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As he was being pelted with boos during his speech at the Libertarian Party’s national convention on Sunday, Donald Trump rattled off a list of purported political victories he thought the crowd would like to hear.
One in particular that stood out was his boast about having weakened sexual assault protections on college campuses. Borrowing from a routine he’s adopted during daily breaks in his New York election interference trial, Trump read an article that praised his administration for weakening the guidelines universities need to follow after receiving an allegation of sexual assault.
In 2020, the Trump administration required colleges and universities to institute stricter standards for what qualifies as sexual assault and reformed the adjudication process in ways seen as more favorable for the accused. The changes were widely promoted among conservatives as a means of protecting men wrongly accused of sexual assault, and men’s rights organizations reportedly had a role in drafting the changes.
In April, the Biden administration officially reversed the Trump-era rules and instituted more protections for accusers.
During Trump’s speech on Sunday, he said:
Trump’s Education Department repealed the so-called guidance letter that turned on campus sexual harassment accusations into de facto criminal convictions. You know all about that. Who else would do that for you? Trump restored due process to the 'he said, she said' minefield for your children. I know many, many people, what they’ve gone through with that is they’ve gone through hell in a powerful blow.
“Who else would do that for you?” is an apt question. Indeed, it comes as little surprise that Trump, a man who has been recorded admitting to sexual assault and has repeatedly mocked a woman he’s been found liable in court of sexually assaulting, weakened guardrails designed to prevent and punish sexual assault.
And those changes appear to have had an impact.
As USA TODAY reported:
Shortly after Donald Trump took office in 2017, his education secretary, Betsy DeVos, rescinded the Obama-era rules. Within a year, many colleges conducted fewer investigations, found fewer students at fault, and suspended and expelled fewer students as a result, USA TODAY’s analysis found. The drop-off, [Biden admin DOJ official Catherine Lhamon] said, 'suggests that the country heard loud and clear' the Trump administration’s message that it was not 'taking seriously the Congressional charge to ensure our students’ rights would be protected in school.' DeVos then unveiled new regulations in 2020 that made it harder for schools to find accused students at fault. But the data show colleges had not been disciplining men en masse, as critics had claimed.
Trump’s boast over the weekend is another indicator that his campaign, and today’s conservative movement, is primarily built around hypermasculine politics and, in particular, the idea of male victimhood.