A Clear Attempt to Push Women Back

Barb Jatkola Jaffrey NH - Letter to the Editor 1/21/2026

 Let’s be clear: The Trump administration wants to put women back in their place. 

From Pete Hegseth’s efforts at the Pentagon to scrub women from its website, replace women in positions of authority in the military, and discourage women from serving in the armed forces by enacting anti-woman policies and denigrating their abilities . . . 

To JD Vance’s anti-woman rhetoric throughout the 2024 presidential campaign (remember his assertion that the country was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies”?) and continuing today . . . 

To Donald Trump’s disgusting and disrespectful comments to female reporters who have the temerity to ask him questions he doesn’t want to answer . . . 

To Republican women in Congress complaining about Speaker Mike Johnson’s discrimination against them in committee assignments and other ways. “He sidelines us and doesn’t take us seriously,” former representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said. Representative Nancy Mace echoed that sentiment: “Women will never be taken seriously until leadership decides to take us seriously, and I’m no longer holding my breath” . . . 

And now to an ICE agent in Minneapolis shooting a woman driving a minivan—and daring to speak to him in what he apparently considered an insulting way—three times in the face as she tried to escape. According to Trump’s Department of “Justice” (headed, ironically, by a woman), the killing of this unarmed woman isn’t even worthy of an investigation. Indeed, the DOJ is ordering an investigation into her widow . . . 

We can see how much the Trump administration and its thugs truly despise women and the power they’re asserting at this time. 

Tech entrepreneur and right-wing political operative Peter Thiel, who bankrolled Vance’s Senate campaign in Ohio, wrote in 2009: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible . . . The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and THE EXTENSION OF THE FRANCHISE TO WOMEN . . . have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” 

That about sums it up. Is it any wonder that in a video promoted by Vance as vindicating the ICE shooter, an unidentified male voice spits out “F---ing bitch!”