Everyone’s heard of someone having a baby in a doomed bid to save a marriage. But to save a fascist ideological project is a new one. OK, OK — no one can prove that Second Lady Usha Vance, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and Katie Miller, the wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, all got pregnant as a concurrent MAGA propaganda project. No more, anyway, than we can say that it’s anything but a wild coincidence that nearly all the women vying for Donald Trump‘s favor seem to have undergone the same intensive cosmetic surgery regimen to achieve “Mar-a-Lago face.” But it sure is lucky timing that all these women got pregnant, right when the MAGA coalition is starting to feel forlorn, torn asunder by infighting and the growing sense that the president’s declining health does not bode well for their future.
Jokes aside, all these pregnancies would likely be unremarkable except for the fact that the MAGA movement is obsessed with making babies. Vice President JD Vance famously spent years denouncing childless women as “miserable,” “sociopaths” and claiming they “must be stopped” from having a role in public life. Billionaire Elon Musk frequently rails about the supposed dangers to humanity from slightly lower birth rates. Kevin Roberts, the architect of Project 2025 who heads the Heritage Foundation, even ranted in his book about the evils of dog parks on the unpersuasive grounds that well-to-do urban women were substituting pet ownership for their duty to have more children. The late Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, frequently scolded women to give up their careers to have “more kids than they can afford.” There’s even Natal Con, an annual right-wing conference attended mostly by men, who get together and hype the idea that American wombs are being under-utilized by the women who still have control over them.
