How Misogyny Fuels Fascism | The Nation
Donald Trump has a decades-long history of humiliation, objectification and alleged abuse of women, from his beauty pageants where contestants complained of being treated like his personal harem to his “Grab ’em by the pussy” Access Hollywood tape, his sexual abuse and defamation of E. Jean Carroll, and his contemptuous campaigns against two women: Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris. At the White House, his administration has moved to exclude women, particularly black women, from positions of power and has supported policies that attack women’s equality and autonomy. Why does the sexism at the heart of Trumpism seem to be taken relatively lightly, especially as it plays out in what is arguably the largest and most disgusting sexual abuse scandal to ever exist: the horror of Jeffrey Epstein, with all his connections to the president and his inner circle that his team seems so desperate to cover up? And alongside racism, how does sexism work in the fascist resurgence that we are experiencing?
To talk about all this, I have three experts. Nina Burleigh is a journalist, best-selling author, documentary producer, and editor of a Substack about politics called American freakshow. Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart is a minister, professor, and first-ever director of strategic partnerships at Political Research Associates (PRA), a social justice research and strategy center founded in 1981. In 2025, PRA devoted an entire issue of its excellent journal to the relationship between gender and authoritarianism. My third guest, Annie Wilkinson, wrote the main essay.
Laura Flandre: This deluge of information about the Epstein files seems to last for years and never stops. What do you remember from what we are witnessing?
Nina Burleigh: What I always tell people is that it’s not just about sex. It’s not just about the abuse of women, I’m sorry to say, because that’s a big part of the problem, and maybe it’s the basis of how Epstein operated. It’s really about influence, foreign affairs, and the way American foreign policy has played out over the last 20 years. You can see it in interactions like this, particularly with Saudi sheikhs, with members of the European Council. Everyone was involved in this operation.
LF: One of the things that frustrates me is that the Epstein story seems to be covered in a separate column of the paper by different journalists than those covering the ICE raids, the rise of authoritarianism and all the rest. But the characters, of course, are super connected, from Trump and Musk to the guy who directed the misbegotten movie Melania. Am I the only one here who thinks there are wires that need to be connected?
Annie Wilkinson: This example gives us the opportunity to distinguish between the different actors who come together around gender politics or perverse gender politics, and perhaps also anti-gender politics, which is the subject of my essay to which you refer. What anti-gender politics can do is help bring these different factions together. Transactional authoritarians who exploit gender for their own power. Trump, Epstein, MAGA politicians who have a deep-seated sense of misogyny and sexism, but are transactional about it with Christian nationalists, who are ideologically committed to patriarchy, who believe it is divinely ordained and central to their worldview. Other elements of this coalition around similar gender politics also include ethno-nationalists. In the United States, it is white nationalists who are invested in a strict gender hierarchy and gender essentialism, or this idea of who women are and who is a woman, in order to maintain the racial and demographic control that interests them. Another aspect is tech oligarchs like Elon Musk, like Peter Thiel, who benefit from gender inequality that allows them to maximize capitalist extraction.
LF: The people who have suffered the most from federal government layoffs are black women. Immigrant women are targeted and intimidated. It seems to me that you have a particular desire to humiliate military women. And most recently, this bizarre White House post of an edited photo of the very dignified and elegant Minnesota protester Nekima Levy Armstrong to suggest that instead of standing strong and proud with a constituency behind her, she was crying and had darker skin. Somehow the word Backlash seems too weak for that. What do you think is really the agenda here, Naomi?
Naomi Washington-Leapheart: In the United States, the least protected women throughout history have been black women. Black women have had this testimony. And now it’s pretty normal for a MAGA influencer to say that black women have brains that process slower than anyone else. And no one disputes that.
LF: Charlie Kirk.
NWL: RIGHT. No one is helping black women at this time. The carefreeness that this moment invites makes visible what has long been invisible or under-recognized. They give us the answer they want us to internalize, which is that women are the problem, black women are the problem, et cetera.
LF: Nina, you also talked about why some of these things work, especially on some of the women you’re with, and Melania is just one of them. Why does this thing resonate? White women overwhelmingly voted for this guy twice.
Attention : They love to talk about the misery of feminist or progressive women. They hate motherhood. They hate children. And yet, they are in reality the big beneficiaries of the second wave of feminism. On one level, what resonates is that it’s transactional. The Melania thing is transactional, but everything about Trump and Trumpism is transactional.
LF: They all make money.
Attention : If you don’t cheat on your taxes when you can get away with it, you are a fool leaving money on the table. This is the mentality to which these women have attached themselves. Now, is this good for them? Is this going to be a win in the long run? One of the most fascinating things is the face of Mar-a-Lago. You know, the Betty Boop womanhood thing.
LF: What do we do with all this? I just feel buried in the big mountain we have to climb. Annie, you also write powerfully, as have others with PRA, about why authoritarians fear feminism, women’s organizing, and women.
AW: Research shows that throughout history, when women and feminist-led fronts form a pro-democracy coalition, we win. The Trump regime and authoritarians around the world know this. We often see that when authoritarians take power, women’s rights and LGBTQ rights are among the first to disappear. This is certainly what we are seeing in the United States with waves of legislative attacks on trans rights, with the fall of Roe v. Wade. To turn this into something positive, we have models to look at. I draw a lot of inspiration from the experience of feminist movements in Poland, Argentina, Mexico and throughout Latin America, where I have done a lot of my own research. In Poland, a feminist movement, largely inspired by young feminists and young women in the streets, managed to reverse the authoritarian turn they had taken there. On the streets of Minneapolis, we can see anti-authoritarian resistance – often led, unsurprisingly, by women, trans and queer people.
LF: Naomi, you wrote about care being mutual aid. I saw a story the other day about women in Minneapolis giving breast milk to babies whose mothers had been seized. It’s extraordinary and there is clearly a counter-narrative. How do you tell it?
NWL: Care is a political act, the idea that we belong to each other. This is another reason why women and women are dangerous, because we have been able to embody and practice care in a way that subverts the political establishment. The other thing I’ve been trying to work on with PRA partners and other parts of the progressive pro-democracy movement is what we would call a pillars strategy. The authoritarian only has the power that is given to him. For example, the Christian tradition has lent its power, its spiritual authority, its human and material resources to the authoritarian regime. The regime can then use it as a source of its own power. It’s about getting people to change their loyalties, to move away from the pillar that literally supports authoritarianism by providing it with power. What if the country’s Christian communities withdrew their implicit and explicit support for this regime? The regime can then no longer use the power of Christianity, the texts of Christianity, the rituals of Christianity to fuel its own agenda.
LF: The challenge I faced is that I want to take the Epstein story seriously. This goes beyond ice cream and has implications in all the areas you described, Nina. At the same time, it’s so discouraging to hear about this sort of thing as usual among this cabal of guys. How to maintain your morale? Especially you, Nina. Your writing is hysterically funny and cutting and angry, and yet I think a lot of journalists say, “Well, I can’t handle that, so I’m just not going to try to fit that into this story I’m writing about fascism.” »
Attention : I actually disagree that it has no effect. These people are exposed. It is important that they are exposed. They’re still the ones running things: Larry Summers. People who watch this, men who might be inclined, say, “This is bigger than Me Too.” » “Oh, you’re losing your job.” You know, and “You don’t do that. You don’t hang out with sex traffickers.” It’s depressing because it reveals that, and it also reveals things that happened before. It’s fading in the rearview mirror as we head into this chaotic fascist situation, but I think it gives things away. Obviously this exposes things, but I think it’s important.
