Republicans are following JD Vance off the gender gap cliff

As a politician, Donald Trump has always exhibited a very creepy form of paternalism. He often says things like "No one has done as much for the Black community as I did" or "I've been better for Jews than anyone in history." It's as if he's bestowing on the people a special gift from the king and they should be grateful to him personally. Of course, his boasts are always lies so they tend to fall on deaf ears, but it reveals how he sees himself as president.

Although he's long exhibited this rhetorical tic, in recent days he's really outdone himself. Sounding much more like a cult leader than a politician in a modern democracy, the passages in his speeches about women are downright disturbing. It started with a weird Truth Social post:

The womenfolk are depressed but Big Daddy Trump is going to fix all that and they'll be so happy they won't even think about abortion. "THEY WILL FINALLY BE HEALTHY, HOPEFUL, SAFE AND SECURE. THEIR LIVES WILL BE HAPPY BEAUTIFUL AND GREAT AGAIN." All that's missing is "OR ELSE!"

You'll note that he said he will "protect women at a level never seen before" as if women are abandoned children who are desperate for him to come and rescue them from all their travails. When was the last time you heard a major politician in America infantilize women like this? It sounds like something out of the 19th century.

He took this all a step further in his speeches over the weekend making it clear that this is an official campaign message delivered from the teleprompter (with a few off-the-cuff embellishments.) In this rendition, women are complete basketcases, barely able to function which, for some bizarre reason, is why they care about abortion rights.

It truly does have the tenor of a patriarchal cult leader speaking to his followers.

He went on like this for a while, complaining that all women are talking about is abortion (because they are so unhappy, unhealthy and depressed) but he's going to make it all better. It's beyond condescending, but as my colleague Amanda Marcotte points out, it betrays Trump's frustration that women aren't falling in line as they are supposed to do so he's resorted to speaking to them as if they're children.

It's profoundly insulting although you cannot help but notice the wild cheering from the women in his audience ecstatic at the idea of Dear Leader "protecting" them. (Why anyone would believe that a man who is on tape bragging about assaulting women and has been found liable for it in a court of law is some kind of "protector" is beyond me.)

But at one point in the speech as he was defending the GOP's record on IVF (even though the congressional Republicans just voted unanimously against a bill that would protect the right to the procedure) he made this comment:

We want beautiful babies in our country! We want you to have your beautiful, beautiful, perfect baby. We want those babies and we need them.

We want those babies and we need them? Who is we? And why do we need them?

Has he been chatting with JD Vance? Because while Trump may just be clumsily trying to finesse the abortion issue and shrink the massive gender gap with his creepy rhetoric, Vance has some very well-developed thoughts on that issue. As we all know, Vance has extreme contempt for childless women. In fact, in his view they are to blame for many of the problems in modern life because they are, you guessed it, so unhappy:

That wasn't a one-off comment. He has thought deeply about this and (at least for the moment, until he changes his identity again) it very much informs his political philosophy. He believes that women who don't bear children should not be full citizens and perhaps aren't even fully human. Like his close pals at the Heritage Foundation who put together Project 2025, his platform is one which would give massive government incentives only to heterosexual couples with large families while also discouraging outside child care. (Who needs it when mom stays home and the otherwise useless post-menopausal grandma is forced to help?)

Vance's contempt has caught on big in GOP circles. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Arkansas' Aunt Lydia from The Handmaid's Tale, made a snide comment the other day about Kamala Harris not having birthed her own children. (She's a stepmother to two kids.) And Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno whined over the weekend about suburban women wanting to have abortions all the time — and wondering why any woman over 50 would care. It's catching on.

Much of this is just good old-fashioned sexism and patriarchal yearning but there is more to it than that. Vance has been pushing pronatalism for some time, which gets us back to Trump's blathering about how he wants women to be happy and content so they can have beautiful babies because "we need babies."

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A couple of months ago the New Yorker's Margaret Talbot wrote a long, definitive piece on Vance's pronatalist views which she defined this way:

Pronatalism typically combines concerns about falling birth rates with anti-immigration and anti-feminist ideas. It champions not just having children but having many—large families for the sake of large families, reproduction for reproduction’s sake. Except that, in this world view, not all reproduction is equal. Pronatalism favors native-born baby makers.

Now it makes more sense, doesn't it? Vance's hostility to women who haven't given birth fits right in with the rest of this pronatalist agenda, particularly when it comes to immigration and the Great Replacement Theory which pushes for native-born women to have more children to alleviate the need for immigrant labor which pollutes the culture. It also keeps women in their place which is just as important as keeping the bloodlines pure.

This is yet another example of the influence of Hungary's Viktor Orbán on the politics of the far right in America. Vance is a big fan and has endorsed Orbán's policies to raise Hungary’s birth rate (and marginalize non-traditional families, particularly those that are blended and LGBTQ+.) Vance may not be the only influential member of the far right pushing these views (Tucker Carlson is another) but he's probably the most powerful elected politician in America to make it a central part of his philosophy.

I doubt seriously that Donald Trump has even the slightest awareness of the ideological underpinnings of the speeches he's giving about being women's "protector" and saying "we need babies." He's not exactly an intellectual. But whoever is writing them certainly is and that person is pushing a JD Vance/Project 2025 agenda whether Trump knows it or not.