Essay: Domestic Terrorism
President Donald Trump speaks at the religious liberty commission at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, September 8, 2025. Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Shutterstock
First published on September 10, 2025
Home is the most dangerous place for a woman. Not a dark alley. Not a parking lot. Not a park after dark. Not the streets of Washington, D.C, or Chicago, or Los Angeles
Home is.
And yet, President “Protector of women, whether they like it or not,” calls the danger that women face in their homes a “lesser” crime that is ruining his fascist law and order parade in the U.S. capital.
During an event at the Museum of the Bible in Washington on Monday, Donald Trump boasted that D.C. was a "safe-zone" after he ordered a surge of federal law enforcement and National Guard troops into the city to respond to what he had called a crime emergency. District of Columbia National Guard troops who are deployed as part of President Donald Trump’s federal law enforcement intervention in the capital have had their orders extended through December, a National Guard official said.
"It's called the safe-zone city. There's no crime, they said crime is down 87%. I said no, no, no, it's more than 87%. [It's] virtually nothing," Trump said.
And what was keeping it from being “more than 87%?” That pesky “lesser” crime of men beating the fuck out of their wives. Imagine!
Members of the District of Columbia National Guard standing next to an MATV vehicle as they patrol outside Union Station Monday, Sept. 1, 2025, in Washington. The troops who are deployed as part of President Donald Trump’s federal law enforcement intervention in the nation’s capital have had their orders extended through December. AP Photo: Jose Luis Magana.
"And much lesser things, things that take place in the home, they call crime. You know, they'll do anything they can to find something. If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say 'this was a crime, see,' so now I can't claim 100%," Trump said.
An ABC News reporter in the room during the remarks said that the comments elicited some laughs from the crowd.
How dare women believe they deserve to be safe at home! How dare they ruin Trump’s clean sheet!
Home is the most dangerous place for women because all tyrants, including Trump, go home.
“Domestic” is important only when it hurts men and the State--as in Domestic Terrorism. Otherwise “domestic”--as in domestic violence--is not taken seriously. It is private, it is hidden, it happens in the realm of the home, that space cleaned and cared for by women, that space headed and ruled by men, that space where women are most endangered.
Crime counts only when men are hurting other men, or when it’s Black or brown men hurting white women. Remember that a pillar of Trump’s electoral platform was fearmongering by inflating the danger that Black and brown men posed to white women.
Terrorism is only when Muslims are hurting the State or white people.
Otherwise, the daily horror that traps too many women at home is a “lesser” crime.
We call it Intimate Partner Violence to shake off the air of privacy and denial, but even that is not enough to convey the horror.
So let’s call it what it is: terrorism.
Trump’s first wife, Ivana, accused him of domestic violence and sexual assault when she filed for divorce. In her 1989 divorce deposition, described in a 1993 book, Ivana said that Trump tore out “fistfuls of hair” from her scalp and then raped her. She later clarified that she did not want her words “to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”
During his re-election campaign, Trump, a white supremacist who has been accused of sexual assault and misconduct by multiple women, tapped into a long and shameful history of white supremacist political rhetoric that paints Black and men of colour as rapists in order to terrify and control white women. He painted the latter as fragile beings in need of protection and saving by white men–the very men who are most likely to hurt white women.
Eight out of 10 rapes in the U.S. are committed by someone known to the victim not “the savage criminal aliens” that Trump and his Fascist Barbie with the crucifix aka White House spokesperson Karline Leavitt love to pin crime on in order to justify mass deportations.
Remember the ways he targeted the Haitian immigrant community in Springfield, Ohio by seizing on a fake story (quickly debunked by authorities in that town) that Haitians had stolen and eaten the predominantly white population’s pets, Trump said at the time that locals in the town faced "20,000 illegals" who were "destroying their entire way of life."
"Nobody knows where they come from. I'm angry about young American girls being raped and sodomized and murdered by savage criminal aliens," Trump added.
Fascist Barbie with the Crucifix aka White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Getty Images
It was bad enough that a sexual predator weaponized the “stranger danger” false trope to further his racist fear mongering. Eight out of 10 rapes in the U.S. are committed by someone known to the victim – a family member, a friend, a date, a significant other – not “the savage criminal aliens” that Trump and his Fascist Barbie with the crucifix aka White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt love to pin crime on in order to justify mass deportations.
Remember when Fascist Barbie with the $50,000 Rolex aka Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem stood in front of men–”savage criminal aliens”--caged in a Salvadoran concentration camp. Her message: she too was making white women safe from the fake danger of Black and brown men.
Fascist Barbie with the $50,000 Rolex aka Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at the Terrorist Confinement Center in Tecoluca, El Salvador, on March 26. Alex Brandon/Pool/Reuters
Fascist Barbie with the dead eyes aka Attorney General Pam Bondi could tell her boss a few things about that “lesser” crime of domestic violence. The department she runs has those numbers that Trump would moan ruin his “clean sheet.”
-Family violence accounted for 33% of all violent crimes recorded by police in 18 States and the District of Columbia in 2000.
-The majority (73%) of family violence victims are women. Women were 84% of spouse abuse victims and 86% of victims of abuse at the hands of a boyfriend or girlfriend.
-While about three-fourths of the victims of family violence were women, about three-fourths of the persons who committed family violence were men.
“Domestic violence” is private, easy to ignore and deny. And now dismissed as a “lesser” crime by a president who has surrounded himself with violent men and compliant women.
Home is where the hurt is.
“Domestic violence” is private, easy to ignore and deny. And now dismissed as a “lesser” crime by a president who has surrounded himself with violent men and compliant women.
Private, hidden, that space cleaned and cared for by women, that space headed and ruled by men, that space where women are most endangered. And it is men they know, love or once loved, men they are related to, who most endanger women–not stranger danger but men they know.
Home is where the hurt is because home is where patriarchy has made men like Donald Trump safe from scrutiny and secure that “domestic violence” is a “lesser” crime.
Trump, once again, says the quiet part out loud.
Fascist Barbie with the Dead Eyes aka Attorney General Pam Bondi speaks, alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Donald Trump during a news conference to discuss crime in Washington, DC, in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington, August 11, 2025. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
Home is where the hurt is because home is where patriarchy has given men like Donald Trump freedom to mete out whatever violence they wish on their possessions: furniture, women, or children. And the most powerful man in the world dismisses that violence as easily as you swat a fly about to spoil the numbers he cooks.
Any minute now, I would not be surprised if Trump fires someone because those “lesser” crime numbers are raining on his fascist parade, the way he fired the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in apparent retaliation for weak jobs numbers. As I would not be surprised if he removes October designated “Domestic Violence Awareness” status. Who needs awareness when it gets in the way?
Any minute now, although I’m not holding my breath, white women, who form the largest voting bloc in the country, who in their majority vote Republican, who are convenient footsoldiers of the white supremacist patriarchy, who let their race trump their gender, will finally understand that their compliance is more important to Trump than their safety.
When Trump uses words like “safe” and “protect,” always ask “safe for who?” and “protect from whom?”
It’s easier to scare those same white women with “savage criminal aliens” than the men who actually are most savage to them: the white men they share their home with.
What is Trump doing to protect them from the men who are actually hurting them, and not the phantom “savage criminal aliens” of Trump’s propaganda?
When Trump uses words like “safe” and “protect,” always ask “safe for who?” and “protect from whom?”
As feminist psychiatrist Judith Herman put it: “The legal system is designed to protect men from the superior power of the state but not to protect women or children from the superior power of men. It therefore provides strong guarantees for the rights of the accused but essentially no guarantees for the rights of the victim.”
Home is the most dangerous place for women because all tyrants, including Trump, go home.
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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her latest book is an anthology on menopause she edited called Bloody Hell!: Adventures in Menopause from Around the World. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
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