Donald Trump: America’s first ‘feminist’ president?

Is Donald Trump a feminist? Suspicions were first raised when, at his inauguration in January last year, the new president declared: ‘As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.’ Less than one month later, Trump signed a new executive order, ‘Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports’. In overturning a decade of transgender madness, Trump did more to defend women’s rights than Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris and all the pussy hat-wearing, Handmaid’s Tale cosplayers combined.

This week, Trump has once again been busy exposing the faux-feminism of the activist set. While his one-time rival, Kamala Harris, was flogging books on her ‘freedom tour’, Trump took to his Truth Social platform to put pressure on the Iranian regime to release eight women, including two teenagers, currently being held as political prisoners. ‘I would greatly appreciate the release of these women’, he wrote to the Iranian leaders. As talks between the US and Iran faltered, granting female prisoners their freedom, Trump said it ‘would be a great start to our negotiations’.

The women whose plight Trump highlighted are thought to have taken part in the anti-regime protests in January, in which tens of thousands of Iranians are believed to have been killed. An internet blackout, in place since late February, makes it difficult to get accurate news. In response to Trump’s post, the Iranian leaders argued that some of the women had already been released, while others, if found guilty, would face imprisonment rather than execution.

However, the Human Rights Activist News Agency confirmed that at least one of the women, Bita Hemmati, had nevertheless been sentenced to death along with her husband, Mohammadreza Majidi-Asl, and two neighbours. The four had been found guilty of engaging in ‘propaganda against the regime’ and stood accused of chanting slogans and throwing incendiary projectiles from rooftops, although campaigners raised concerns that their confessions may have been obtained through coercion. Whatever the Iranian regime claims, away from the glare of the world’s attention, it is still treating its own citizens with murderous brutality.

By turning the spotlight on these imprisoned women and appealing directly to Iran’s leaders, Trump appears to have succeeded in securing their clemency. Yesterday, Trump announced:

‘Very good news! I have just been informed that the eight women protesters who were going to be executed tonight in Iran will no longer be killed. Four will be released immediately, and four will be sentenced to one month in prison. I very much appreciate that Iran, and its leaders, respected my request, as president of the United States, and terminated the planned execution.’

We will likely never know the extent to which Trump’s intervention swayed matters with the Iranian regime, or whether some of the women would have been spared regardless. It seems that Bita Hemmati, her husband and neighbours are still not safely home, and while imprisoned, continue to be at risk. It remains to be seen if their promised release will materialise. But if Trump’s attention has secured the lives of these eight women, then that is something to celebrate. He has achieved something that neither the global human-rights community nor America’s own brand of intersectional, trans-inclusive feminists managed to accomplish.

Among media blackouts and allegations of fake news, one thing seems certain. Trump is doing far more to keep the plight of imprisoned Iranian protesters at the forefront of people’s minds than almost any other world leader. While anti-war activists take to the streets in London and New York to protest against America and fly the flag of the Iranian regime, it is Trump who has called for the release of the country’s political prisoners.

Students in Britain mourned the death of Ayatollah Khamenei when he was killed by American and Israeli airstrikes in February. That is, they mourned the leader who brutally suppressed the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ uprising that followed the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the so-called morality police in 2022, which resulted in the slaughter of 600 protesters and the arrest of more than 20,000. They grieved for the man who oversaw the mass slaughter of anti-regime protesters again in January, shortly before his death. Yet there have been few campus protests in support of Iranian women. Praise for Trump’s most recent intervention is notable only by its absence.

Whether it’s defending women’s right to single sex spaces at home or calling for the release of female prisoners in Iran, time and again, Trump exposes the moral rot at the heart of the Democratic establishment and woke activists around the world. This week, on both sides of the Atlantic, so-called feminists have shown themselves to be worse than useless when it comes to defending women’s rights. Kamala Harris’s repeated performance of authenticity shows she has learned nothing from electoral defeat. Meanwhile, in the UK, we have been treated to nepo-podcaster Grace Campbell ridiculing the ‘ugly’ women who want single-sex spaces.

If this is what ‘intersectional’ means, I’m throwing my lot in with the president of the United States.

Joanna Williams is a spiked columnist and author of How Woke Won. Follow her on Substack: cieo.substack.com.