AI Is A Gateway To The Welfare State
October 6, 2026 |
Keith Giles
Trump is Following the Christian Nationalist Project 2025 Plan for Restoring the Cult of Domesticity
So many people have been harmed and are being harmed by the Trump administration that is difficult to say who has been affected the most. Farmers have been hurt without doubt by Trump’s tariffs; people who are relying on SNAP benefits just to put food on the table are being hurt by Trump’s Big Ugly Bill; those who have health insurance under the Affordable Care Act will surely be decimated by doubling and tripling premiums if the MAGA Congress doesn’t act soon.
Additionally, marginalized groups have been attacked and further marginalized or erased by restrictions on LGBTQ books, anti-transgender legislation and the destruction of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs that have produced measurable improvement in the past for these groups.
School curricula is being restricted to a white-washed history program that ignores or downplays the role of racialized enslavement and the Jim Crow era. K-12 students are being harmed by such a narrow view of history.
Immigrants, both documented and undocumented, have been targeted and profiled for deportation. Under the guise of “going after violent criminals” anyone with darker skin have been rounded up and pegged as criminals.
Only about 5% of those detained had a violent criminal conviction, and 69% had no criminal conviction according to the Cato Institute. Data indicates that a majority of people arrested by ICE have no criminal convictions or only minor ones, contradicting claims that enforcement focuses on the “worst of the worst.”
If you haven’t noticed, about the only group of people who haven’t been harmed are straight white men. That is not an accident. The Trump administration is overtly racist, misogynist and patriarchal in its attempt to return the United States to an era when white men were in charge of everything and privileged without question. The Christian nationalist doctrine behind Project 2025 aims to return the United States to the 19th century Cult of Domesticity.
As a group I will argue that women (all of them) are the ones who have or will suffer the most under Trump 2.0. This doesn’t minimize the harm done to all the other groups I’ve mentioned, but women, who make up 50.5% of the population according to the most recent census, have been set back decades by Trump administration policies, especially those emanating from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.
The Christian nationalist blueprint for government that Trump is implementing is a comprehensive religious restructuring of government that has in ten short months, systematically reduced women’s autonomy, safety, economic independence, political power, and legal equality.
It isn’t just about reproductive rights, although that is a major component, but they extend into labor, healthcare, civil rights, family structure, social services, and democratic governance itself.
In short, women are being returned to a second-class citizenship status after decades of progress in the fight for equal rights. Here are seven ways that women are being deliberately reduced to second class citizenship.
Going beyond the Dobbs decision which ended broad protections for women’s abortion rights and made it a state issue, Project 2025 has targeted women’s bodily autonomy on a national scale.
Project 2025 endorses a federal re-interpretation of the 14th Amendment and various statutes that would treat embryos and fetuses as “persons,” laying the groundwork for criminalizing abortion nationally. There is no scientific basis for such an interpretation.
Even without explicit legislation, this approach empowers agencies such as HHS, DOJ, and the FDA to roll back medication abortion access, restrict contraception by reclassifying certain forms (e.g., Plan B, IUDs) as “abortifacients”, and support prosecutions under the Comstock Act, which Project 2025 explicitly embraces.
The Comstock Act of 1873 is a federal anti-obscenity law that prohibits the distribution, sale, or mailing of materials deemed “obscene, lewd, or lascivious.” Its scope is broad, and its enforcement power comes from its regulation of the postal system and interstate commerce.
Project 2025 states that “Federal law prohibits mailing ‘[e]very article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion.’”
This interpretation of the Comstock Act is as broad as the Grand Canyon, but it will potentially be used to end the shipping of mifepristone and misoprostol, common and safe abortion pills.
Women have and will lose the freedom to make medical decisions, and doctors face criminal liability for providing reproductive care. Women’s bodily autonomy in all states would be criminalized.
Cult of Domesticity #1 – Make women have babies whether they want to or not.
Project 2025 recommends sharply reducing the regulatory power of the Department of Labor and the EEOC. The Trump administration has already weakened enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, narrowed the definition of sexual harassment, has reclassified many workers as contractors which affects women in retail, caregiving, and education, and has opposed minimum wage increases and overtime rules. Because women disproportionately work in low-wage or care-sector jobs, cuts to enforcement would widen existing pay gaps and increase worker vulnerability.
Project 2025 openly rejects federal involvement in childcare affordability, federal paid leave programs, and employer mandates. Women perform the majority of childcare services and a reduction in support for these programs is one of the top reasons women are leaving the workforce.
It is not a coincidence that over 400,000 women left the workforce in the first half of the year, with mothers of young children experiencing the steepest decline in over 40 years. The primary drivers are factors like burnout, the rising cost of childcare.
It is no surprise that the Department of Education (what is left of it) declared fields such as nursing, physician assistance, social work, and physical and occupational therapy to be reclassified as “non-professional”. These roles are predominantly staffed by women and are critical to the healthcare system. It will be harder for women to use these career fields for advancement and better pay if they are deemed “non-professional.”
The goal of Project 2025 is clear. It is designed to return women to the home as primary care givers to children and traditional gender roles as wives and mothers. The net effect is reduced workforce participation for women and increased economic dependence on male partners or extended family.
Cult of Domesticity #2 – Make women entirely dependent on men economically.
Because of its religious ideology, Project 2025 promotes redefining “sex” in Title IX and Title VII. (Title IX is a landmark federal law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in any education program or activity that receives federal financial assistance; and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a federal law that prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin).
They insist that “sex” means strictly “biological sex,” but goes further by narrowing the government’s civil rights role regarding gender equity.
It reduces enforcement of Title IX in education, weakens federal oversight of sexual harassment and sex discrimination, and cuts funding for offices dedicated to gender equity. These changes make schools less accountable for sexual assault investigations and workplace discrimination claims—a direct harm to women’s safety and equality.
The Trump administration has already dismantled or defunded federal civil-rights enforcement offices and equity-related offices and ended demographic data collection by federal agencies that helps track inequality or discrimination.
Civil rights violations will go unseen, unlitigated, and undoes decades of progress for women, and for people of color, especially women.
Cult of Domesticity #3 – Protect Euro-American men from legal actions regarding employment discrimination and harassment.
On January 20, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order that dissolved the White House Gender Policy Council. The Council, which was established by President Biden in March 2021 through Executive Order 14020, was tasked with advancing gender equity and equality across federal agencies. Trump’s order, titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” rescinded Biden’s order and stated that the new administration would operate under the policy that there are only two sexes, male and female, as biologically defined.
Anytime you see the phrase “defending women” you can be assured it means the opposite. It is rooted in a patriarchal and archaic form of male dominance that views women as “needing protection” as the “weaker sex.”
The practical consequence will be severe. There has been a loss of research on maternal health, reduced attention to women’s entrepreneurship, weakened protections from domestic violence and sexual assault policy coordination, and a loss of programs supporting STEM recruitment for girls and women. This is Trump’s definition of “protecting women.”
Cult of Domesticity #4 – Disincentivize women from public involvement by erasing their presence in research and data.
Under the guise of “protecting women” Trump’s embrace of Project 2025 makes women more physically vulnerable. They have targeted federal grants and offices connected to what it calls “radical gender ideology.”
But in practice this includes ending components of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), DOJ programs that support shelters, crisis hotlines, and training for law enforcement leaving women in abusive homes with fewer resources. These programs disproportionately serve women experiencing domestic violence, trafficking, and stalking.
Additionally, cuts to reproductive health infrastructure, especially Title X and Medicaid-funded clinics, would reduce access to pap smears, breast exams, prenatal care, and STI prevention and treatment. This especially harms low-income women, native American women, and women of color.
The consequences of the religiously inspired Project 2025 is intentionally cruel and demeaning to women who are vulnerable economically and domestically.
Cult of Domesticity #5 – Incentivize women to stay in marriages where domestic abuse is a threat and force women to seek marriage for economic reasons.
We have already seen the Trump attack on gender-equality in its weakening of Civil Rights laws. What is at work in this effort is the objective of not just reinforcing but forcing a Gender-Hierarchy onto the American society. This is nothing more than the usual fundamentalist complementarian theology being implemented through government policy.
Throughout Project 2025’s introductory chapters, the Christian nationalist authors call for strengthening “the natural family”—defined as a married man and woman with children with father’s being the “paterfamilas” or highest authority.
No other options exist and certainly not same-sex couples with children. They also call for ending federal support for single-parent families and discouraging women’s workforce participation by promoting “domestic roles.”
This is not neutral or benign cultural commentary; it informs the policy agenda. It is aligned with Christian nationalist gender ideology that views women’s primary role as mothers and homemakers.
What does the policy implication of this ideology look like? If federal resources are shifted away from single-parent households, women—who make up 80%+ of single parents—these women would lose food assistance, housing support, early childhood education support, health coverage and college and job training programs.
This is a structural shift toward a patriarchal economic model forcing women into subverient marriages they may not want, staying in marriages that are dangerous to them and making their distance from homelessness a few steps closer. This Christian nationalist ideology and associated policies would be disastrous for women, and for children; the ones they say they want to “protect.”
Cult of Domesticity #6 – Define the “real family” in limited religious complementarian terms and disallow and defund single parent homes headed by women.
Project 2025 also includes provisions that hinder democratic participation. It calls for overhauling the civil service to allow mass firings and political loyalty tests. Women who oppose Trump’s agenda could easily find themselves unemployed.
It also weakens voting rights enforcement and some within the Christian nationalist movement are even calling for rescinding the 19th Amendment and taking voting rights away from women. It sounds far-fetched, but so did women losing their abortion rights under Roe v. Wade.
Women—especially women of color and younger women—rely on strong voting protections and civil service neutrality. These rollbacks would reduce women’s power in a system where their political preferences have been trending toward the Democratic Party and toward candidates who support gender equality.
Cult of Domesticity #7 – Keep women in the private sphere and uninvolved in the political culture where men can dominate.
Project 2025 is not simply conservative policy. It represents a comprehensive religious restructuring of government that would systematically reduce women’s autonomy, safety, economic independence, political power, and legal equality. It would return women to a status of servile homemakers with no political voice, agency or power.
This program represents and harkens back to the period in the 19th century when women were restricted to the home under a cultural norm called the “cult of domesticity.” If Christian nationalists get their way, it will be coming to a neighborhood near you.
This patriarchal ideology is the same one that protects, empowers, and ensures rich white men like Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump who get to continue abusing and exploiting women. Make no mistake who the biggest losers are in the Trump-era- MAGA-Christian-nationalist universe….women.
