On a Sunday in late March, dozens of White House staffers dressed in florals and pastels gathered at the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia to celebrate the impending arrival of Karoline Leavitt’s second child. “I feel blessed to have so many strong and loving women in my life,” the White House press secretary would later post on Instagram, “and can’t believe we will welcome our little lady into the world in a few weeks.”
The vibes of the pink-themed baby shower, as documented in a New York Post exclusive, were soft, bordering on twee – a sharp contrast to the professional persona of a woman the Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán once joked about hiring after witnessing her cage matches with the press.
Leavitt gave birth on 1 May, becoming the first White House press secretary in US history to deliver a child while holding the position. She is one of several women in the president’s orbit on a similar journey: Katie Miller, the rightwing podcaster and wife of top White House aide Stephen Miller, and the second lady, Usha Vance, both revealed shortly after Leavitt’s December pregnancy announcement that they too were expecting.
If multiple high-profile pregnancies in one administration feel unusual, that’s because it is; even in Congress, only 13 women have given birth while serving in office. But what would probably have been noted as a mere coincidence in past administrations has morphed into a source of reverence for the right. As a January Wall Street Journal op-ed noted, this Maga baby boom is evidence that Republicans are the “party of parents”, while Democrats are “increasingly the party of the childless”.
It isn’t just conservative media. Leavitt, Miller and Vance have each used their pregnancies to promote the narrative that the Trump administration supports families and that birthing babies is vital to the nation.
Pregnancies laced with such overt political messaging might seem in poor taste to some, creepy to others. But for these women, posting Maga agitprop smothered with Etsy sensibilities in order to convince the ambivalent masses to pump out more kids seems to come naturally. As Leavitt captioned a maternity shoot that was at once pretty to behold and slightly menacing in tone: “There is no greater blessing than motherhood. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”
Then there’s Miller, who, in between maternity outfit snaps, regularly supplies her X feed with a stream of explicitly pronatalist commentary. “Men want to be the protectors of their family,” she wrote in March. “Children shouldn’t be delayed for [women’s] careers – they are the bonds of society.”
“The messaging is definitely propaganda,” said Ronnee Schreiber, a political professor at San Diego State University, “because the messaging is tied to Trump and his political goals.” And pregnancies, Schreiber said, offer these women an “edge”, signaling embodiment of the right’s pronatalist pressure campaign in a way that other acolytes just can’t pull off.
Birthrates in the US continue to plummet. Yet in their pregnancy promotion, these Maga moms betray little curiosity as to why some women are prioritizing careers over kids, or why some households are buckling under the soaring costs of daily American life.
Still, at least one unlikely figure seems comfortable blurting out a possible reason.
“We’re a big country. We have 50 states, and we have all these other people. We’re fighting wars,” Donald Trump said at a closed-door Easter lunch. “We can’t take care of daycare.”
For all the certainty about having kids, the Maga baby boom doesn’t give us much clarity on how working moms fit into a Republican party bursting with ideas of what the American family should look like – and who’s responsible for child rearing.
“You have this situation where Donald Trump wants to be the president who loves women,” said Tammy Vigil, a communications professor at Boston University, referring to the president’s way of fighting off accusations of sexism by bragging that he hires women to powerful positions. “But on the other hand, there is deep rhetoric telling women to stay at home and to take care of their kids. So the conflict is very clear.”
That traditionalist rhetoric reverberates throughout conservative spheres, including at the influential policy group Institute for Family Studies, where writer Maria Baer insisted that there was “no boss, no industry, no political administration or nation that needs a woman more than her children”. The president himself cracked in 2005 that to support his own family, he would “supply funds, and she’ll take care of the kids”.
Today, such jokes lay the groundwork for Republican proposals designed to get more parents, meaning mothers, to stay at home – including eliminating federal tax credits for daycare and increasing the child tax credit. (More than 80% of stay-at-home parents in the US are women.)
What, then, could Leavitt have meant when she expressed gratitude to the president for cultivating a “pro-family environment”, as she wrote in her December pregnancy announcement?
Whatever she was getting at, Leavitt’s two pregnancies have demonstrated how working Maga women atone for their careers.
“No, no, no, I’m in a hurry” to return to work, is how Leavitt, then press secretary for the 2024 Trump campaign, framed her plan to take 10 days of leave instead of a month for the birth of her first child, Niko. That proved too much: Leavitt returned to work just three days after giving birth in response to the assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. (It’s unclear how Leavitt and her husband, Nicholas Riccio, a real estate developer in New Hampshire, handled the childcare.)
Here, multiple streams of Maga valor converged: Leavitt’s inherent femininity as a mother, her eagerness for a quick leave and an intense, burning loyalty to the president. Indeed, within days of his re-election victory, Trump named Leavitt to the role of White House press secretary – a big show of support for a working mother.
At a Turning Point USA event in April, Leavitt celebrated that convergence: “Being a mom and having a family and having a job, it gives you the greatest perspective,” she said in remarks about balancing a high-pressure career and motherhood. Some on the right were outraged.
“Have both [if] you want – pretending it’s BETTER than being a mom who stays home is actually disturbing,” wrote the rightwing commentator Kira Davis.
That backlash is indicative of the Republican party’s larger struggle to negotiate its ideological beliefs around motherhood: that families are private enterprises that should not require government “interference” such as paid family leave and subsidized childcare – and the irrefutable fact that in 2026, most mothers in America work and many depend on that very “interference”.
So it makes sense that Leavitt has never offered specifics of how Trump fosters a “pro-family workplace” in the White House.
In that vacuum of explanation, it is Usha Vance who appears to understand, at the very least, the contours of what such support could look like. “We are particularly grateful for the military doctors who take excellent care for our family and for the staff members who do so much to ensure that we can serve the country while enjoying a wonderful life with our children,” she wrote in her pregnancy announcement.
For the many parents struggling to obtain similar care in a country that ranks dead last among developed nations in family-friendly policies, the second lady’s comment might have read like a rebuff. Perhaps that explains why Vance, rather than make discomforting social media posts throughout her fourth pregnancy, has in recent weeks emphasized the more relatable sides of family life.
“We have our Costco membership,” she told NBC News in a rare interview tied to the launch of her new children’s podcast, Storytime With the Second Lady. “It’s the kind of stuff that you don’t want to let go when you have a family life, and you move into something like the Naval Observatory.”
The conversation, like her new story-time venture, was overwhelmingly placid. Yet, cracks emerged.
“What do you mean?” she said, registering a slight but clear impatience when pressed about her political evolution from registered Democrat to Maga wife. You would hardly know that she was once a high-powered lawyer who clerked for John Roberts. For conservatives who don’t approve of working moms, that might have been exactly the point.
Vance, the daughter of Indian immigrants, similarly has not weighed in on the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, which has played a significant role in slowing the country’s population growth. Her husband, JD Vance, has offered vociferous defenses of the same crackdown, while making cringeworthy claims that their pregnancy is evidence that he “practices what he preaches” when it comes to boosting birthrates.
The Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies do not track with the “discourse of pronatalism when you’re actively deporting a huge portion of your population”, said Miranda Brady, a communications professor at Carleton University. “The moral panic around population decline and fertility rates is a bit of a misattribution, especially in light of antinatalist policies that are also exercised by the Trump administration: mass detentions and deportations.”
For Maga moms, such hypocrisy is disregarded. Take a look at Katie Miller’s X feed, where the darker elements of the pronatalist push – such as a penchant for “great replacement” theory paranoia – are abundant.
“The West is dying and is being overtaken by mass amount of unfettered migration,” Miller wrote in January. In March, she responded to a study about masturbation and declining birthrates: “PSA for men trying to increase the dramatically low birth rate across the West.”
Miller called one statistic that Leavitt shared on X about children being born to non-citizen mothers in the US “retard level lunacy”.
As a soon-to-be mother of four, it also seems that Miller is attempting to manifest a solution to the fertility crisis she complains about. That is, if her husband’s pesky (but still elite) genes don’t get in the way.
“Why have I been more nauseous this pregnancy?” she asked Dr Oz during a February episode of The Katie Miller Podcast. “Why have I had more eczema this pregnancy? It’s because it’s more of my husband’s genetic makeup than mine in this baby.”
The newest federal data shows that the Trump administration’s push for more kids isn’t working, with US fertility rates dropping to another record low over 2025.
The decision to forgo parenthood – or to have fewer children – could be attributed in part to rising costs of housing, childcare and groceries. As well as the immigration crackdown, there are a litany of Trump-era policies that, in order to slash federal spending, have contributed to the financial difficulties for parents: draconian work requirements for Medicaid, which covers four in 10 US births and almost half of births in rural areas; the all-out war on critical food stamp programs that has left millions of families food insecure; the White House falling dramatically short of its promise to make infertility treatments such as IVF free.
So what does a pro-family party mean to Republicans? Perhaps it’s Leavitt, after weeks of offering conflicting answers on the 28 February airstrike that destroyed an Iranian school, sharing photos of a newly purchased Nuna stroller on Instagram (“couldn’t help buy the pink one”). Or Usha Vance promoting reading while the Trump administration guts the Department of Education.
The Maga baby boomers have certainly had their work cut out for them proving the GOP is indeed the party of families. Any success on their part will be hard to measure – but these women have undoubtedly executed a strange motherhood promotional tour.
