Progressive Politics

President Donald Trump has a long history of treating women like property.

From 1996 to 2015, he was the owner of the Miss Universe Organization. Many of the contestants complained about his inappropriate behavior towards them, such as entering the dressing rooms while they were naked. Tasha Dixon (Miss Arizona 2001) reported, “He just came strolling right in. … Some girls were topless. Other girls were naked.” Many of them were teenagers. In an interview with Howard Stern, Trump defended this behavior saying, “I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant.”

Since the 1970’s, no fewer than 26 women have accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct, ranging from harassment to sexual assault and rape. In a conversation with television host Billy Bush in 2005, Trump infamously stated that his celebrity status entitled him to do anything he wants to women without consent: “I just start kissing them,” he said, “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” He was subsequently convicted of sexual assault against E. Jean Carroll and directed to pay over $86 million in damages for assault and defamation.

Now, as Trump enters his second term in office, his rapaciousness seems to have found a new outlet of expression on the global stage. In an interview with Fox News, he stated that Ukraine should not have fought back against Russia when they invaded because Russia was “much bigger, much more powerful.” The following month, in a White House press conference with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump said that Ukraine “never should have started it”—as if they were somehow responsible for having caused themselves to be invaded.

Feminist writers have long argued that there is an intrinsic relationship between patriarchy, rape and colonialism. The seizure of land by force is comparable to the seizure of a woman’s body—and historically rape and war have often gone hand-in-hand.

In order to get a better understanding of how Trump’s attitudes towards women might be related to his foreign policy, I reached out to Dr. Judith Herman, a world-renowned expert in trauma studies. Herman is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, director of training at the Victims of Violence Program at Cambridge Hospital (Massachusetts), and a lifelong feminist activist. Her pathbreaking 1992 book Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror has been described as “almost singularly responsible for the legitimization of rape trauma in the psychiatric field.”