By Azaleea Carlea | New York Amsterdam News | Word In Black
(WIB) – As a longtime advocate against gender-based violence, it is clear to me that America is a battered woman, and President Donald Trump is her abuser. Congress must do its job to stop him and secure the safety of this country and its people.
America is no stranger to trauma. She’s seen wars, economic collapse, racial and gender injustice, and systemic inequality. But under the coercive control of this administration, America is afraid to speak. Her body (America’s people) and her choices (their freedoms) are tightly controlled.
The dynamics of this administration’s abuse of power closely follow the cycle of abuse seen in many cases of gender-based violence. When applying the Power and Control Wheel, a tool used internationally to understand the dynamics of abusive relationships, the parallels are sadly all too clear. Each of the eight segments of the wheel mirrors the tactics currently employed not against a single partner, but against our entire nation.
Trump’s tactics of reproductive coercion most closely mimic a hallmark of intimate partner violence that includes sabotaging birth control and forcing pregnancy outcomes. State bans and restrictions on abortion — entirely enabled by his Supreme Court nominations, federal judge appointees, and rhetoric — are no different. The state has stepped into the role of an abusive partner, instructing women that they must carry pregnancies no matter the cost to their health, their lives, or financial stability — not unlike an abuser forcing pregnancy to keep a partner dependent on the relationship.
Recent ideas for so-called incentives for pregnancy make even clearer that the administration sees women as tools to advance white, Christian ideological goals rather than acting on a genuine concern for family well-being.
Additionally, when you consider the fact that the majority of men who murder their female partners use a gun to do so, the administration closing the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, launching a 2nd Amendment Task Force, and stripping funding from agencies like the Office on Violence Against Women poses a tangible threat to lives of women across the country. Coupled with the fact that more than 300 grants have been terminated from the DOJ Office of Justice Programs, this administration has enshrined gender-based violence into policy.
In addition to its attacks against women, all aspects of the administration’s increasingly cruel immigration enforcement encapsulate the use of threats, intimidation, and fear used by abusers, — gaslit as a matter of national security.
All Americans are filled with uncertainty as a direct result of federal action. Tariffs are wreaking havoc on American markets and families’ pocketbooks, mirroring an abuser’s financial control of victims and disabling the opportunity for economic mobility.
These targeted campaigns against the American people combined with the relentless attacks against the government itself — like threatening the Department of Education, gutting the Department of Health & Human Services, and the chipping away of social safety nets like Medicare, SNAP, and vital programs supported by federal funding — reveal a government driven by cruelty and uninterested in allowing its people to seek a better future for themselves.
Finally, the “America First” foreign policy that actively turns allies away and plunges the country into isolationism helps make the entire cycle of abuse possible, just as an abuser cuts their victim off from support networks.
This isn’t new behavior. America has seen this before: Trump’s first term, marked by the Muslim travel ban, traumatic family separation policies, and COVID misinformation, followed this same harmful pattern. Unfortunately, like so many survivors of abuse, America went back, hoping, perhaps, that the chaos of his first term might iron out into a more professional second. But instead, in a classic sign of abuse, he escalated.
To break this cycle, we must first call it what it is: abuse.
Now, Congress must step up. This week, the National Task Force to End Sexual & Domestic Violence held a day of action at Capitol Hill to demand that Congress close the dangerous gap in funding for survivors of domestic and gender-based violence created by this abusive executive branch. This would be an essential first step forward in healing, and a catalyst for the support that must follow for every group that has been targeted and victimized for years.
Azaleea Carlea is legal director at Legal Momentum, The Women’s Legal Defense, and Education Fund.
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