s coming. He is emboldened. He didn’t think he’d win in 2016. He lied about 2020 but oh my God, he thought he was going to win now, he did, and now he believes, ‘Man, they want me and they want what I’ve been promising and I’ve been promising this enemies list.“‘I’m going to put my enemies in jail, I’m going to fuck Nato, I’m going to do what Putin wants me to do.’ If I were the rest of the world and the country, I’d be scared to death because we just put an absolutely out-of-control authoritarian in the White House. That’s scary shit.”Trump’s strongman tendencies will receive defiance and pushback, however. Along with Congress and the courts, America has a robust civil society and rambunctious media. The Women’s March of 2017 set the tone for four years of resistance by progressive activists and pressure groups, an energy that converted into electoral gains in 2018, 2020 and 2022.Now, as Trump prepares for his once unthinkable return to the White House, these weary foot soldiers are preparing to do it all over again. That, in turn, raises the prospect of a fierce backlash from the would-be American Caesar who once asked authorities if they could just shoot protesters in the legs.“What am I worried about most?” pondered Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington. “The answer is that in response either to demonstrations in the streets or the exigencies of rounding up and deporting millions of immigrants here illegally, Mr Trump will invoke the Insurrection Act, which is the closest thing in American law to the declaration of martial law.“That prospect terrifies me. There’s very little else about the administration that terrifies me but the mass deployment of the US military in domestic affairs put us, I’m afraid, on a very slippery slope.” More