A new report from Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee says the Trump administration has sharply reduced women’s presence in senior national-security roles and dismantled programs supporting women overseas. CBS News reports that the changes include retreating from initiatives Trump backed in his first term.

One of those is the Women, Peace and Security Act, a bipartisan law Trump signed in 2017. It called for a federal strategy to strengthen women’s participation in preventing conflict and building peace afterward.

In 2025, Pete Hegseth announced that he had ended the Pentagon program and described it as a divisive Biden initiative. He subsequently argued that Biden’s administration had distorted it.

The distinction matters. So does the astonishing amount of presidential travel required to make it.

Trump signed the law. Marco Rubio co-sponsored it as a senator. Rubio, by then secretary of state, was still praising his support in April 2025. Somewhere between those facts and Hegseth’s announcement, the program acquired a false mustache and became Joe Biden.

How does this work? Is there a scanner? Do they pass the legislation beneath a red light, and if it contains the word women, an alarm announces that the previous president has escaped into the document?

The administration can argue that a program was implemented badly. It can identify what changed, explain what failed and say what it will do instead. That is a policy argument. It involves nouns attached to actual events, and therefore requires slightly more exertion than spraying the word woke over the furniture until nobody can recognize the room.

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According to the Democratic report, women hold 17.4% of Cabinet and Cabinet-level positions, compared with 52% under Biden. The report also says the administration has not yet used the $112 million Congress approved for the Women, Peace and Security strategy for fiscal 2026.

The White House points to women in senior jobs and defends Trump as a champion of women. The Pentagon cites increased female recruitment and says its approach is merit-based. Its response to CBS did not answer questions about the strategy itself.

Yes, women work here. Nobody is asking whether the building has ever contained a woman. We are asking what happened to a specific program, with a specific law behind it and specific money Congress provided.

Imagine asking why the fire alarm has been disconnected and receiving a photograph of the facilities manager standing next to a bucket. Lovely bucket. Does it explain the fucking wires?

I need a minute. There are legitimate debates about foreign assistance, military priorities and how to measure results. We could have those. We could discuss whether an initiative works without first assigning it an enemy president like a criminal alias.

But no, we also have to establish that 2017 occurred before Biden’s presidency. The country has nuclear weapons and we are back at the little calendar with the movable felt numbers.

If Hegseth wants to dismantle a Trump-backed program, he should defend dismantling a Trump-backed program.

At the very least, make Trump’s signature pass the loyalty test before blaming the paper.