“Now is the time,” said Melania Trump, as she took to the podium on Monday morning. “This is the time.” Clearly, now and this is a time. But a time for what?
“Beginning today,” Mrs. Trump said, “we will change the reality of women’s health.”
It’s a bold claim, but the first lady is really underselling her husband’s efforts here. Because actually, Donald Trump started changing the reality of women’s health years ago. And the so-bad-it’s-darkly-funny detail buried within today’s supposedly “historic” executive order makes the whole thing even more absurd.
In the Rose Garden Monday morning, Melania read out an oddly worded, buzzword-heavy speech about how “social norms are changing and topics that were once taboo are becoming open” (no specifics offered), about how we now have a “unique chance to reinvent women’s healthcare” (again, no specifics discussed), and how “we are women, we are resilient” and we are “deserving of lives defined not by the burdens we carry” (OK then!)
Probably the most famous time the first lady went to visit a bunch of women and children was when she wore a jacket emblazoned with the words “I really don’t care, do u?” to an immigration detention center. But with the midterms looming, she and her husband seem to have had a particularly acute onset of gender-based empathy. It’s funny how well-timed such changes of heart can be.
Melania wrapped up her speech with a bit about how women experience love and have hopes and dreams (yes, really), and then handed over to Donald, who immediately launched into a speech about how much he’d improved the Rose Garden. There used to be grass here, you know, he said, “and many women have ruined their shoes” on it in the past because the garden was built on a wetland. Luckily, now there are inches of hard granite instead.
Sure, cancer’s hard, but have you tried walking through the Rose Garden in stilettos?!
Still failing to mention anything about women’s health, the president then directed us to admire “the new heliport that’s just opened” and the construction work that will one day be his oversized ballroom, which is “going to be the greatest ballroom and military complex combination that’s ever been built.” Gosh, and the world is just full of those! A historic achievement, indeed.
“The prices are coming way, way down,” Trump continued, which is a “big improvement from — uh, the previous administration” (don’t say “from a few weeks ago because of the war,” don’t for God’s sake mention the war!) And then, eventually, the president meandered his way to women’s health: he couldn’t believe it, he said, when Melania informed him that there was no women’s health division at the NIH — “Think of it, a women’s health division, and it hadn’t been done!” Well, now there is one. Clearly, Biden and all his predecessors had been sleeping on the job.
Except, of course, none of this is exactly true.
Joe Biden signed an almost identical executive order in 2024, or identical at least in terms of its stated aims. Biden’s executive order, however, focused on research: funding it, providing better access to it, encouraging innovation among business and universities, and adding more accountability around federal research grants.
After the Biden order was signed in 2024, Donald Trump came back into power and began his war on places of higher education. In doing so, he specifically targeted research being done on women’s health. Federal agencies started flagging research grants for the word “women” and then pulling the funding.
This happened to scientists researching such seemingly uncontroversial topics as uterine fibroids. Researchers at other institutions told me they’d heard of colleagues having their doctoral research ended because it looked at female cancers, and other reporting has found that medical research into Alzheimer’s and pregnancy have been affected.
The downstream consequences of this are that students are less likely to put forward research into women’s health. Why risk your career on investigating endometriosis or pre-eclampsia if you’re at risk of an overzealous official — or “superintelligent” bot — suddenly cancelling everything because you happened to mention the female sex?
But never fear, Melania’s here to rearrange some of the deckchairs on the Titanic this week. The executive order she signed alongside her husband (why did she sign it? Who knows) is focused on AI — sorry, super intelligence — and specifically an “accelerated translation of research into clinical and community practice.” So, basically, slashing red tape to the benefit of healthcare startups using artificial intelligence. Who needs the federal right to abortion when you’ve got ChatGPT?
Even more ridiculously, right at the end of Trump’s executive order is a section that specifically revoked Biden’s 2024 one, as well as axing one signed by Biden in 2023 that created a similar White House task force to the one (re)created this morning.
This means two things: that, yes, Trump is essentially just rewriting a Biden-era policy and putting his own name on it; but also that he is specifically not empowering the universities that do so much of the medical research needed to achieve meaningful change in the areas he’s outlined (dementia, cancer, reproductive health and so on.) Because meaningful change is much more likely to come from international research done in established labs by experts than it is by a couple of Stanford dropouts in Silicon Valley running an AI agent.
So, here we have it: Two weeks out from the midterms and polling badly with women (especially the white women he counted on two years ago), Donald has pushed his wife into the spotlight again. And the best he can do is tell us that, now that he’s listened to Melania about some woman thing, Dr. Oz and RFK Jr. (“He’s a little different,” Trump conceded today about Kennedy, in the understatement of the century) will be leading the charge, plus something-something-superintelligence and by the way, ladies, your high heels are safe from the swampy grass outside of the Oval Office now!
There doesn’t seem to be any extra funding here, but then women are bad with numbers anyway, so why mention one? There’s a commitment from the president that they’ll “really go after” diseases, which presumably doctors and medical researchers were doing anyway. And then there’s something for Susie Wiles to do, since rumor has it she’ll be stepping down from her current role as his chief of staff after the midterm blitz. Women across the country will be psyched to hear Wiles’ career is safe; I, for one, was waiting with bated breath.
The implications of this executive order are, then, insultingly little, essentially less than nothing.
And so, as I watched Donald and Melania awkwardly sign the paper together then give out pens to the assembled audience; as I listened to the president talk to the crowd about Melania like she’s a pet Labrador (“You think she’s easy. She’s not so easy, but she is smart”); and as I contemplated the idea of RFK “Brain Worm” Jr leading the country’s efforts on endometriosis while members of the administration slapped each other on the back and Trump loudly congratulated a clearly uncomfortable Usha Vance on the newborn baby sleeping on her chest, I could only come up with one cogent thought:
This meaningless display is clearly supposed to make women care about voting for MAGA again. And personally, I really don’t care, do u?
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