(Washington) They would be a “cancer for the American nation”: progressive white women, always the favored targets of President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, have been the subject of attacks of particular ferocity in recent weeks.
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The death of Renee Good, a 37-year-old American woman killed by an immigration police agent in Minneapolis, was followed by particularly violent comments from certain figures of the radical right.
Conservative radio host Erick Erickson coined the acronym “AWFUL” to describe her, meaning “awful,” for Affluent White Female Urban Liberal.
“White progressive women are a cancer to the nation. They don’t have real problems, so they’re bored” and therefore mobilize for causes such as the fight against racism or Ukraine, a comedian committed to the MAGA cause, Vincent Oshana, scathed on X on January 10.
In this same vein, which consists of describing progressive women as bourgeois cheating their idleness with glasses of wine and demonstrations, a Fox News columnist joked in a text published on the internet about “gangs of drinking moms”, “harassing” ICE, the federal immigration police.
Women’s vote, a “tragedy”
Going further, commentators from Christian nationalism have been calling for several years to revoke the 19e amendment to the American Constitution, which gave women the right to vote in 1920.
This amendment “was a moral and political tragedy for America. For what ? Because women are not made to lead, but to follow and feel,” asserts, for example, a pastor, Dale Partridge, in a video at the end of December.
For Juliet Williams, professor of gender studies at UCLA University in California, these comments are typical of a worldview that “requires men to feel intrinsically superior.”
The American government regularly exalts virility, embodied for example by the head of the Pentagon Pete Hegseth, who is shown doing push-ups with soldiers.
Health Minister Robert F. Kenendy recently praised Donald Trump’s testosterone levels, which are said to be particularly high for his age.
In this ideology, explains Juliet Williams, “the hatred of progressive white women is necessary”, because they challenge the ideal of the radical Christian right, namely families and couples in which men would dominate.
In 2016, 2020 and 2024, white women, of all ages and levels of education, voted predominantly for Donald Trump, according to the count made by the Pew Research institute.
But several analyzes suggest a growing divergence among the youngest, with “Generation Z” voters who adhere in large numbers to progressive ideas while young men, who played an important role in Donald Trump’s latest victory, are always more tempted by the ideas of the hard right.
The attacks against Democratic voters also aim, according to Juliet Williams, to weigh on young women who “perceive more than ever the extent to which their social value is indexed to their appearance. »
“More attractive”
The women who gravitate around the White House and Donald Trump most often have sophisticated clothes, pumps, long wavy hair and heavily made-up faces, sometimes retouched by injections and operations.
Katie Miller, podcaster and wife of Stephen Miller, one of the most influential advisers to the American president, openly mocks the physique, according to her, unattractive, and the appearance considered neglected by women on the left.
“Conservative women are objectively more attractive than progressive women,” she wrote on X, ensuring that for this reason conservative families would have more children – birth rate being another recurring theme of Trumpists.
Katie and Stephen Miller recently announced that they are expecting a fourth child, as did Vice President JD Vance and his wife Usha Vance. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is also pregnant with her second child.
