We begin with this clip from a March 28, 2025 press conference, in which President Donald Trump answers the timeless question: “What is a woman?”
Photo credit: NeydtStock/Shutterstock.com
In the news:
* Election day is on November 4, less than a month away, and a race everyone is watching is in New Jersey: Democrat Mikie Sherrill leads Jack Ciattarelli by between 3 and 8 points if you knock out a few outlier polls. It’s a litmus test for 2026, since by party registration, New Jersey is starting to look a little swingy, since new GOP voter registrations are rising faster than new Democratic registrations. It’s an ugly campaign. Ciatterelli accused Sherrill of being part of a cheating scandal during her time at the United States Naval Academy, based on documents leaked by Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon. The Sherrill campaign counterattacked by linking a medical publisher Ciattarelli owned to the opioid epidemic. But what could push Sherrill over the top is Donald Trump’s toxic approval rating in the Garden State: 37%.
* On Tuesday, Politico reported that leaders of Young Republicans chapters across the country routinely use racial, homophobic, and antisemitic slurs on their Telegram channel. In these exchanges, these young men spoke of torturing, bombing, gassing, and burning their opponents; joked about rape; and chatted about their admiration for Nazis (mostly the old-school German ones.) Despite widespread disgust at the chat’s content, Vice President JD Vance has downplayed criticism of these men, some of whom are employed by elected politicians, as “pearl-clutching.”
* As we expected, Maine Governor Janet Mills has jumped into that state’s Democratic primary for the honor of facing 73-year-old Republican Senator Susan Collins in 2026. Mills will face oysterman and former marine Graham Platner and progressive Jordan Wood. Platner has positioned himself as the populist candidate, Platner the businessman, and Mills will be the proven winner with statewide name recognition who has already distinguished herself by standing up to the Trump administration. But Mills is 77, and would be almost 80 when sworn in. Political scientist Amy Fried, who believes a contested primary will benefit a Democratic candidacy, breaks down the primary here.
* In yet another bizarre piece of medical advice, Secretary of Heath and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has linked male circumcision to autism. Asserting that babies are given Tylenol after the procedure, he claims that circumcised boys have twice the rate of autism as uncircumcised boys (about 80% of American people with penises are circumcised.) Kennedy is relying on two, small outlier studies: larger studies have revealed no link between circumcision and autism. But the announcement has elevated another fringe group, so-called “intactivists,” who believe that the procedure, usually done shortly after birth, is a form of psychological and physical abuse that is detrimental to a full male sexual experience.
Your hosts:
Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.
Neil J. Young,is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, a mentor at the OpEd Project, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).
Our Focus: the women of MAGA
* President Donald Trump has appointed women to a third of his Cabinet positions: that is more than any other president. These appointments include Kelly Loeffler, Administrator of the Small Business Administration; Attorney General Pam Bondi; Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard; Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins; Secretary of Education Linda McMahon; Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem; Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer.
* One of Trump’s most trusted personal attorneys was Alina Habba; he recently installed her as U.S Attorney for New Jersey—something that has turned out to be a problem, as at least one judge asserts she was appointed illegally.
* But there are many more women in key positions in the Trump administration. They include 26-year-old Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, the youngest person to fill that role, and Trump can’t seem to stop talking about how pretty she is. In a recent gaggle on Air Force One, he commented: “That face... and those lips, they move like a machine gun.”
* It’s probably no accident that the highest-ranking Black official in the Trump administration is also a woman, and that she is also Director of Minority Outreach. Lynn Patton, who grew up in New Haven, CT, was unable to begin her job until May because of sanctions imposed for violating the Hatch Act (twice) when she worked at the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the first Trump Presidency.
* In his first term, Trump had a lot to say about how he liked women to look, which may account for the remarkably uniform appearance of many of the women in his administration.
* First Lady Melania Trump is almost exclusively discussed in relation to her fashion choices and physical appearance.
* Trump has a long association with beauty pageants.From 1996 to 2015, he owned the Miss Universe Organization (which includes Miss USA and Miss Teen USA), which is said to be racier, and does not offer a path to education, which the Miss America brand does.
* Perhaps not surprisingly, there are a large number of successful beauty pageant contestants in Trump’s circle. But what else about pageant contestants makes them good candidates for a Trump White House?
* One Trump woman who is not a glamour puss is White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, a veteran of Florida state politics and the director of Trump’s 2024 campaign. She is also the first woman to serve in that role.
* Another c0ontrasting look is Laura Loomer. Trump is said to value women who fight, hence his allegiance to the 32-year-old social media influencer. Journalist Nina Burleigh recently dubbed Loomer “the Madame DeFarge of the right.” But some around Trump see the forms of intimidation Loomer engages in, and her claims to intimacy with him, as vulnerabilities, and aides actively work to keep her away from the President.
* The women surrounding Trump represent a larger emphasis for conservatives: a rejection of feminism’s gains in favor of returning women to home and family. And yet, there is a contradiction, since obviously the women around Trump work and have careers.
What we want to go viral:
* Neil wants you to read Annie K. Lamar’s “Inadequate recordkeeping is not just a bureaucratic failure” (Capitol Weekly, October 16, 2025), which details ICE’s destruction of documentation, what seems to be a calculated process that allows the federal government to simply make immigrants disappear. Somewhere around 400 human beings vanished from a facility built in the Florida Everglades before it was shut down by the courts. The destruction of records also makes it impossible for detainees to appeal their incarceration and deportation or show that they have been wrongly arrested.
* Claire pushes back against the mainstream TV critics and urges you to watch “Boots,” a Netflix series based on Greg Cope White’s memoir The Pink Marine (Aboutface Books, 2015.) Although the show is set in the 1990s, Cope’s original book is about a gay teen who joins the Marines in 1979, when it was still illegal to be homosexual in the armed services. “Boots” (slang for freshly-minted Marines) was Norman Lear’s last creative project before he died in 2023. While it has received mixed reviews, particularly criticisms that it glorifies the military, it is wildly entertaining—and an excellent preview of the antediluvian military to which Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth want to return us.
Short takes:
* At The Nation, Elie Mystal predicts that SCOTUS will undo Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which “prevents white people from overrepresenting themselves in Congress.” Black voting will not cease to exist, as it did all over the South after between 1877 and 1965, but the capacity of Black voters to act together will be diluted in many places. “Oral arguments can sometimes sound like the justices are deliberating great and technical points of law, but the outcome in this case was decided long before the lawyers arrived at the courthouse,” Mystal writes about Louisiana v. Callais, which was heard on Thursday. “Oral arguments were largely an exercise of the Republicans justifying their racist positions.” (October 16, 2025)
* Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem has distributed a video to be shown in airports, explaining to passengers that if their flights are delayed or canceled, it is the Democrats’ fault. But more than a dozen “airports said that the video was overly partisan,” Christine Chung reports at The New York Times. “While some airports cited internal or municipal policies that barred politically partisan messaging for preventing them from showing the video, others pointed to state and federal law. Kara Hansen, a spokeswoman for the Port of Portland in Oregon, said in a statement that the video violated the Hatch Act, a 1939 law intended to maintain a nonpartisan federal work force and to limit the political activities of federal employees.” (October 14, 2025)
* In The Prospect, Jo-Ann Mort tells you everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask about White House Deputy Chief of Staff and hate monger Stephen Miller. “Miller is one of a handful of hardcore ideologues who have served in both Trump White Houses. He will likely be remembered in history for his current project, turning the streets of America into war zones so that he can meet his professed goal of arresting 3,000 immigrants a day,” Mort writes. And yet, “There is probably nothing more central to the liberal and mainstream American Jewish experience than the history of being immigrants and of having the opportunity to thrive and prosper in a US that welcomed them.” (October 14, 2025)
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