Nina Burleigh, the Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart, and Annie Wilkinson speak to Laura Flanders about the sexism at the heart of Trumpism.
Donald Trump has an extensive, decades-long record of demeaning, objectifying, and allegedly abusing women, from his days of his beauty pageants where contestants complained that they were treated like his personal harem to his “Grab them 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. In the White House, his administration has moved to exclude women, especially Black women, from positions of power and backed policies that attack women’s equality and autonomy. Why is it that the sexism at the heart of Trumpism seems to be taken so relatively lightly, especially as it plays out against what is arguably the biggest, sickest sex abuse scandal possibly ever: the Jeffrey Epstein horror, with all of its links back to the president and his circle and which his team seems so desperate to cover up? And alongside racism, how does sexism function in the fascist resurgence we are living through?
To talk about all of this, I have three experts. Nina Burleigh is a journalist, bestselling author, documentary producer, and the publisher of a Substack on politics called American Freakshow. The Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart is a minister, professor, and the first-ever strategic partnerships director at Political Research Associates, (PRA), a social justice research and strategy center that was founded back in 1981. In 2025, PRA dedicated an entire issue of their excellent journal to the relationship between gender and authoritarianism. My third guest, Annie Wilkinson, wrote the lead essay.
Laura Flanders: That deluge of Epstein file information seems to have been with us for years and never to stop. What’s your thumbnail takeaway from what we are witnessing?
Nina Burleigh: What I always tell people is it’s not just about a sex case. It’s not just about the mistreatment of women, I’m sorry to say, because that’s a big part of it, and it’s the underpinning of how Epstein maybe was operating. It’s really about influence, foreign affairs, and the way that the last 20 years of American foreign policy has played out. You can see that in this guy’s interactions, especially with the Saudi sheiks, with European Council people. Everybody was enmeshed in this operation.
LF: One of the things that’s frustrated me is that the Epstein story seems to be covered in a separate column of the paper by separate reporters from those who are covering the ICE raids, and the rise of authoritarianism, and all the rest. But the characters, of course, are super connected, from Trump and Musk to the guy who made the misbegotten Melania movie. Am I alone here in thinking there are threads that need to be connected?
Annie Wilkinson: This example gives us an opportunity to tease apart the varying actors that come together around gender politics or perverse gender politics, and perhaps also anti-gender politics, which is what my essay that you referred to is about. What anti-gender politics is able to do is to help bridge these different factions. Transactional authoritarians who instrumentalize gender for their own power. Trump, Epstein, MAGA politicians who have a deep-seated sense of misogyny and sexism, but they’re transactional about it together with the Christian nationalists, who are ideologically committed to patriarchy, who believe that it is divinely ordained right and core to their worldview. Other elements of this coalition around a similar politics of gender also include ethno-nationalists. In the United States, that’s white nationalists who are invested in a strict gender hierarchy and gender essentialism, or this idea about who women are and who is a woman, in order to maintain their racial and demographic control that they’re interested in. Another aspect is the tech oligarchs like Elon Musk, like Peter Thiel, who benefit from a gender inequality that enables them to maximize capitalist extraction.
LF: The people that have borne the worst brunt of the federal government layoffs were Black women. You’ve got immigrant women being targeted and intimidated. You’ve got a particular desire, it seems to me, to humiliate women in the military. And most recently this bizarre post by the White House of an altered picture of the very dignified and elegant Nekima Levy Armstrong, protester in Minnesota, to suggest that she was, instead of standing strong and proud with a constituency behind her, actually crying and with darker skin. Backlash seems too weak a word for it in a way. What do you think is really the agenda here, Naomi?
Naomi Washington-Leapheart: The most unprotected women in the United States throughout history have been Black women. Black women have had the testimony. And now, it’s sort of OK for a MAGA influencer to say that Black women have brains that process more slowly than anybody. And nobody challenges that.
LF: Charlie Kirk.
NWL: Right. Nobody comes to the aid of Black women in that moment. The recklessness this moment invites is making visible what has been invisible or under acknowledged for a long time. They’re giving us the answer that they want us to internalize, which is that women are the problem, the Black women are the problem, et cetera.
LF: Nina, you’ve also written about why some of this stuff works, specifically on some of the women that go along, and Melania is just one of them. Why does this stuff resonate? White women have voted majority for this guy twice.
NB: They love to talk about how feminist or progressive women are miserable. They hate motherhood. They hate children. And yet they are actually massive beneficiaries of the second wave of feminism. At one level what resonates is it’s transactional. The Melania thing is transactional, but everything that Trump is and Trumpism is transactional.
LF: They’re all making money.
NB: If you are not cheating on your taxes when you can get away with it, you are a chump leaving money on the table. That’s the mentality that these women have attached themselves to. Now, is it good for them? Is this going to be a long-term win? One of the things that’s so fascinating is the Mar-a-Lago face. You know, the Betty Boop femininity thing.
LF: What do we do about all this? I’m just feeling buried in what a big mountain we have to climb. Annie, you also write powerfully, as do others with PRA, about why authoritarians fear feminism, and women’s organizing, and femmes.
AW: Research shows that across history, when women and feminist-led fronts are in a pro-democracy coalition, we win. The Trump regime and authoritarians around the world, they know that. We often see when authoritarians take power, women’s rights and LGBTQ rights are some of the first to go. That is certainly what we’re seeing in the United States with waves of attacks at the legislative level against trans rights, with the fall of Roe v. Wade. To turn this into sort of a positive, we have models to look at. I look a lot to the experience of feminist movements in Poland, Argentina, Mexico, all across Latin America where I’ve done a lot of my own research. In Poland, a feminist-led movement inspired a lot by young feminists and young women out in the streets was able to reverse the authoritarian turn they took there. We can look to the streets of Minneapolis to an anti-authoritarian resistance—that is often also led unsurprisingly by women and trans and queer people.
LF: Naomi, you’ve written about caregiving being mutual aid. I saw a story the other day about women in Minneapolis donating breast milk for babies whose mothers had been seized. It is extraordinary, and there is clearly a counternarrative. How are you telling it?
NWL: Care is a political act, the idea that we belong to each other. That’s another reason women and femmes are dangerous, because we have been able to embody and practice care in ways that subvert the political establishment. The other thing that I’ve been trying to work on with partners of PRA and other parts of the progressive pro-democracy movement is what we would call a pillars strategy. The authoritarian only has the power that we give it. For example, the Christian tradition has lent its power, its spiritual authority, its human and material resources to the authoritarian regime. The regime is then able to use that as a source of its own power. It’s about getting folk to shift their loyalties, get out of the pillar that’s literally holding up authoritarianism by resourcing it with power. What if Christian communities around the country withdrew their implicit and explicit support for this regime? Then, the regime can no longer use the power of Christianity, the texts of Christianity, the rituals of Christianity to resource its own agenda.
LF: The challenge I’ve been facing is I want to take the Epstein story seriously. It is beyond blood-curdling and has implications in all the areas you’ve described, Nina. At the same time, it is so disempowering to hear about this kind of business as usual amongst this whole cabal of guys. How do you maintain your spirit? Especially you, Nina. Your writings are hysterically funny as well as sharp and angry, and yet I think a lot of journalists are kind of, “Well, I can’t handle that, so I’m just not going to try to integrate that into this story that I’m writing about fascism.”
NB: I disagree actually, that it’s not having an effect. These people are being exposed. It matters that they’re being exposed. They’re still running things—Larry Summers. People looking at that, men who might be inclined are like, “This is bigger than the Me Too.” “Oh, you lose your job.” You know, and “You don’t do that. You don’t hang with sex traffickers.” It’s depressing because it’s exposing this, and it’s also exposing stuff that’s happened before. It’s receding in the rear-view mirror as we careen into this chaotic fascist situation, but I think that it’s exposing things. Obviously, it’s exposing things, but I think it matters.
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Laura Flanders
Laura Flanders is the author of several books, the host of the nationally syndicated public television show (and podcast) The Laura Flanders Show and the recipient of a 2019 Lannan Cultural Freedom Fellowship.
