President Trump loves moms, and last week he announced a whole new website — moms.gov — to prove it to you.
At an event just after Mother’s Day, the president, flanked by a phalanx of maternal health advocates, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Mehmet Oz, reminded the public that he was the “father of fertility” and presented the website, which purports to be a one-stop shop of useful information for mothers. In reality, the online resource is light on useful information or new proposals. It is best understood as a way to highlight this administration’s beliefs about which women count and which mothers matter.
Bucolic imagery of a faceless pregnant woman standing in a golden field dominates the homepage. A lot of real estate is also dedicated to controversial “pregnancy centers,” code for places that distribute conservative anti-abortion counseling masquerading as health care. It is mostly a sloppy rebranding of culture war talking points.
The website may be underwhelming but its existence is a rare concession that Trump is very unpopular. Granted, several primary victories for Trump-backed candidates suggest that the Republican Party still belongs to the president. But, his coalition is not impervious to political fracturing. The push to remind his base that Trump loves the conservative mothers who voted for him is about three realities closing in on him. The midterms are critical to the president’s agenda. MAGA moms are important to his midterm fortunes. And the moms are not happy.
Oz, who spoke at length during the event, is a man so attuned to women’s health that he once said that a weight loss regimen involving injecting pregnancy hormones and eating only 500 calories a day “is not some crazy wacky idea.” He used the recent rollout to introduce us to a new crisis that supposedly afflicts one in three Americans: they’re “underbabied.” He defined the cringy neologism as “you either don’t have any children or you have less children than you normally would want to have.” But saying Americans at large are “underbabied,” however silly the term sounds, has a deeper purpose — cute-washing the racially coded idea of natalism, which has become so popular among American conservatives. Oz insisted that MAHA, the Make America Healthy Again movement, was “vital” to addressing his rechristened crisis.
There’s a reason he name-checked MAHA. The moms of MAHA are some of MAGA’s most enthusiastic and organized constituents. Opposition to Covid-19 vaccines, school closures and public masking mandates enlisted a cross-section of women who might not otherwise have backed Trump. Some of them were vaccine skeptics. Others were ideologically committed naturalists. Some were just savvy online influencers. Over time, this coalition came to represent a semi-coherent set of ideas: removing fluoride from water, reducing or eliminating vaccine requirements, supporting organic school lunches, removing food dyes from packaged foods. In some instances, some of those agendas demand more regulatory oversight, and others call for complete deregulation. Many interests are contradictory, but the thing holding the coalition together is a base-line eco-fascist motherhood politics that merges libertarian individualism with consumer choice and frames keeping track of it all as women’s natural, right and proper societal role.
Trump deserves some credit for being politically savvy. Embracing this coalition in all its messiness helped him become a political juggernaut. Catering to MAHA moms earned him a crucial endorsement from Kennedy Jr. and recruited an army of women to his cause.
Trump also owes some credit, ironically, to a woman. Sarah Palin may be a joke today, but back in 2010 the former vice-presidential candidate pioneered the folksy, fiery, female politics of weaponized motherhood that created a template for MAHA moms to become political kingmakers.
In a speech to abortion opponents, Palin tested out a political line of attack that would shape the political landscape in the years to come. “You don’t want to mess with the mama grizzlies,” she said. The mama grizzly line morphed into a more generalized “mama bear” politic — a moral appeal to fecund motherhood that whitewashes punitive anti-female, anti-family sentiment and policy as wholesome Americana. It looks like a mother with a gun, happy to use it to defend her kids. It’s a freedom not extended to mothers of Black kids carrying skittles, and that’s key. Mama bears are defending America’s white future. Their violence is moral, not deviant. The G.O.P. spin boys have rarely done it better.
Donald Trump has repeatedly embraced the mama bear ethos — framing conservative mothers as the real warriors of his culture war. He flatters women as “strong and heroic moms,” as he did at a recent event celebrating Gold Star mothers and mothers whose children were killed by undocumented immigrants. And he has fully embraced, at least at the level of rhetoric, the conservative family values position that motherhood is the natural, right and highest achievement for women.
The political upside to embracing MAHA moms is pretty clear. Women are great mobilizers. And a lot of mothers helped mobilize their followers, churches, communities and customers for Trump, while shielding the cruelty of anti-mother policy as a nationalist investment in white conservative motherhood. But the political downside is starting to emerge. It is easier to celebrate mothers and much harder to deliver them political wins.
Trump’s political interests increasingly favor the party’s masculine interests — like waging needless wars — over the moms’ concerns.
On the domestic policy front, MAHA moms are scared of what artificial intelligence is doing to their kids’ mental health. Yet this administration has gone all in on empowering Silicon Valley to unleash attention heroin indiscriminately on the nation’s kids. Angry parents across the political spectrum — many of them moms — are organizing to keep A.I. out of their schools and A.I. data centers out of their communities. The Trump administration is not only blocking those efforts with an executive order that seeks to undermine state control of A.I. regulation but is actually insisting on its adoption by schools — a direct threat to women’s political organizing in local issues.
Perhaps the most striking evidence of Trump’s disdain for the moms who helped make him president is his recent turn toward increasing production of glyphosate — used to kill weeds — and against MAHA moms who trusted him to ban it. Trump’s executive order protected the corporate baddies MAHA moms blame for poisoning the nation’s food chain. As Kelly Ryerson, who goes by “The Glyphosate Girl” on social media, told my colleague Lisa Friedman, “I would strongly advise the E.P.A. not to move forward on deregulating PFAS if they want to win the November midterms.” Known as “forever chemicals,” PFAS accumulate in the environment and do not break down for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
True believers are Trump’s biggest blind spot. For him, fungible beliefs are a pathway to more votes. This brand of transactional politics helped him amass a coalition of strange bedfellows. He went from a benign lack of interest in trans women to being a hater of trans people because it inflamed his followers. He was for a ban on TikTok and then against it. Democrats would call this flip-flopping; Trump calls it deal making.
Not every MAHA mom is a MAGA ideologue. Many of them are simply anxious about a health care system that is anti-woman when the stakes of health care are at a historical premium. But the MAHA moms were willing to make a deal with the devil when they elected Trump.
Motherhood politics comes with a real kernel of belief. Even if you will trade your religious convictions about adultery to vote for a man who allegedly cheated on his future first lady with a porn star, there is a limit to what you’re going to trade away when it comes to your kids. Trump’s motherhood base is facing the hard truth: Trump’s politics don’t do much to help them.
Loving the idea of mothers is easy. Supporting women is much harder. Babies are real, and they’ve got to eat. To provide for them, the economy has to redistribute its largess, families have to be able to afford health care, and healthy food has to be accessible — for every mother. Neither the recent White House event nor the moms.gov website mentioned racial disparities in health access or nutrition. And, tellingly, they did not focus on the well-documented maternal health crisis among Black women. It’s yet another indication that every Trump initiative is an opportunity to reframe American social policy as a white entitlement.
The president is undoubtedly still the ringleader of MAGA. But his coalition is not content and it is not permanent. When it comes to the complex, messy politics of motherhood, the midterms will soon arrive. A smart countermovement should take motherhood seriously, not as rhetoric but as policy and vision. Surely the other side can do better than “underbabied”?
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