Blog Post

How Trump Has Threatened Women and Families in His First 100 Days

Donald Trump has been President of the United States for nearly a whole 100 days (We know. It feels so much longer to us, too). In that time, he’s already broken a number of campaign promises. For example, remember how he swore he’d “drain the swamp?” Neither does he, or his family, or the dozens of former lobbyists and other representatives of corporate interests currently working in his Administration.
And thanks to immense popular resistance (and the continued existence of Constitutional separation of powers), he’s sustained some significant losses, too — all wins for women and families. He failed to win the confirmation of extreme anti-woman nominee Andy Puzder as Secretary of Labor. He failed to secure the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, allowing 24 million people to keep their health insurance. He failed to enact an anti-immigrant, anti-refugee executive order that could stand up in court – twice. And he failed to take money from state and local governments as punishment for not using limited resources to enforce immigration laws the federal government is tasked with enforcing.
But when you have as many bad plans as Trump (aided by his allies in Congress), it’s possible to not win every single time, yet still do a lot to undermine women and families. And in the last 100 days, Trump has managed to do quite a bit of damage to a lot of our most important issues.
 Reproductive Rights and Health
From his very first day in office, the Trump Administration has attacked women’s health by:

• Reinstating the Global Gag Rule
• Installing anti-ACA, anti-abortion Tom Price as head of Health and Human Services
• Successfully putting Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court — including backing the unprecedented GOP move to change Senate rules to confirm him without bipartisan support
• Supporting Congressional attacks on federal Title X Funding to Planned Parenthood, undermining women’s access to trusted community providers and preventive care
• Proposing structural changes to Medicaid that would harm the health and economic security of low-income women and their families
• Appointing Roger Severino, an anti-woman, anti-LGBTQ individual, to lead the Office of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights

Workplace Justice
Not content just to make life harder where our health is concerned, he also did his best to make our lives harder at work by:

• Making it more difficult for women to sue their employer for sexual harassment, as well as rolling back other protections for fair and safe workplaces
• Removing protections for LGBTQ federal employees
• Appointing Alexander Acosta, who wouldn’t promise to defend overtime pay for workers, as Labor Secretary

 Education
Compared with his predecessors, observers have noted that Trump is much less intellectually inclined. So it’s not exactly shocking that his administration would also attack education by:

• Appointing the first Secretary of Education who has never worked in, attended, or been a parent of a student at a public school, and who has spent decades funding efforts to undermine public education
• Rescinding Title IX guidance from the Department of Education that protected trans students in schools and programs that receive federal funding
• Siding with student loan companies over student borrowers
• Issuing an Executive Order that disparages the federal role in education – a role the federal government took on in order to protect students’ civil rights

 Tax & Budget
Donald Trump still hasn’t released his tax returns like he promised, so we still don’t know whether or how much Trump pays in taxes, whether he will benefit from his own tax plan, or whether he’s got any troubling business ties to companies and countries working against America’s best interests. But he’s definitely threatened everyone else’s economic security by:

• Proposing a budget that undermines the economic security of women and families by cutting or eliminating programs that ensure basic living standards for all Americans
• Proposing a tax plan that gives massive tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations

 Targeting Marginalized Women & Communities
Donald Trump’s presidency is scary enough for native-born, straight, cis and/or white women. For women who are also people of color, LGBTQ, and/or who come from different countries (or whose families come from different countries), and for all women who want to live free of state violence and domestic violence, his 100 day attacks have been magnified, by:

• Issuing executive orders that could radically increase police power to criminalize and brutalize communities of color and immigrant communities
• Proposing to eliminate funding for important safety programs under the Violence Against Women Act
• Dropping questions about LGBTQ status from the Census and removing information about LGBT rights from various government websites
• Confirming a man who has a “consistent, incontrovertible hostility towards a broad swath of women’s rights and civil rights” as Attorney General
• Frankly, selecting a Cabinet that’s pretty terrible all around
• Choosing non-Cabinet picks who are pretty terrible, too, including the wage gap denier advising him on women’s issues, and the known white nationalist advising him on immigration issues (and practically everything else)

It’s been a long 100 days, but this is also just the beginning of our fight to stop the worst of the Trump agenda, and to advance our best interests instead. So just in case you’re not “sick of winning” yet, sign our We the Resistance manifesto, brush up on ways you can have an impact, and definitely stay informed and ready to act.