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April 13 - April 15, 2025
There was a jolt of disbelief that he had been held accountable
A pang of vindication. It was now beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump had committed serious crimes in order to win. He was exactly who we thought he was. But with vindication also came sorrow, because nothing can change what happened or the damage done since, and it’s far from clear that his conviction will be enough to prevent him from returning to power. Sorrow because our country deserves better than this disgrace.
As Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” I live with it every day. And every day I make an effort to turn my eyes to the future instead.
In Japan they say, “The misfortunes of others taste like honey.” Whenever
People often say to me, “You warned us, and I wish we had listened.” What am I supposed to say to that? Yes, I did warn you. Yes, I said Trump was a con man, a Russian puppet, and a threat to democracy. I warned that he would end abortion rights, inflame our divisions, and botch every crisis he faced. I take no pleasure in being right. In fact, I hate it. In
I stared at him for a minute, trying to contain my anger. You’re sorry? Now? Finally, I said, “I would have been a great president,” and walked away.
I miss a time when truth mattered. I miss fact-based debates about policies to solve problems and improve lives. I miss the clear separation of church and state, once sacrosanct, now breached by culture warriors and Christian nationalists. I miss elections where everyone respects the will of the people, without constant attacks by sore losers and wannabe dictators. I
Jane Fonda has a great way of looking at the process of aging. She says people used to think about aging as an arc: “You’re born, you peak at midlife, and then you decline into decrepitude.”
Now, Jane says, we should see aging as a staircase: “You gain well-being, spirit, soul, wisdom, the ability to be truly intimate, and a life with intention.” It’s
It won’t just be a rerun of his first term. Since losing in 2020, Trump has become even more unhinged and dangerous. He wants us to fear the future and fear one another. He’d take us backward, with abortion bans, tax cuts for billionaires, and sweetheart deals for polluters at home and dictators abroad.
It’s like clockwork: They break it, we fix it.
As one hard-core Trumpist from Michigan explained later: “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.”
In our third debate in that campaign, Trump had refused to commit to accepting the results of the election. If he lost, he would claim it was rigged. Violence was a staple of his rhetoric.
Mothers like Dawn, Susan, Sybrina, and Lucy already knew what many other Americans woke up to on January 6: Racist rhetoric can lead to violent action.
“I’ve found you can’t argue people out of their deeply entrenched worldview. They just entrench further,” Shannon says.
Hopeless people,” she told me, are “easily controlled and manipulated. But hopeful people can move mountains.”
It’s become essentially a one-party state, with opponents marginalized, propaganda on the airwaves, corruption in the ministries, a thumb on the scale in the courts, and, above all, an unconstrained leader with an insatiable taste for power and no attachment to democratic norms or values. Minorities are persecuted. Migrants are scapegoated. Civil society has largely been crushed.
“Fascism,” as Yale history professor Timothy Snyder put it, “is might over right, conspiracy over reality, fiction over fact, pain over law, blood over love, doom over hope.”
“I am prepared to speak with those I dislike and distrust, or whose ideas differ from mine, if it means that I carry on with my work. Better that than to shout from afar.”
I take some comfort from knowing that while the Taliban can close the schools, they can’t take away two decades of girls’ education. They can’t erase the memory from millions of women’s minds of what it was like to pursue careers outside the home, vote, and work together to effect change. No matter how brutal they are, they can’t control women’s minds or extinguish their dreams.
Rosalynn’s grandson Jason said it had been her wish that all the First Ladies would come together for her memorial in a show of unity in these divisive times. “My grandmother campaigned against and voted against some of their husbands,” he said. “But she believed that there are some things that are more important than politics.”
President Rodham Clinton; I would have liked that as an enduring tribute to my parents. I hope the women presidents in our nation’s future get to choose how they will be addressed, no matter how much of a mouthful it is.
Rosalynn was the same way. She was a hard worker and a serious, somewhat reserved person who really wanted to get things done. When you saw her, there were few pleasantries. She would dive right into whatever passion project she was working on at the time, whether it was mental health, childhood immunization, or the Equal Rights Amendment.
the young conservative zealot Pat Buchanan had whispered in Nixon’s ear that universal childcare would lead to the Sovietization of American children. A well-coordinated letter-writing campaign by conservative evangelicals and ultra-right-wing groups like the John Birch Society also pressured the president to kill the bill. They claimed government involvement in childcare would threaten the American family and encourage women to enter the workplace instead of staying home.
In 2008, I became the first presidential candidate to put forward a proposal for paid family leave.
On top of investing in the care workforce, we need to invest in new parents. The United States is the only developed nation in the world that doesn’t require paid leave for new mothers.
One in four new moms in the United States returns to work within two weeks of giving birth, potentially sacrificing her health and her baby’s.
many families are forced to choose between spending a significant portion of their income on childcare (the cost has more than doubled
The COVID-19 pandemic made all this worse. As schools and childcare centers closed, working moms left the workforce in droves.
the return-to-work rates for women lagged significantly behind those for men.
Newt Gingrich, proposed taking children away from moms on welfare and sticking them in state-run orphanages.
In 1985, Pat Schroeder, the irrepressible Democratic congresswoman from Colorado, formally introduced what would become the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA).
Over the next nine years, the bill was repeatedly reintroduced, debated, and amended.
It wasn’t until 1991 that the FMLA finally passed Congress with bipartisan support.
On February 5, 1993, Bill went to the Rose Garden at the White House and signed his first piece of legislation as president. It was the Family and Medical Leave Act. The new law granted millions of American workers access to twelve weeks of job-protected leave for family emergencies like welcoming a newborn or caring for a sick relative.
U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade two months before, ending the constitutional right to abortion nationwide.
Donald Trump, who promised to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe, had won the state by fifteen points over Joe Biden in 2020.
The week after the ultra-right-wing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court announced their decision, voter registration in Kansas increased by over 1,000 percent. More than 70 percent of those newly registered voters were women.
in Romania, which strictly outlawed abortion. Every month, women were subjected to humiliating examinations in their workplaces to check if they were using contraception or pregnant, in which case the secret police would monitor them to make sure they delivered (something Trump has proposed allowing states to do if he’s reelected).
One in three women of reproductive age in the United States now lives under an abortion ban.
Ninety-three percent of OB-GYNs in states that have banned or severely restricted abortion say they have been unable to follow standards of care because of abortion laws.
Abortion bans are driving doctors out of hostile states (Idaho lost nearly a quarter of its practicing OB-GYNs since Roe was overturned, including more than half of the state’s high-risk doctors). And medical students are less likely to apply for residency in states with abortion bans. We’re
Misogyny is hatred of women. It’s the rage that makes men confuse cruelty for morality—that makes them think they should own women’s bodies and dictate women’s choices.
“This nomination could well be the tipping point against constitutionally based freedoms and protections we cherish as individuals and as a nation. I fear that Judge Alito will roll back decades of progress,” I warned on the Senate floor, adding, “Roe v. Wade is at risk; the privacy of Americans is at risk; environmental safeguards; laws that protect workers from abuse or negligence; laws even that keep machine guns off the streets.
“Women,” he wrote, “are not without electoral or political power.” Translation: Stop complaining. If you don’t like us taking away your rights and turning the clock back on women’s equality, just try to stop us. You’ll find that we Republicans will beat and block you at every turn. Which of course misses the whole point that having a constitutional right means that it’s yours wherever you live, whether it’s popular or not.
“The law cannot do it for us,” she said. “We must do it for ourselves. Women in this country must become revolutionaries.”
Instead, Republican leaders across the country made a strategic decision. If people were going to vote for abortion rights, then they just had to make it harder for them to vote at all.
The Ohio secretary of state, a Republican named Frank LaRose, said the quiet part out loud: “It’s 100 percent” about keeping abortion off the ballot.
In Mississippi, which already bans most abortions, state lawmakers are trying to pass an initiative that would make it impossible to change abortion laws through statewide elections.
Now, many are all in for a federal abortion ban. And the last thing they want is for Americans to be able to vote on any of this. They’ve learned the hard way that voters overwhelmingly support reproductive freedom and oppose government overreach.
