The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

The Trump Justice Department has helpfully put out a programming schedule for the next season of Handmaid’s Tale: Administrative State Edition. In a court filing in the Louisiana mifepristone case, DOJ and Trump’s FDA lay out their plan to conduct a long, faux-serious "safety review" of one of the most studied and safest drugs on the market — purely so they can resurrect restrictions that even prior Republican administrations had to half-pretend were about health. The timeline is chef’s kiss political: results by December 2026, full report by March 2027, i.e., just far enough past the midterms that women’s bodily autonomy won’t show up on too many swing-voter ballots.

We’re told this is all about the drug’s "Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy" — because nothing screams medical science like using a terrorism-tier regulatory tool on a pill safer than Viagra. The target is Biden’s biggest reform: ending the in-person dispensing requirement that lets patients in red states get care via telehealth from blue-state doctors and receive the medication by mail, protected (for now) by shield laws. Louisiana, meanwhile, is in court claiming telehealth abortions are bankrupting them via hypothetical Medicaid complications they can barely document, but sure, let’s call it "state sovereignty" and not what it is: a taxpayer-funded crusade to control wombs across state lines.

The filing also doubles as a love letter to the anti-abortion movement, which has been sulking that Trump’s second term hasn’t moved fast enough in the race to theocratic glory. DOJ’s message: relax, once the votes are counted, the FDA will handle the crackdown so your lawmakers don’t have to put their names on it. To sweeten the deal, Trump has nominated Heidi Overton — who calls mifepristone "dangerous to women" and cheers Dobbs — to run the FDA, because what’s better than putting an anti-abortion activist in charge of drug safety for half the population? It’s not health policy; it’s federalized forced pregnancy by bureaucratic memo.

The Trump-era FDA has been lovingly wrapping mifepristone in so much pointless red tape you’d think the pill was plutonium instead of one of the most studied and safest medications in reproductive healthcare. A federal judge in Virginia, Robert S Ballou, just pointed out the awkward truth: the agency’s restrictions are "arbitrary and capricious"—legalese for "you made this up because politics told you to"—and ordered the FDA to go back and actually reconsider them like a real regulatory body and not a subsidiary of the Federalist Society.

This all lands while the FDA has no permanent commissioner and is busy "reviewing" abortion pill rules at the urging of conservative lawmakers whose medical expertise begins and ends with campaign donations. Meanwhile, abortion providers in Virginia, Kansas, and Montana are stuck navigating special registration schemes and duplicative, inaccurate, and confusing paperwork that serve exactly zero medical purpose but do a fantastic job of slowing care and scaring patients. As clinics become lifelines for people forced to cross state lines for basic healthcare, a federal court has now gently suggested that maybe science and 25 years of safety data should matter more than the Trump administration’s ongoing war on bodily autonomy.

Advocates are calling the ruling "a win for science"—which, in Trump’s America, is basically an extremist position. While Louisiana runs to the Fifth Circuit begging judges to kill mail-order access and pharmacy prescriptions, this case is a reminder that the mifepristone fight has never been about safety. It’s about using the machinery of the state to make abortion as humiliating, delayed, and inaccessible as possible, then calling that "pro-life" and going to a fundraiser.

The Trump administration has quietly decided that frozen embryos are now "children" – because when you're building a soft-theocracy, you start by giving constitutional vibes to whatever's sitting in a clinic freezer. In updated guidelines for a long-running Embryo Adoption Awareness and Services grant, HHS now refers to embryos as "children" and demands adoptive-parent-level screening for people who want to use them, solemnly describing them as "children who already exist and are in need of a family". Women, meanwhile, remain a sort of inconvenient life-support accessory with suspicious ideas about autonomy.

This bit of bureaucratic fan fiction is not just weird word choice; it's ammunition for the fetal personhood crowd, who can now point to federal policy and say, "See? The government already agrees these clumps of cells are people." We've already seen the test run in Alabama, where the state supreme court declared frozen embryos "extrauterine children" and IVF clinics promptly shut down rather than risk being charged with freezer manslaughter. Public backlash was so intense that even the Alabama legislature had to pretend it likes IVF more than it hates women.

The new language is a signal flare: after biding its time, the Trump crew is gearing up to push maximalist anti-abortion goals – from a "safety review" transparently aimed at restricting abortion pills to laying groundwork for nationwide bans via fetal personhood. The embryos get rights, the freezers get rebranded as "cryogenic nurseries", and women of childbearing age get downgraded to potential crime scenes. American democracy, now proudly co-governed by Trump, the Supreme Court, and a Petri dish.

The Trump White House spent Mother’s Day launching Moms.gov, a government-branded bait-and-switch that pretends to offer "Resources, Information, and Help" to pregnant women and then basically just shoves them toward Option Line, a network of Christian anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers. The site omits trivial luxuries like contraception, paid leave, or actual medical care, but it does feature faceless stock photos of very pregnant white women and the anti-abortion movement’s beloved fetus-footprint iconography, because nothing says "you are a vessel, not a person" like cropping out your head and surrounding your torso with merch-ready baby feet.

The launch event in the Oval Office was a full-cast dystopia. Medicare/Medicaid boss Mehmet Oz announced Americans are "under-babied" and predicted a wave of "Trump babies," while HHS Secretary RFK Jr. warned that teen sperm counts are an "existential crisis" for America. Trump himself appeared to briefly lose consciousness during the fertility panic hour, which, to be fair, is the most relatable policy response he’s had in years. Behind the weird vibes is a clear project: rebuild the anti-abortion movement’s enthusiasm by using federal power to funnel women into fake clinics that lie about gestational age, overstate legal limits, and dangle diapers and cribs that often never arrive unless you sit through a sermon.

This isn’t social policy; it’s state-sponsored gaslighting. After Dobbs, abortion bans tanked Republicans in the midterms and Trump decided the movement he unleashed didn’t deserve any more gifts. Now, with 2026 looming, that “pause” is over: the administration has dumped an insufficiently anti-abortion FDA chief, is eyeing mifepristone restrictions, and has rolled out Moms.gov as a glossy interface for coercion. It’s a perfect metaphor for Trump’s government: dress up patriarchal control in soft-focus stock imagery, slap a federal URL on it, and call it "help" while you quietly strip people of autonomy and lie to them on the public dime.

Republicans finally did it: they owned the libs so hard that Planned Parenthood clinics are now running side hustles as Botox bars to keep the lights on. After Donald Trump and Congress jammed through a tax-and-spending package that blocks Planned Parenthood and any abortion provider from taking Medicaid for non-abortion care, the country’s largest affiliate in Northern California is plugging the budget crater with cash-only cosmetic procedures, IV drips for hangovers, and sedation upsells.

This is what "pro-life" governance looks like in practice: 75–80% of their patients are on Medi-Cal, but instead of letting poor women use their health insurance for Pap smears and IUDs, the federal government told clinics to go find some side gig in the gig economy. So now reproductive health providers are doing aesthetic injectables to subsidize birth control and cancer screenings, while the same politicians who caused the crisis will soon point at the Botox menu and shriek that Planned Parenthood is a frivolous beauty shop that doesn’t need funding. It’s not healthcare policy; it’s a long con where low-income patients pay the price and Congress pretends it’s fiscal responsibility.

The National Institutes of Health, formerly known as the world’s biggest public funder of biomedical research and now apparently a branch office of the Heritage Foundation, has announced it will no longer fund any research using human fetal tissue from elective abortions. NIH director Jay Bhattacharya – because nothing says “cutting-edge medicine” like elevating a Great Barrington Declaration guy – declared that this is all about “advancing science” and “reflecting the values of the American people,” which is an extremely polite way of saying: theocrats yelled, Trump listened, science loses.

This is the most sweeping move yet in the administration’s long-running crusade to kneecap fetal tissue research, which has been crucial for work on diabetes, Alzheimer’s, infertility, and, minor detail, vaccines for things like polio, hepatitis A, and rabies. Researchers can still use tissue from miscarriages, but scientists overwhelmingly prefer donated tissue from abortions because it’s actually usable and not riddled with the genetic problems that often cause miscarriages in the first place. In other words, the NIH just took a proven, life-saving research pipeline and smashed it in favor of whatever “breakthrough technologies” Jay’s friends in the culture war think sound holy enough on Fox News.

The ban takes effect immediately, yanking support from roughly $60m worth of 2024 projects and sending a very clear message: if your work offends the anti-abortion lobby, you’re done. The administration is calling this “modernization,” which is an interesting rebrand for “we’re discarding decades of scientific progress so Trump can keep his base hopped up on moral panic.” But sure, canceling research that helped create vaccines and fight major diseases is just another big win for “pro-life” governance – as long as you don’t count the actual living people who’ll suffer.

The Trump-Vance administration has decided that nothing says "thank you for your service" like denying raped veterans basic medical care. The Department of Justice quietly issued a memo declaring that the Department of Veterans Affairs is not "legally authorized" to provide abortions, even in cases of rape, incest, or serious health risk. The VA, ever the loyal foot soldier, immediately complied, snapping shut access to care that Biden-era rules had finally opened up for veterans in the post-Roe hellscape.

The internal memo, leaked and published by Democracy Forward, carves out a tiny, grudging exception: doctors can still act if a veteran is literally about to die from pregnancy complications. Miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, or a clinician determining that care is "necessary to save a veteran’s life" might still be allowed — assuming, of course, lawyers and political appointees don’t overrule the medical chart. But counseling about abortion? Care in cases of rape or incest? That’s gone, because nothing screams "pro-life" like forcing a veteran who survived combat and sexual assault to navigate a patchwork of state bans on her own dime.

More than half of female veterans live in states that have banned or are likely to ban abortion. Biden’s VA policy was one of the few lifelines left; Trump’s team is cutting it off while the formal rule rollback slowly oozes through the bureaucracy. In other words, they’re not even waiting to finish the paperwork before slamming the door. As Skye Perryman of Democracy Forward put it, the move is callous and inhumane. But sure, tell us again how this administration "backs the troops" while it turns VA hospitals into enforcement arms for forced birth.