Statement by National NOW President Kim Villanueva
What is it about Donald Trump’s angry, domineering, patronizing, disrespectful, and self-centered State of the Union that women find so familiar?
A political movement has grown around a culture that glorifies aggression, division, and domination. In that world, women are vilified and attacked simply for demanding equality.
Today, that backlash is an animating principle of the Trump Administration.
Donald Trump’s State of the Union is actually the state of his campaign to further dehumanize and marginalize women. It’s practically an obsession with him.
Trump’s enablers in Congress are no better. They line up to vote for policies they would never tolerate in the businesses, medical practices, institutions, and other workplaces they used to run in private life. They tell themselves it’s what their voters want.
But no one wants this.
This State of the Union is a nightmare.
Donald Trump’s theatrical demand that lawmakers stand if they agreed that “the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens,” recalled his chilling campaign promise to help women “whether they like it or not.”
Guess what? We don’t like to be protected by Epstein enablers.
For generations, women have endured a system that pays them less, values them less, respects them less, and treats them as second-class citizens. We don’t want any more State of the Union speeches from the patriarchy – we want equality.
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