cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/62591065
President Donald Trump has a long history of treating women like property.
From 1996 to 2015, he was the owner of the Miss Universe Organization. Many of the contestants complained about his inappropriate behavior towards them, such as entering the dressing rooms while they were naked. Tasha Dixon (Miss Arizona 2001) reported, “He just came strolling right in. … Some girls were topless. Other girls were naked.” Many of them were teenagers. In an interview with Howard Stern, Trump defended this behavior saying, “I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant.”
Since the 1970’s, no fewer than 26 women have accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct, ranging from harassment to sexual assault and rape. In a conversation with television host Billy Bush in 2005, Trump infamously stated that his celebrity status entitled him to do anything he wants to women without consent: “I just start kissing them,” he said, “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” He was subsequently convicted of sexual assault against E. Jean Carroll and directed to pay over $86 million in damages for assault and defamation.
Now, as Trump enters his second term in office, his rapaciousness seems to have found a new outlet of expression on the global stage. In an interview with Fox News, he stated that Ukraine should not have fought back against Russia when they invaded because Russia was “much bigger, much more powerful.” The following month, in a White House press conference with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump said that Ukraine “never should have started it”—as if they were somehow responsible for having caused themselves to be invaded.
Feminist writers have long argued that there is an intrinsic relationship between patriarchy, rape and colonialism. The seizure of land by force is comparable to the seizure of a woman’s body—and historically rape and war have often gone hand-in-hand.
In order to get a better understanding of how Trump’s attitudes towards women might be related to his foreign policy, I reached out to Dr. Judith Herman, a world-renowned expert in trauma studies. Herman is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, director of training at the Victims of Violence Program at Cambridge Hospital (Massachusetts), and a lifelong feminist activist. Her pathbreaking 1992 book Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror has been described as “almost singularly responsible for the legitimization of rape trauma in the psychiatric field.”
Is this clickbait? Do they mean that Trump and Putin represent all strong men? I’m giving up on media what-ifs and going back to “just the facts ma’am” news reporting. Whether you’re an academia nut or just a nut it’s pretty obvious that a paternal hierarchy exists.
I’m not sure what you mean?
Do you mean a patriarchal hierchy? It may be pretty obvious to you in 2025, but if that’s what you mean, you can probably thank Judith Herman for that.
Herman was the first person to really focus on trauma as a psychological concept, and to distinguish between trauma following an acute event vs trauma that develops after repeated traumatic events.
Acute trauma results in PTSD. Repeated/inescapable trauma such as domestic violence, repeated sexual assault, or even living under an authoritarian regime, often results in the development of complex PTSD.
Both cPTSD and PTSD result in an overactive nervous system, that can be easily triggered by a traumatic memory. However, when trauma is chronic or inescapable, often the person experiencing the trauma will develop coping skills that are necessary to survive while continuing to go about daily life as though everything is normal.
For example, think of people in Ukraine right now. There are often times when people wake up in the middle of the night and rush into a subway as a makeshift bomb shelter, hiding there until the bombs stop dropping and it’s “safe” to come out.
They may come out to find casualties and destruction, only to then go get ready for work and continue living their 9-5 lives like they did before the war. Going about life as though everything is normal is a form of dissociation, but it’s a necessary coping skill during times of war or high stress.
The current head of the Heritage Foundation, pulling the strings of Trump’s administration is quoted as saying “Put them in trauma,” regarding the plan to overwhelm the U.S. with so much chaos that eventually people just give up and completely dissociate from the trauma going on around them. They want complacency. They want you to just give in, and trust that what they’re doing is for the best, even though everything inside of you is telling you it’s wrong. The leader/authority figure always knows best.
Masses of people everywhere are dissociating right now, and convincing themselves that maybe if they play along, they will be safe. Maybe things will eventually work themselves out. That’s not how it works. Complacency is victory for the people in power.
The first post I made in this community was based on Herman’s work for a reason. Understanding how to cope and survive repeated trauma that is often out of our control, without just fully dissociating or checking out is key to fighting back.