General Discussion

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/09/trump-domestic-violence

Trump apparently thinks domestic violence is not a crime. That makes sense

Speaking at a Christian museum on Monday, Donald Trump claimed, falsely, that his deployment of national guard troops to invade the nation’s capital has eliminated crime in Washington. He complained, however, that domestic violence was being counted in the crime statistics, which he claimed meant that the influence of his policy was not being seen as significant enough. “They said, ‘Crime’s down 87%,’” the president claimed, not explaining who “they” were. “I said, no, no, no. It’s more than 87%, virtually nothing. 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%, but we are. We are a safe city.”

If Trump wanted to endorse domestic violence decriminalization, he may take some comfort in the status quo: as it is, about 24% of adult American women have been the victims of “severe physical violence” by an intimate partner, according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline; the Centers for Disease Control, meanwhile, puts the proportion of women who have experienced “contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner” at 41%. and many of those incidents are not reported or not prosecuted – meaning that the perpetrators are free, and that their assaults have not been treated as fully “criminal”.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, has been working to make sure that victims of domestic violence have even fewer resources and even scanter opportunities to escape their abusers. The Trump administration has moved to drastically cut federal grants to domestic violence non-profits, which rely heavily on the federal government for funding. The administration has further sought to freeze funding to domestic violence charities that serve trans women victims and participate in diversity, equity and inclusion programming, severely hampering the work of groups that seek to serve marginalized victims from LGBTQ+ or racial minority populations, or to frame domestic violence as a gender justice issue. The administration has also moved to condition domestic violence funding on charities’ willingness to hand over abused women to Ice, a move that would severely limit the ability of undocumented victims to seek help.