One of the goals of Trump and his crew of malcontents and deplorables is a selective roll-back of the 1960s social and cultural revolution, together with the civil rights, regulatory, and institutional changes associated with the so-called (because it wasn’t really) Great Society. You can understand a lot about Trump by realizing that he wants a return to the good old days, when women knew their place and people of color were not so uppity, or so visible for that matter.
In those (fictional) days, you didn’t have to worry about pronouns or having to hear Spanish or other “foreign” languages all the time. You could make offensive jokes, harass the few women you encountered in the workplace, and generally impose your will on whoever wasn’t white or male or as rich as you. Being a slumlord like Trump’s father was a-ok, and best of all, white men didn’t have to compete on a level playing field with non-whites and/or non-men.
One of the primary architects, and cheerleaders, for Trump’s efforts has been the Heritage Foundation, but there are other miscreants as well, like Stephen Miller.
This nostalgia for a past in which white men were unassailably on top seems to be a principal source of Pete Hegseth’s purges in the military (which have disproportionately affected women and non-whites, but also have included white men who are open to expanding opportunities based on merit as opposed to whiteness and maleness).
That nostalgia also is reflected in the Administration’s attacks on universities, its attempts to roll back loan forgiveness programs and student aid (especially aid to minority students), and more generally its moves to transform post-secondary education into vocational ed programs designed to cater to the corporate sector’s desire for already-trained worker bees.
A longing for a return to white male domination also is reflected in the Administration’s immigration policy, which obviously is designed to make the country less brown. If you have any doubts about this, notice who is being deported and/or denied a chance to seek refugee status and consider that Trump has been expanding the opportunities for white South Africans to immigrate.
The longing to return to the good old days of white male primacy also explains the Administration’s alliances with white supremacists and Christian nationalists, and its frequent social media aping of white supremacist messaging.
Of course, we shouldn’t forget the Administration’s attacks on LGBTQ+ people, whose progress is about as anathema to the Trump nostalgic mindset as you can get.
And, lastly (for now), the nostalgia also can explain the new Administration plan to divert some of the money that is now used to subsidize childcare for working parents in order to make payments to stay-at-home moms. That this plan would encourage women to leave the work force by paying them to do so is obvious.
But that isn’t all this plan would do. It also would seek to reinstate what is imagined to be the traditional family model of a working dad and stay-at-home mom by applying only to married couples, one of whom is working and the other of whom is staying home to take care of the child or children. (Can you guess the gender of the parent most likely to stay at home?)
More deviously still, by diverting money from existing child-care programs, the proposal would reduce the pot of money available for childcare for women who prefer to work. This would make it more difficult for such women to find and afford childcare, thus forcing some (many?) of them out of the work force and into the home where, I guess, the Administration wants them to be.
We may question the economic prudence of a plan to remove significant numbers of women from the workplace at a time when perhaps 2 million foreign-born workers have left the labor force. But, of course, but this is about ideology, not economics.