Donald Trump: The Fertilization Administration

Growing up as a queer trans child, I watched the United States oppress its queer population and bomb countries in the Middle East while large swathes of society stayed indifferent. It felt as though the tides were turning in favor of a left-leaning agenda with the ascendancy of Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary, but that fell apart, especially as Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016. After his victory, it felt as if the world was about to get much worse. All of this heavily influenced my personal politics and the framework through which I view the world, so when Donald Trump won the 2024 election, I immediately spent far too long trying to figure out why he won again and what he plans to do. 

A major mistake people have made for too long is to assume Trump, Musk, Vance, and all these people in his cabinet are simply stupid or purely evil. While their actions negatively affect people in real ways, the Trump administration and its true believers don’t consider themselves stupid or evil. They are in lockstep on an agenda, and it’s important to understand your enemy’s plan to address and counter it properly. After multiple conversations on my podcast Western Kabuki and with people in my personal life, I watched Trump begin to go through with his radical tariff agenda, which will, by every indication, alter the life of all Americans and, more broadly, all of civilization. 

Then, it finally clicked on what the agenda truly is. The second Trump administration operates under a pro-natalist nationalistic ideology. 

That might initially sound complicated, but the premise is quite simple. Donald Trump and his far-right cabinet, with Elon Musk at its center, are deeply disturbed by the declining birth rate and the shifting ethnic demographic makeup of the United States and will do everything in their power to halt and reverse that trend, including restricting access to contraceptives, banning abortions, and even restructuring the global economy through the use of tariffs.

Elon Musk, Fertility Expert

One would be hard-pressed to find anyone more vocal about declining birth rates than the far-right tech billionaire Elon Musk. Leading up to the 2024 election, Musk radicalized himself through his 2022 purchase of Twitter. Since then, he has become an avid supporter of Donald Trump and used his wealth and influence to become a central figure in the Republican Party. His rhetoric ramped up throughout this embrace of the right and his self-radicalization. He began constantly posting about the importance of getting Trump elected to the White House, going as far as to say that “civilization as we know it is on the line” at one point.

At first, like many, I thought this was one of his ketamine-fueled ramblings, and many people online, myself included, mocked his unreasonable alarmism. However, as time passed, it became apparent that he truly believed that Trump's agenda was the vehicle to saving human civilization. On his Twitter page, Elon repeatedly spoke about the pressing nature of the declining birth rates around the globe, describing it as the biggest threat to human civilization on multiple occasions.

In a recent interview, Musk said that shrinking birth rates keep him up at night, and his views on this issue go much deeper than simple rhetoric. With 14 known children, the billionaire believes he is ‘doing his part’ to help combat what he sees as an existential threat to humanity despite demographers disagreeing with him and asserting that the world’s population is, in fact, growing.

It is highly unlikely that the nation’s leading fertility expert is unaware of the abundant data showing that the world’s overall population is growing. Still, that trend does not help Musk sleep any better at night. In a recent interview with far-right Italian politician Matteo Salvini, Elon said, “A country is its people, not its geography.” Musk’s statements during the interview give a glimpse of his underlying thinking, which resembles that of the far-right great replacement conspiracy theory, which he repeatedly endorsed in the past.

It isn’t just Elon Musk embracing pro-natalism. JD Vance, Stephen Miller, and even Donald Trump buy into this as a baseline agenda, and it has been the trend in right-wing spaces for years now. Data shows that without immigration, the calculated fertility rate of the United States is roughly 1.66 children per woman and declining, which is significantly below the 2.1 replacement level needed to sustain a population. The modern right-wing believes that this is the biggest problem that the United States and the world face. 

They also believe that society's high levels of education, particularly the higher levels of education among women, are bad for society and its birth rate. In general, the higher a society’s level of education, the lower the birth rate tends to be due to women making more money and not having to rely as much on men to survive. This, I believe, is the reason they have elevated their attacks on higher education and want to abolish the Department of Education. 

Data shows that women's education levels are inversely correlated with fertility rates. This correlation is perhaps why the Trump administration is attempting to close the Department of Education. The administration's efforts to promote a higher fertility rate are also reflected in how it prioritizes the distribution of resources, with a recent memo outlining how the Department of Transportation seeks to prioritize allocating resources to counties with birth and marriage rates higher than the national average. 

The pro-natalists want people to become less educated, which is crucial to their restructuring of society and push to bring back manufacturing. They want to replicate the American society of the early 1900s. 

Growing the population by rolling back bodily autonomy

In conjunction with destroying education generally and the education of women specifically, the pro-natalists aim to strip women of as much bodily and social autonomy as possible. The overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 was a major victory for the right as it stripped millions of women across the country of the right to access abortion, but their attacks didn’t stop there. Shortly after overturning Roe v. Wade, 12 states enacted total abortion bans, which include criminal and civil penalties for physicians who provide women from these states access to abortions and abortion-inducing medication. 

Donald Trump has stated on the campaign trail that he does not support a federal abortion ban and would rather leave the issue of abortion to state legislatures. However, Trump’s statements about abortion should be viewed as an attack on access to abortion and not in support of it, as the push to eliminate access to abortion in red states rapidly escalated under his administration, culminating with the recent arrest of a Georgia woman for the crime of having a miscarriage.

Trump’s efforts to promote a higher birth rate have seen him depart from the Republican Party’s rhetoric against in vitro fertilization (IVF) and come out in support of it. Less than one month after his inauguration, Trump signed an executive order to expand access to IVF despite his party’s long track record of opposing fertility treatment. The Republican Party’s opposition to IVF is rooted in the belief that life begins at conception, which is the same line of thinking used in the push to ban abortion.

Since Trump has taken hold of the party, Republicans have shifted to a more secular critique of both abortion and LGBTQ rights hinged closely to birth rate trends. When gay marriage was legalized by Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, the right took a step back after that major defeat and decided to consider new routes of attack for their social conservative agenda. His new “secular” based criticism of a liberal social agenda is the manifestation of that change.

In a recent press conference, Trump called himself the “fertilization president”—on the surface, seemingly another instance of his inane ramblings, but all evidence points to the fact that he fully means it.. He fully believes in an agenda to raise birth rates at all costs, which has always been a longstanding goal of the religious conservative agenda. Still, Trump has modernized the strategy to achieve this same goal.

Since entering the workforce to help sustain the economy as men went to fight in World War II, women have continued to increase their participation in the labor force. We have become a far more equal society between the genders since this shift occurred: women have been able to build their own lives separate from the men they marry, meaning they may be less likely to start families if they have a career. 

The Trump administration wants to reverse the role of women out of the workplace to a traditional role raising large families on wages provided by labor manufacturing jobs. I think this helps explain why right-wingers online have been melting down about “email jobs” and particularly women in higher-level jobs. In this context, the online rightwing freaking out against the TikTok made by the Australian skin care company, something totally harmless, completely melts their brains. They do not want women to have control; they want women to have children to counter what they view as the population collapse of society.

Deportations and degrowth

In combination with onshoring a large number of manufacturing jobs, the Trump administration seeks to deport millions of undocumented and documented immigrants. The deportations serve two purposes: firstly, to induce an artificial labor shortage and temporarily drive up wages for the newly onshored jobs, and secondly, to allow the administration to be selective about who gets those jobs. These policies work hand-in-hand with the right-wing push against DEI initiatives in universities and workplaces to allow members of certain demographics favored by the Trump cabinet to attain higher-paying jobs to drive up birth rates for these same demographics.

How will they ensure they can make manufacturing jobs to raise large families? They will have to limit the labor market drastically. This can help explain why they have always wanted mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and even American citizens out of the country. As we saw in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns, the labor force became limited. Fewer people were working, which led to workplaces trying to hire more and, in doing so, had to raise wages in almost every industry to encourage workers to apply for these jobs that felt labor shortages. They want to replicate the labor shortage we witnessed of the early COVID-19 pandemic, this time by forcing as many people as possible out of the country and forcing those who remain in the US to take the jobs left open from mass deportations. This is the driving motive behind their deportations; they want to shrink the labor force as much as they can. 

Elon Musk recently posted a video on Twitter discussing how “a country is its people” and that if you “replace” the people currently living in a country with a separate population, it will no longer be the same nation. Based on current projections, America has to increase immigration from other countries to sustain population growth. Musk’s proposed alternative is to de-educate Americans, bring back manufacturing, and hope that that will make Americans have more children, bringing the US back to an era of sustained population growth.

Sabotaging consumer demand through tariffs

The strange paradox at the center of this administration is that while the Republican Party is typically pro-free trade, Trump is seemingly destroying that free trade world order to bring manufacturing back into the United States. Why would he want to destroy what is sustaining modern American society, importing goods and consumerism? Wouldn’t this completely destabilize the current world order and American society? 

The reality is that this is what they actually want. They believe that by enacting domestic isolationist free-market capitalism, they will be able to restart the American dream and American fertility. They aren’t just saying this to cope or to trick people. Even if tariffs don’t last long-term at the rates Trump set initially, he will continue to use them as active threats to try to bring back manufacturing to the US by any means necessary.

They want to do this because they are anti-consumerist: they want to drive down buying power and force workers to perform more labor. They aren’t anti-consumerist based on a leftist or communist principle that workers should own the means of production. Still, one hinged upon returning stronger privileges to the ownership class enjoying more labor performed by workers, which they hope will eventually lead to increasing birth rates. He isn’t just setting massive tariffs because he thinks trade is bad, but because he and his administration think importing large quantities of foreign goods is a sign of lazy, stagnant societies. 

The Trump administration appears to buy into the long-debated correlation that an increase in a society's consumerism correlates with an increase in education with a move away from prioritizing manufacturing as a country's population increases its level of education, manufacturing jobs will be offshored to less developed and less educated countries. They very intentionally want to enact tariffs globally to raise prices on all goods to drive down consumerism. 

This is why they don’t mind that the stock market tanks and that people are less confident in the current economy. They want to completely recreate the economy, short term economic struggle is worth the effort in their view, because it will ensure the reintroduction of manufacturing into America, which if they succeed, will drive the birth rate to a more sustainable rate as they identified that societies that have higher manufacturing industries compared to jobs that are based around consumption, such as a job in retail.

Queer rights: another obstacle to maximum fertility

Continuing on their anti-women's rights and anti-freedom stances, they are also virulently anti-LGBTQ. As someone who is transgender and queer, this scares me because this is the first time in a decade where it feels the rightwing reactionary agenda against the queer community has had any victories. Their reactionary agenda fits into their pro-natalist nationalistic agenda, too. 

Elon Musk is, again, a perfect illustration. For years, he publicly has been ostensibly pro-LGBTQ, even promoting Tesla’s social policies. When he bought Twitter in 2022, he seemingly turned on the queer community, especially transgender individuals. During the discovery period for the legal case of him purchasing Twitter, text messages he sent revealed he bought the website due to the Babylon Bee being suspended over a transphobic joke. Simultaneously, his first child, Vivian Wilson, came out as trans. Ever since, he has been one of the largest promoters worldwide of anti-trans narratives and healthcare policy. 

Musk and many others in his sphere describe trans people in nefarious terms. When talking about transgender children, they use the framing that they are “being castrated” or “mutilated”. In looking at Elon Musk's ideological framing of pro-natalism, his transphobia isn’t based on thinking we trans people are “weird” or “cringe”, but an actual attack on the survival of civilization, as trans people in general have fewer kids for various reasons. He has 14 kids because he wants to create a dynasty but also because he views this as “helping save humanity.” If someone is trans, he views that as “hedonism” and an attack on the survival of the human race. There are those in the right wing movement, probably the majority, that just dislike transgender people for typical transphobic reasons; due to their shared dislike of trans people, these two groups are natural allies working to “eradicate transgenderism” and “gender ideology”.

How does this tie into the rampant anti-feminism of Elon Musk and the current administration? They believe the late 19th and early 20th centuries to be America's golden age. They intend to bring America’s ‘Nuclear Family’ back into the picture as much as possible, and inherently, the existence of the LGBTQ community and women's rights are direct threats to that. 

Re-masculinizing the workforce, culturally and materially

When I realized I was transgender and decided to transition, it started a domino effect in my own mind. If gender is a social construct that can be broken and bent, what else is a social construct? Is the entirety of society simply a social construct that can be rewritten or reoriented? Rightwing reactionaries will typically make fun of the line “gender is a social construct.” Still, ironically, their heavy lean into false masculinity is a result of them trying to reinforce a social construct that they prefer. Administrative officials have called the tariffs “masculine” and said that “the strong will survive,” and this is their attempt to restructure society back to the age of pre-feminism. They believe that when society was at its most “masculine,” when men worked hard labor jobs, and when women's primary goal was to raise families, this is the only way a positive birth rate is achievable. They view feminism as one of the largest drivers of the collapse of society, which is why they want fewer women in higher education.

Donald Trump's pro-natalist Nationalistic agenda is as much of a cultural reorientation as it is an economic reorientation. These pillars go hand in hand. Their seemingly random grievance politics-based, scattershot culture war against ‘wokeness’ has been intentional and was crucial leading up to this economic reorientation.

DOGE, led by Elon Musk, is also a factor in the reorientation of the economy. They believe that deregulation is one of the primary ways they can bring back the golden age of manufacturing. They believe corporate prosperity is only at its full potential if there are as few regulations as possible. Republicans believe that regulations only exist to harm business, and there is no value in adding guard rails to the economy. This is why they despise Franklin Delano Roosevelt more than any other president in history, as he taxed the rich at rates never seen in history and expanded the government and government regulations, favoring the worker and their safety and prosperity. 

The function of DOGE, at least initially, was a multi-pronged attack on the government. The first prong of DOGE was to destroy government regulations that favored workers, giving business owners more power over them. This is in line with the Republican agenda ever since Ronald Reagan, an agenda that has successfully broken down government power and high taxation levels. Over the last couple of years, we have seen an increase in union membership; this is a direct threat to the right wing's agenda. They have always wanted a weaker labor force that is easier to exploit, and that has not changed. 

The second prong of DOGE was to lay off as many government workers as possible who work “cushy fake email jobs” to ensure a workforce for the manufacturing jobs they want to bring back to the US. Moreover, they view these government jobs as feminine. The right believes that working behind a computer is not sufficiently masculine.

Working in the factory is masculine. Their theory is that type of job is what makes someone working class, not the wage one makes. This is why the right wing views working as a barista at Starbucks, even though it fits the definition economically of a working class job, as not working class. To the right wing, being “working class” is far more about aesthetic than it is about actual class position. They believe if they can destroy feminism systematically and socially, women will want to work less due to cultural pressure and instead return to having and raising more children.

What’s next? 

This second Trump administration is cruel, and that is the point. They are doing anything they can, at any cost, to enact their agenda and change the country forever. They are trafficking non-criminal immigrants into labor camps in El Salvador, monitoring the social media activity of legal immigrants, rolling back LGBTQ rights as far as they can push them, cracking down on free speech but in particular are cracking down individuals who are pro-Palestinian, and funneling money to the richest allies they have to consolidate the rich class power. They know they have to be cruel to do this. They will steamroll through our rights and society to get what they want. This is their strong-arm right-wing fascism in action.

While I was writing this piece, Trump announced a 90-day pause on “reciprocal tariffs” on all countries except China, on which he imposed import tariffs of 125%. This is a sign of his administration wavering due to the pressure put on it by investors and Republican lawmakers due to the collapsing stock markets. This should be viewed as a temporary compromise with the owning class and a negotiation tactic deployed by Trump to bring manufacturing jobs to the US, not as a long-lasting change in the administration's agenda. The notable exclusion of China from the pause on tariffs is likely tied to the Chinese government’s blocking of the deal to acquire TikTok in response to the reciprocal tariffs. 

So clearly, his use of tariffs is fluctuating and likely tied into his battle to win TikTok from ByteDance in China, as the deal they were close to making fell through shortly after Trump announced his “liberation day” tariffs. They may walk the entirety of his tariff agenda within a day of me publishing this, and they can announce it was all part of their plan after all and was “The Art Of The Deal”. They might keep changing their minds on the specifics of the tariffs every other day and doing what appears to be market manipulation to benefit themselves and their close allies. At the end of the day, the market is still incredibly volatile, which is usually bad for investors and the country's current economic order in the long term if it doesn’t settle out. 

I could be entirely off base, and the Trump administration might actually be a group of psychopaths who have no idea what they are doing. It could just be that Trump is willing to say anything and has no real beliefs other than that he has to win. It could even simply be about projecting power, strength, and masculinity. Whatever the case, the only antidote that I believe will fully defeat the Trump administration’s far-right pro-natalist nationalism is a left-wing populist movement that will make a real effort to address the growing social and economic grievances of the American people by enacting sweeping reforms akin to FDR’s new deal instead of opting for slow, gradual change like all other democratic administrations in the modern history of the US. 

The classic Democratic Party method of letting their enemy make mistakes while hoping voters will be driven to them cannot continue to be the only plan. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been going across the United States, holding rallies and bringing out thousands of people during a period when elections aren’t being held. People in the United States are hungry for bold action. Our politicians must meet the moment.

This piece was written by June Sternbach and edited by Josh Boerman of the Worst Of All Possible Worlds podcast and by Cirnose. Big thanks to both for helping put this together.