The Poxy Morons

Today we start with a review of policies and procedures that are at cross purposes in the Trump administration. That leads to a discussion of a more general conflict between the beliefs underlying pronatalist policies on the one hand, which promote more babies, and the public health contrarianism of RFK Jr and his minions, which seem to want only people with certain traits to survive. We review some research on natalism and misogyny, and their connection to insecure masculinity, and then take a quick look at some of the influences on Trump, Musk, and RFK Jr. growing up. Finally we suggest what may connect the divergent views of population.

Back in February NBC News reported on what it called a "mass of contradictions":

• Tariffs on nations that supposedly have shortchanged the US, but a promise of lower prices.
• Extending the multi-trillion dollar tax cut from the first Trump administration, while limiting federal debt.
• Calling for an end to “weaponization” of government while, for example, dropping the criminal case against New York City mayor Eric Adams, prosecuting former CISA head Chris Krebs, etc.
• Calling for clamping down on illegal drugs entering the US, but deploying 300 agents whose job description previously included combating the influx of fentanyl, to instead focus on deporting immigrants.
• Advocating for free speech “without government interference,” while excluding Associated Press reporters from White House press briefings because the AP Stylebook still calls the body of water off the southern coast of the US Gulf of Mexico (instead of Trump’s label: Gulf of America).

In March the NY Times highlighted Trump’s contradictory representations regarding running for a third term, seizing control of Gaza, celebrating Black History month at the White House or dismissing it as a waste of time and money, calling Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky a dictator and then questioning that he made the statement, etc.

Independent journalist Marcy Wheeler, who blogs at emptywheel, wrote recently of the "collapse of all management inside the White House." She highlights:

• Conflicting State Department policies toward Africa in the aftermath of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s firing of Pete Marocco, identified by FBI sources as having participated in the January 6, 2021 storming of the Capitol. Rubio and Marocco reportedly disagreed about how to eliminate USAID programs.
• Turmoil in the Treasury Department concerning Gary Shapely, apparently installed by Elon Musk without consulting Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and subsequently replaced by Bessent’s choice, Michael Faulkender, previously deputy Treasury secretary. Bessent also fired so-called “DOGE” staffer Gavin Kliger who was apparently preparing to implement a “reduction in force” at the IRS just as tax season begins. Bessent is also reportedly a key player in, so far, preventing Trump from firing Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell.
• Three of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s top associates were fired on April 18, and Hegseth’s chief of staff Joel Kasper will reportedly step down to assume “a new role at the agency.” The three aides are senior adviser Dan Caldwell, deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick and Colin Carroll, chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg. They were reported terminated in connection with an ongoing investigation of leaks from the Defense Department. The leaks under investigation include military operational plans for the Panama Canal, deployment of a second aircraft carrier to the Middle East, a controversial visit to the department by Elon Musk, and a planned pause in intelligence gathering related to the war in Ukraine.

In all this, Trump “does whatever the last person in the room tells him to,” Wheeler writes, “And often as not, the last person in the room is Stephen Miller.”

The broad-stroke firing of federal probationary workers is the subject of judicial proceedings, but there are numerous instances of “DOGE” frantically attempting to rehire workers that had been fired only a short time previously. The most visible example of this is probably “DOGE’s” frantic attempt to rehire hundreds of National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) employees the day after they were fired. The attempted rehiring was complicated by the fact that some fired employees lost email access. The firings of all but 28 NNSA employees were rescinded.

Similarly on February 19 the Department of Agriculture tried to rehire workers “DOGE” had fired, who help monitor bird flu and other animal diseases, as the epidemic of bird flu continued to spread. And the National Park Service restored approximately 5000 seasonal jobs that had been eliminated in January.

While in some cases triggered by policy debate or confusion within the administration the foregoing examples are perhaps as much procedural as policy matters. But the cross-purposeful behavior extends to policy, as well. There’s a dark and somewhat general contradiction at work in the Musk-Trump administration. I’m not suggesting that it is a comprehensive explanation for anything, but it does have ramifications. I’m referring to the inherent conflict between pronatalism and public health contrarianism, noted above.

A recent New York Magazine article declares Elon Musk and his “obsession with fertility” responsible for the “current prominence” of pronatalism. Citing an April 15 Wall Street Journal report New York Magazine’s Sarah Jones notes Musk’s concern that developing countries will “outbreed the West.”

Whether under Musk’s influence or otherwise, in the 2024 campaign Trump declared himself the “father of IVF,” although he admitted he had only recently learned what it meant from Alabama Senator Katie Britt.” A February executive order stated a commitment to “advance IVF and help American families with associated costs so American families can have more babies…,” although it was not specific about how costs would be reduced. Then on March 27, 2025 at a White House Women’s History Month event Trump strangely declared himself “the fertilization president. And in his first public speech Vice President JD Vance declared with typical subtlety, “I want more babies in the United States of America.”

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr has vacillated regarding abortion rights, in 2023 advocating a federal ban after the first trimester, then supporting abortion rights during his presidential campaign, finally stating during his confirmation hearings that he agreed “with President Trump that every abortion is a tragedy.”

But in something out of DC Comics’ Bizarro World Kennedy has set about implementing his dangerous idiosyncratic beliefs as policy, including

• Falsely claiming that childhood vaccines are dangerous and related to increasing prevalence of autism. Kennedy recently praised a Texas doctor who prescribed cod liver oil and the steroid budesonide for children with measles, and treated them while he himself was infected.
• Removing restrictions on raw milk, which the CDC documented having caused over 200 illness outbreaks affecting more than 2,000 people between 1992 and 2018.
• Removing fluoride from drinking water, regarded by conspiracy theorists as “a plot to make people submissive to government power.” Fluoride has been shown to prevent tooth decay.

In February The Guardian identified the right-wing American Accountability Foundation (AAF) as one of the prime movers behind the Trump administration’s purge of federal employees supposedly promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the federal government. Project 2025 architects, the Heritage Foundation, are donors to AAF. AAF has participated in training Republican staffers, in conjunction with the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI). AAF was created by CPI in 2021, along with America First Legal (AFL), the Center for Renewing America (CRA), the Electoral Integrity Project (EIP) and American Moment. “All of these groups were on the advisory board for Project 2025, and most have placed personnel at the highest levels of the new Trump administration,” The Guardian reports. Trump deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, is shown on the AFL website as a founder. Russell Vought, chief architect of project 2025 and now head of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, is credited on the CRA website with “launching” the organization. American Moment founder Saurabh Sharma is a special assistant in the presidential personnel office.

AAF president Thomas Jones spoke at a May 2024 “Legislative Assistant Symposium,” that was attended by staffers for senators Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, and JD Vance, among others. The event also featured speakers from CPI, AFL and anti-immigrant group NumbersUSA. The Center for Media and Democracy’s SourceWatch lists NumbersUSA as part of the Tanton Network – a group of organizations associated with “population-control advocate and nativist” John Tanton.

At the same time, as reported by Politico, Project 2025 calls for “increasing surveillance of abortion and maternal mortality reporting in the states, compelling the Food and Drug Administration to revoke approval of “chemical abortion drugs” and protecting “religious and moral” objections for employers who decline contraception coverage for employees…. Another priority is defunding Planned Parenthood, which provides reproductive health care to low-income women.”

On the surface population-control advocacy and pronatalism seem like opposing points of view.

The University of Delaware’s Claire Rasmussen has written about the intersection of politics and biology that pronatalism represents. They identify the current increased interest in pronatalism as a right-wing populist¹ response to fears of immigration and demographic change, applying Catherine Jean Nash and Kate Brown’s term heteroactivism.² “The heightened anxiety about the threat of demographic change is often channeled into championing heteronormativity and traditional gender norms to encourage reproduction,” Rasmussen writes.

Rasmussen makes a key distinction that helps our task of reconciling Trump-Muskian pronatalism, Tanton-influenced population-control advocacy, and Kennedy’s crusade against public health. “Nativist natalism,” she writes, “is less focused on the overall economic concerns with a declining population than with the character of that population…. The future of the nation must be perpetuated through a lineage that links to past generations in both literal kinship, and figurative traditional values….” Non-native persons and ideas are deemed threatening to the nation-state.

Rasmussen notes that the “emphasis on national identity has also meant that pro-natalist campaigns have often been accompanied by similarly popular restrictions on immigration, requiring the response to the demographic crisis to be not just a quantitative increase in population but a specific increase in the size of the native population.” With reference to Hungarian Prime Minister and Trump role mode Viktor Orban, Rasmussen writes that in the natalist worldview “The transmission of national identity occurs not only in the cultural reproduction of specific values but in the literal passage of genetic identity through biological reproduction.”

Natalism is also a source of the anti-DEI rhetoric and policy prescriptions.

“Gender” can also, therefore, be a point of resistance to the dominant order from the right seeking to reassert a natural sexual hierarchy, allowing right-wing populists to claim the heteronormative family and traditional gender norms as the radical alternatives to both the imposition of liberal values and a source of social value….

It follows for the natalist that women’s bodies must be regulated “to ensure the proper identity of the nation across time….” “Women are expected to serve not just as the vessels for material reproduction but to manage every day social reproduction in the care and cultivation of children,” Rasmussen writes. This also serves the goal of preserving national identity, “because of a presumption that national identity is carried in and passed through kinship and blood, linking both a desire to encourage reproduction in our population and discourage their immigration.” Rasmussen sees policies of separating immigrant families at the border, and discouraging pregnant migrants from entering the country to exercise birthright citizenship, as based in a perceived threat of demographic change to the national “home.” Rhetoric with imagery of “Mexican rapists” and “Muslim savages” suggests “flow of goods, bodies, and blood that threatens the purity of national communities.”

Writing in The Nation in January 2024, the University of Houston’s Elizabeth Gregory focused on economic effects of laws pertaining to abortion, conception, and LGBTQ individuals. “Under patriarchy’s gendered work-assignment system,” she writes, care of infants and children “was considered ‘female’ and organized to exclude women from civic life. With minimal education and no money of their own to influence change, women had very little say in the rules of the society they steadily reproduced.”

The decline in birthrate from the development of hormonal birth control, the legalization of abortion, and progress of the women’s suffrage movement did not cause an equivalent decline in workers or productivity. Improved public sanitation and disease control ushered in a decline in childhood deaths and an increase in longevity. The key changes related to “fertility patterns” that Gregory identifies are (1) women moving into “civic life,” with accompanying demands for labor policy changes such as free childcare and wage equity, and (2) “reduced work pressure on young people without babies to feed,” who can now more easily continue their education, learn on the job, “and generally expand their human capital” during their young adult years in ways that would be more difficult or impossible later.

Gregory finds this new freedom of young adults to be a major factor in the recent conservative push to ban abortion. She quotes Idaho state Senator Chuck Winder who blamed the shortage of service workers on “not just low birth rate,” but the number of abortions. Idaho Democratic state Representative Lauren Necochea responded that an abortion ban was not likely to create more babies in the near-term, but “more parents, desperate to take any job available.”

The University of Pittsburgh’s Laura Lovett has written about the rise of pronatalism in the US, especially after women gained the right to vote. In the Teddy Roosevelt era, ““[t]here was this anxiety that white, native-born, middle-class women were having smaller families.” Historically pronatalism in the US has also been linked to eugenics. Trump’s executive order in support of IVF sides in this instance with the eugenicists over anti-abortion forces who oppose IVF because it can produce embryos that are subsequently discarded.

“Pronatalism … is at the core of much violence against women,” retired Wells College professor Laura M Purdy writes in the anthology Analyzing Violence Against Women.

Together with its soulmates misogyny and geneticism, it harms children, male partners, and humanity as a whole, given the serious environmental challenges now facing us. But, of course, biology requires women to gestate offspring, and women are generally expected to be responsible for childrearing. Female gender roles incorporate these facts, and thus pronatalism’s negative impact on women—both their bodies and their lives—is of another order of magnitude.

Speaking at the first Natal Conference, held in Austin, TX in December 2023, right-wing blogger Charles Haywood asserted that “the actual meaning of masculinity has been destroyed by feminists.”

A 2021 study by University of South Florida’s Jennifer Bosson and others identifies men who were “low in perceived mate value” and “lack serious relationship partners” as more likely than others to exhibit misogyny.³

[H]eterosexual men may be most inclined toward misogyny (high hostility without high benevolence) when they lack the security of a serious relationship and doubt their appeal to female partners. We are reminded here of male incels (“involuntary celibates”), who assert that their physical unattractiveness blocks their access to female romantic and sexual partners…. Accordingly, some of these men espouse misogynistic views including violence toward women.

“Anxious hyper-masculinity has always been central to Donald Trump’s political cult,” writes Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, singling out Trump’s endorsement by podcaster Joe Rogan “whose entire shtick is being the standard-issue meathead who didn’t do the reading before running his mouth,” and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. who “built his career on shunning scientific knowledge and posting shirtless workout videos.”

Then, of course, there’s Elon Musk. An April 15, 2025 story in the Wall Street Journal reported on Musk’s “at least 14 children with four women including the pop musician Grimes and Shivon Zilis, an executive at his brain computer company Neuralink.” According to the Journal, “the true number” of Musk’s children may be “much higher than publicly known.” The article highlights Musk’s pronatalist world view – that civilization is in danger because of declining population – and his personal goal to “correct the historic moment by helping seed the earth with more human beings of high intelligence….” Musk reportedly refers to his children collectively as a “legion.” The Journal reports that Musk offered conservative social media personality Ashley St. Clair $15 million and $100,000/month to keep quiet about the child she had with Musk, who they named Romulus. During St. Clair’s pregnancy Musk reportedly suggested engaging seven other women to have more children faster. According to the Journal Musk “is concerned about what he called Third World countries having higher birthrates than the US and Europe.” St. Clair and Musk are embroiled in a case in New York state Supreme Court centered on Musk’s making the terms of his financial support contingent on St. Clair not disclosing to their child or the public that Musk is his father, among other matters.

Salon’s Marcotte has written more recently about the MAGA obsession with masculinity, especially what she calls “a hyper-focus on ‘proving’ manhood….” She notes the “comic book levels of muscularity, which can often only be achieved through risky means like steroid abuse and cosmetic surgery,” of which RFK Jr is perhaps a wannabe example. Along with the body dysmorphia are the “escalating demands of female submission,” which Marcotte links to a catalog of misogynist and abusive behaviors by MAGA influencers. Independent journalist Vera Papisova spent a year on conservative dating apps for an article for Cosmopolitan. Interviewed by CNN Papisova characterized the men she dated as “the most insecure men I have ever sat down with,” adding “It was really difficult to have some of these dates because they were so insecure, because they don't really know who they are — and they don't know how to figure that out."

Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk’s biographer, begins his tale with a description of a survival camp Musk attended as a twelve-year old. Musk compares it to  Lord of the Flies. The boys were given small rations and encouraged to fight over them, Musk recalls. Isaacson reports that Musk, who was comparatively small in his group, was beaten up twice and lost ten pounds. Fond of slinging the epithet “stupid,” Isaacson reports, in school Musk was regularly punched in the face. After one particularly intense incident Musk had to be taken to the hospital, and decades later was still having corrective surgery on his nose. Meanwhile his father, Errol Musk, sided with Musk’s attackers, subjecting Musk to an hour-long lecture after his return home from the hospital, calling Elon a worthless idiot. Errol Musk tells Isaacson that he “exercised ‘an extremely stern streetwise autocracy’” with his boys, adding “Elon would later apply that same stern autocracy to himself and others.”

“Once he started going to school, he became so lonely and sad,” his mother tells Isaacson. His brother and sister would make friends and bring them home, but “Elon never brought friends home,” she continued. In a 2017 Rolling Stone interview Musk admits that as a child he said to himself “I don’t want to be alone.”

In the case of Trump, about whom we’ve written extensively elsewhere, according to Marc Fisher, co-author of Trump Revealed, Trump's problems and crises growing up were almost exclusively related to his being a bully. From an early age, Fisher says in a PBS interview, “Trump drew strength and stature from denigrating others, from insulting his peers ….” From Trump’s father, Fred, Fisher suggests Trump received the message that “to be a Trump you have to be king.”

You have to succeed in every possible way. You brook no criticism; you brook no defeat….

He wasn’t there to win people’s hearts. He was there to get to the bottom line. And he drilled this into Donald, and he allowed no weakness, no signs of softness.

The time Trump did spend with his father was work. Significantly, Fisher notes, the time was not much.

In his intimate relationships, Fisher says, Trump views whatever goes wrong as evil intent on the part of the other person, or “something gone terribly wrong in those people’s lives,” not “commentary on himself,” or even anything he “needs to pay attention to on behalf of the other person.” Even when family members went into decline, including his mother’s battle with osteoporosis and later loss of sight and hearing following a mugging, and his father’s dementia, Trump didn’t reach out or seek to create family solidarity, according to Fisher.

RFK Jr was 14 when his father was assassinated. A Vanity Fair profile describes the Kennedy clan as familiar with RFK Jr's “’savior complex’ (as one family member called it) that drives him to take up quixotic causes and cast himself as a lone hero against established powers, and, above all, as one old friend calls it, his “pathological need for attention.” Family members describe “a man of exceptional charm, wit, brains, and generosity,” who is nonetheless bedeviled by an array of pathologies, including “personal trauma and addiction to drugs, sex, and perhaps most perniciously of all, public adulation.”

While Trump, Musk and RFK Jr. share some traits that characterize MAGA adherents in general, it would appear to be their shared advocacy of eugenics that bridges the gulf between pronatalism and public-health contrarianism. Musk’s eugenicism takes the form of a belief that people of “high intelligence” must have more babies. RFK Jr’s seems more indirect – a reliance on the fact that withdrawal of public health services will disproportionately affect lower income communities.

And as Marcy Wheeler observed in her piece we quoted above, Trump does whatever the last person in the room tells him to.

¹ A “thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic camps ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite,’ and which argues that politics is an expression of the volonté generale (general will) of the people.” – from Populism: a very short introduction, by Cas Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, Oxford University Press, 2017. Strictly speaking, populism can be associated with left- or right-wing politics. Left-wing populist positions include anti-elitism, anti-capitalism, social justice, and anti-globalization. Right-wing populism also considers itself anti-elitist, but opposes immigration, environmentalism, advocates nativism and protectionism. Right-wing populists may support the notion of a “welfare state,” as long as benefits are not available to immigrants. Argentine philosopher Ernesto Laclau instead defines populism as an activity that defines “a people.” Rasmussen characterizes Laclau’s position as creating “the political subjectivity it claims to represent, bringing a ‘people’ —as an object of identification—into being.”

² Heteroactivism is defined as “a term to conceptualize oppositions to LGBTIQ+ equalities, in ways that seek to assert a particular form of heteronormative sexual and gender order”. Heteronormativity and being cisgender are regarded as superior, and a foundation of western civilization. Heteroactivism has roots in the US Christian right.

³ Bosson and her co-authors distinguish between “hostile” and “benevolent” sexism. Men exhibiting hostile sexism might, for instance, regard women holding traditionally male occupations such as construction worker, pilot, business leader, etc. as trying to take power away from men or control them. They might display hostility or aggression towards these women. Men exhibiting benevolent sexism might hold stereotypical views of women, but combine them with “subjectively positive intentions and behaviors.” Writing in Psychology Today, Arash Emamzadeh suggests “… whereas hostile sexism is insulting, dominating, and aggressive, benevolent sexism may be paternalistic, warm, and flattering. Because they endorse beliefs such as "men and women complete each other,” benevolent-sexist men may appear romantic. Nevertheless, they additionally believe men are powerful, courageous, assertive, and decisive, while women are incompetent, sensitive, fragile, and passive. Bosson’s key observation is that hostile and benevolent sexism typically coexist, but in the misogynist the benevolent component is limited and/or fades over time.