“Do you want to work in the center of the universe?”
That was the question May Mailman, the former director of Independent Women Law Center, was asked nearly a decade ago. Initially, Mailman, who was clerking in Denver, Colorado, at the time, wasn’t on board.
“I was like, ‘No, I’d hate New York. I do not want to work in New York,” Mailman told IW Features, noting she assumed the job would take her to the Big Apple since so much of the legal profession resides there.
But it wasn’t a job in New York. Instead, it was a job at the White House.
During President Donald Trump’s first term in office, Mailman served as a legal advisor for the president on a variety of topics such as social issues, healthcare, and immigration, in addition to working in the offices of both the Chief of Staff and Staff Secretary.
Mailman returned to “The People’s House” in January 2025 to serve as deputy assistant to President Trump and senior policy strategist.
“So, how does somebody do that? How does somebody get to the place where they receive that text message?” Mailman asked.
Mailman explained that “it’s not because your parents are wealthy” or “because your dad was in the White House under [former President Ronald] Reagan,” noting that she herself didn’t come from that kind of background.
Rather, it’s all about “doing the best you can and keeping in touch with people and making sure that people know you’re willing to step in,” she added, noting that the individuals she’s hired to work with her in the White House this time around are people she knows “who were really good at their jobs doing whatever it is that they were doing.”
“And once people know that, once you establish yourself … you get noticed,” Mailman said. “My family always said, ‘It doesn’t matter whether you’re a garbage truck driver, just be the best garbage truck driver you can be.’ And I think that’s the type of mentality of people who end up in the White House.”
Before returning to the White House in January, Mailman served as the director of Independent Women’s Law Center, the legal arm of Independent Women. In this role, she fought to preserve women’s sports and spaces like sororities and testified and spoke out about the need to define sex-based terms like “male” and “female” in state and federal law.
Mailman also played a major role in pushing back against the Biden-Harris administration’s Title IX rewrite by traveling nationwide last June with the “Take Back Title IX” bus tour, sponsored by the Our Bodies, Our Sports coalition. She also took direct legal action against the Biden-Harris administration’s Title IX rewrite.
Since returning to “the center of the universe,” Mailman has continued to be a champion for women and girls nationwide. Notably, Mailman has been credited with crafting President Trump’s sex definitions executive order that he signed on January 20, 2025.
The day-one executive order addressed an issue “that Independent Women’s Forum has been working on for a very long time,” and is “one of those things that nobody would’ve thought was necessary during Trump 1.0, that nobody would’ve thought was necessary for even maybe the first couple of years of Biden,” Mailman said.
“There were gatherings of lots of different conservative groups where people [who] were biologists and lawyers and journalists would all come together and figure out, ‘What are the best definitions here? How do you communicate this? How do you win in the courts?’” Mailman told IW Features.
Mailman further explained that “[t]hese conversations all culminated in the sex definitions executive order,” which coincides with a directive by the Department of Health and Human Services. A bill in Congress also adopted the executive order’s language and would codify it nationwide.
But the executive order, according to Mailman, “had a lot of other pieces” driven directly by Mailman’s own experience on the frontlines to preserve sex-exclusive spaces. For example, she noted she drew heavily from a report on the Left’s “abusive interpretation of the Prison Rape Elimination Act … that I put together that is on the Independent Women website.”
Just weeks after Trump signed his sex-definition executive order, on February 5, the president, surrounded by young female athletes and prominent women’s advocates, signed another executive order aimed at saving women’s sports.
(Imagine Photography for IW Features)
“We decided not to do that [executive order] day-one and instead to really have an event because so many people have put so much time into protecting women’s sports, spaces, opportunities, safety, privacy,” Mailman told IW Features. “And so it was important to us to have an event because of the blood, sweat and tears that everybody had put in. That’s Independent Women, that’s a lot of the brave athletes. That’s everybody who’s spoken up who has put their back into it, they deserved at least a day, and so that was a fun event.”
When asked what it’s like working for President Trump, Mailman said, “It is constant. It’s all the time. It’s zero error. It’s difficult.” Especially because those working for the president realize that time is of the essence when it comes to advancing his agenda.
“We have four years to deregulate, to preserve freedom, to close the border, to make our nation energy dominant. We have only four years. And if any of that is going to be durable, if it’s going to last beyond the four years, then it has to be done in the first year. It has to be done on the first day,” Mailman said.
“And I think that that energy of ‘It all needs to be done now for it to be lasting’ has changed the culture in the White House and the agencies,” she added.
Every month, Independent Women Features will highlight a new woman for its Champion Women series. If you know a woman who you think should be highlighted, please share her name and a brief description about her background here.
