Trump and MAGA: Love the Babies, Hate the Kids

Donald Trump campaigning in Colorado Springs on July 29, 2016. Evan Vucci/AP

Has there ever been an American political movement that has relied as much upon cognitive dissonance as MAGA? It hails Donald Trump as a manly dealmaker who’s a friend of the little guy and gal. But he’s an out-of-shape makeup junkie who went bankrupt as a casino owner, who regularly stiffed his small-business contractors, and who (other than for politics) would never be caught dead hanging with the hoi polloi.

The cult’s Christian nationalist wing embraces Trump as a savior, but he’s a non-churchgoer with a long record of violating most of the Ten Commandments and who often takes the opposite path of WWJD. MAGA-ites also see him as a hero for rural and working-class (white) America, but his tariffs are clobbering farmers, his government-slashing has weakened rural health care, and he’s purposefully pursuing reckless policies likely to raise the price of groceries. They praise him as an anti-war leader. Yet he is an imperialist who has threatened to use force to gain control of Greenland and the Panama Canal.

I could go on. But I’m here today to talk about babies—and another contradiction of Trumpism the Trumpers refuse to see.

On Tuesday, the front page of the New York Times featured an almost absurd juxtaposition of headlines that highlighted one more example of MAGA cognitive dissonance. “Would $5,000 Bonuses Spur New Baby Boom?” read a headline over an article about the Trump White House entertaining proposals for increasing birthrates. “E.P.A. Poised to Cancel Grants to Study Dangers to Children,” blared the other one.

That first story reported that the Trump administration was seeking ideas to boost American procreation. These included handing out $5,000 to every mother after a delivery, initiating a program to educate women about their menstrual cycles, and reserving 30 percent of Fulbright scholarships for applicants who are married or parents. (Oops! The Trump administration just suspended Fulbright payments.) Such ideas are being pushed by a burgeoning pronatalism movement that wants more babies and that claims JD Vance (father of three) and Elon Musk (father of 14, and maybe more) as adherents.

These folks believe declining birthrates imperil humanity and, in particular, American civilization. And some pronatalists proclaim it’s time to bring back the traditional family, meaning a family formed by a heterosexual couple in which the wife stays at home popping out and taking care of wee ones. Advocates for more breeding have suggested the White House create a “National Medal of Motherhood” to bestow upon mothers who produce six or more children. Trump himself has called for a new “baby boom.”

Okay, who doesn’t like babies? Yet while calling for upping the production of humans, the Trump administration is making it harder for parents to raise kids. In fact, the Trump White House, as Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell put it, is waging a “war on children.” Many of the government cutbacks that Trump and Musk have pushed will make life much tougher for parents and their young offspring. Especially in the first days and years of life.

A few weeks ago, the Guardian reported, “Multiple maternal and child health programs have been eliminated or hollowed out as part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) layoffs.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the conspiracy nutter who leads that agency, says he wants to make America healthy again. But how do you do that when you eviscerate programs aimed at boosting the health of newborns and their moms? (In 2023, 54 countries had better infant mortality rates than the United States, and that group included Russia, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates.)

Then there’s what comes after postnatal care. The Trump administration has proposed eliminating Head Start—which would end early education for nearly half a million kids and childcare for their families. (This is hardly efficient. “Over their lifetimes,” Rampell notes, “children in Head Start end up making more money, paying more in taxes and needing fewer safety-net benefits.”) Congressional Republicans appear to be contemplating huge cuts in Medicaid, which funds health care for tens of millions of kids. Trump is also decimating the Department of Education, the only Cabinet agency dedicated entirely to…helping children.

Kennedy has been undermining the use of vaccines for children. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention fired everyone in its lead poisoning office. (About half a million children in the United States are threatened by dangerous levels of lead contamination.) The Department of Agriculture has erased hundreds of millions of dollars from school meal programs.

Parents of kids are being deported without due process. In one horror story that came out this week, Gothamist reported that the Trump administration killed part of a $200 million contract that funds attorneys for unaccompanied migrants. This has forced children as young as four years old to defend themselves in immigration court proceedings that will determine whether they are deported. That sounds like a bad joke. It isn’t.

The abovementioned New York Times story discloses that the Trump administration is moving to “cancel tens of millions of dollars in grants to scientists studying environmental hazards faced by children in rural America,” including exposure to pesticides from agriculture and other pollution. In March, Trump’s Justice Department dropped a lawsuit against a petrochemical plant in Louisiana’s notorious “Cancer Alley” that emits a carcinogen that endangers local residents. The lawsuit emphasized the threat posed to nearby children. 

And, of course, Trump’s many moves to reverse action to address the climate crisis is bad news for kids who will grow up in an ecologically imperiled world. (If you want even more on Trump’s war on children, see here.)

There are reasons to think seriously about declining birthrates and what this holds for the future. What might it mean to have fewer younger workers (and consumers) in an aging society? If you’re concerned about this, you might want to think twice about deporting kids and law-abiding residents.

But here’s a rather simple point: If you want people to have more children, make it easier, not more difficult, for them to raise a family. Ensure there’s access to quality health care, childcare, and education. Help women—and men—juggle work and home life. Address gender pay inequities, as well as the housing shortage, which drives up costs and renders it harder for young people to envision kickstarting a family. This is not rocket science.

Yet all this would entail a government dedicated to communal interests, and that’s not what we have under the Trump regime. Instead, Trump and conservatives are cooking up gimmicks to spur more births. Honey, we have five already. One more and you get a medal! MAGA World is a land in which policy is supplanted by emotional button-pushing. Round up millions of people for deportation? Yeah, that sounds good—until you realize that means setting up a police state and creating a labor shortage that will likely fuel inflation.

In middle and high schools across America, health education classes teach students about unprotected sex and the challenges of becoming a parent. That is, there are consequences to actions. Encouraging more babies but waging war on kids and families is nonsensical, hypocritical, and irresponsible—a policy that ignores its real-world consequences. In other words, the perfect stance for Trump and his MAGA crew.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

It’s one thing for Donald Trump to debase the national discourse with idiotic, juvenile, and mean-spirited blathering on Truth Social, his failing social media platform. It’s quite another for the White House to use taxpayer dollars to amplify his divisive, belligerent, and vicious gum-flapping. But that’s what happened on Easter, the day when Christians are meant to be contemplating the Prince of Peace and God’s grace.

For Trump, though, the holiest day of the year for his supposed faith was merely another occasion to be nasty and vile. He zapped out a Truth Social post declaring,

Happy Easter to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murders, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters, back to our country. Happy Easter also the WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Judges and Lae Enforcement Officials who are allowing this sinister attack on our NATION to continue.

Trump went on to rail against President Joe Biden and “all of the people who CHEATED in the 2020 Presidential election in order to get this highly destructive Moron Elected,” adding, “I wish you, with great love, sincerity, and affection, a very Happy Easter!!!”

By now, we’re all inured to Trump’s utter lack of decency, and this Easter message came as no surprise. But White House aides posted it on the official White House Instagram and Facebook accounts, adjacent to a photo of Trump next to the Easter Bunny.

It sounds so fuddy and naive these days to point out that such an expression of hatred from a president would have been scandalous not too many years ago. Alas, we’re way past that. Still, the judges believe we should not become too ho-hum about this depravity.

Meanwhile, on Fox News that same day, host Rachel Campos-Duffy, who is married to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, proclaimed, “The real spirit of Easter has returned to the White House.” She added, “We are a Christian country.”

The judges wonder what Jesus would say about cutting off aid to people who are starving and facing deadly diseases overseas. Would he cheer shutting down pediatric cancer research and making it easier for the money changers—that is, big financial companies—to exploit consumers? Yeah, we’re really a Christian nation.

Axios muffed a big-deal story this week. It reported:

Trump administration officials are suggesting their immigration crackdown could expand to include deporting convicted U.S. citizens and charging anyone—not just immigrants—who criticizes Trump’s policies.

Hmmm. If Trump administration thugs go after American citizens for criticizing Trump, that’s not the expansion of an immigration crackdown; it’s the establishment of a police state.

This week’s winner was the guy leading that crackdown: Tom Homan, Trump’s so-called border czar. The judges were astonished by a comment he made about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland resident whom the Trump administration erroneously deported to El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison. While pushing the BS line that the White House could not press El Salvador (which is receiving millions of dollars from the Trump administration to accept and imprison deportees) to return Abrego Garcia to the US, Homan, who (baselessly) referred to Abrego Garcia as a terrorist, huffed, “He got plenty of due process. He got more due process than Laken Riley got."

This was despicable. Riley was a 22-year-old University of Georgia student who was murdered by an undocumented Venezuelan man. Abrego Garcia has nothing to do with that. Except his skin is the same color as that of the convicted killer. Throughout the Abrego Garcia case, I’ve wondered if the Trump gang can really be as evil and mean-spirited as they appear to be, as they defend a mistake that led to a sheet metal worker charged with no crime being locked up in a foreign gulag. For answering that question, Homan gets the prize. 

There is too much corruption in the Trump regime to keep track of. One piece that faded quickly was his Justice Department dropping the strong case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams so Adams would help Trump round up migrants. You might recall that the lead prosecutor in the case resigned over this, as did the acting US attorney for the Southern District of New York.

This week, three more federal prosecutors who worked on the case—Celia Cohen, Andrew Rohrbach, and Derek Wikstrom—resigned in protest. They had previously been placed on administrative leave, and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who represented Trump in the porn-star/hush-money criminal case that ended with Trump being convicted on 34 felony counts, had set a condition for their return to work: express regret and admit wrongdoing for having refused to go along with dismissing the case against Adams.

In a letter to Blanche, the three told him to get lost: “We will not confess wrongdoing when there was none.” They declared:

The Department has decided that obedience supersedes all else, requiring us to abdicate our legal and ethical obligations in favor of directions from Washington. That is wrong…There is no greater privilege than to work for an institution whose mandate is to do the right thing, the right way, for the right reasons. We will not abandon this principle to keep our jobs. We resign.

That’s how to stand against Trump’s perversion of the Justice Department.

Many readers seemed as outraged as I was in the last issue about Trump’s misuse and abuse of existing laws to implement his destructive tariffs and to justify his mass deportations.

Gary Miller wrote:

What is the remedy for an autocratic despot bent on subverting and destroying our democracy? Given the attitude of what seems to be the majority of our Congress, SCOTUS, big business, elite billionaires etc., what the F is the remedy? Can there be a change of course without the use of force by We the People? I am really disheartened by the whole mess.

There is not one formula for successful opposition here. The approach must be everything, everywhere, all at once. But not violence. That means demonstrations large and small, court challenges, lawsuits, legislative obstructionism, and no retreats. Pressure those people and institutions that yield to Trump’s autocratic efforts. We are seeing rumblings of popular opposition, and many judges have stood firm against Trump’s assaults on democracy. If enough people give a damn and do something, there's a chance.

Edward Hackett emailed:

I have a question regarding King Trump's use of the two laws you cited. We know the King is too busy or unable to read anything as complicated as a law, so my question is, "Who is behind him and doing the heavy lifting?" Even Project 2025 requires some reading.

The Project 2025 gang has obtained positions of power throughout the government and the ability to implement its far-right schemes—which are in accordance with Trump's own anti-democratic and self-glorifying impulses and instincts. Sure, he doesn't have any desire to know the details. But as long as all the right-wingers he and his minions have installed throughout government take steps to fortify his power and pay deference to him, he's good. 

Laurence Doxsey observed:

In describing Trump’s authoritarian proclivity, another word comes to mind with which to label him: Ayatollah.  

They certainly do have in common the embrace of religious fundamentalism to justify the suppression of democracy.

Stephen Wend shared this:

The general situation and the disgustingly obsequious Cabinet meetings remind me of the old Twilight Zone episode “It’s a Good Life,” in which a six-year-old has everyone terrified.

That episode was also on my mind recently. Everyone in a small town must keep thinking positive thoughts about this monster of a kid, who can read minds and has the power to make anyone disappear. How exhausting that must be. And, indeed, just like being in Trump’s Cabinet.

“Are you doing this just to generate content for your newsletter?”
“Uh, no, Moxie. I’m concerned about your eyes, as you get older.”
“What’s ‘getting older’?”
“If you don’t know, consider yourself lucky.”