The MAGA movement is working overtime to hype up the recently announced pregnancies of key women close to Donald Trump's administration, including White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, but according to an analysis from Salon's Amanda Marcotte, efforts by the right to spin this "mini baby boom" into a broader narrative are falling flat.
Alongside Leavitt, Second Lady Usha Vance and Katie Miller, wife of controversial top Trump adviser Stephen Miller, have also recently announced new pregnancies. As Marcotte pointed out in her analysis, "MAGA media is hyping these pregnancies as hard as possible," with a recent Fox News segment amplifying Lara Trump's claim that the U.S. will "be in a pickle if we don’t get more babies coming," and her dubious claim that the president's policies are creating "safety and security for every child."
"It would be funny if these views weren’t tied to dangerously bigoted policies and tactics, from funding anti-birth control propaganda to Trump’s unleashing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to terrorize people of color in Minnesota, whether they are citizens or not," Marcotte wrote.
The MAGA movement's efforts to will a new baby boom into existence are largely falling on deaf ears with the general public, Marcotte argued further, noting that these pregnancy announcements were largely met with mockery. Leavitt's announcement, in particular, drew numerous jokes about the 32-year age gap between the press secretary, 28, and her husband, Nicholas Riccio, 60, with one Instagram user noting that Leavitt is closer in age to her unborn child than her husband.
"Despite all the right-wing media hype around these pregnancies, the response of the general public has cut against their hopes that this would lead to a Great Fertility Awakening among young women, who suddenly realize they need to quit their jobs to spend the next 20 years of their life staying constantly pregnant," Marcotte wrote.
The response from conservatives, Marcotte noted, has not been much more inspiring. Aside from "generic congratulatory responses from elderly Republicans," she argued that most "right-wing audiences mostly just didn’t care." At worst, she added, some of the most hardcore of MAGA faithfuls expressed anger at Usha Vance's pregnancy, due to the fact that she will have "another baby who will not be white."
"Panic over 'birth rates' is a pretext, often a laughably thin one, for other right-wing grievances: social change, racial diversity and women’s equality," Marcotte concluded. "That’s why even MAGA doesn’t get too excited about prominent women getting pregnant — unless there’s a hope that it will prove the end of her career."
