Trump Wants to Pay Women to Have Babies. We Already Know Why.
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Brad discusses recent news about the Trump White House considering a $5,000 baby bonus to increase the US birth rate and similar incentives to support traditional family structures.
Brad argues that these measures are deeply rooted in white nationalist ideas and reflect a broader agenda to shape the American family. He draws connections to Project 2025 and discusses how Hungary, with its pro-family policies under Viktor Orbán, serves as an inspiration for US conservative policies despite Hungary's economic and social issues.
These conservative agendas prioritize a specific vision of family and society, often at the expense of broader public welfare and economic stability.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi.
Great to be with you on this Monday.
I am under the weather, so today may be shorter than usual.
If you're a subscriber, bonus content may come later this week just because I'm trying to pile my way through here today.
I want to talk, though, about something that's in the news that has implications farther than the headline that it is being written with.
This weekend, you might have heard the idea that the Trump White House...
is considering paying women $5,000 as a baby bonus in order to increase the birth rate in the United States.
I'll read a little bit here from Caroline Kitchener's article at the New York Times.
It was first published on April 21 and then updated a couple days later.
One proposal shared with aides who would reserve 30% of scholarships for the Fulbright Program, the prestigious government-backed international fellowship for applicants who are married or have children.
Another would give $5,000 cash baby bonus to every American mother after delivery.
A third calls on the government to fund programs that educate women on their menstrual cycles, in part so they can better understand when they are ovulating and able to conceive.
Kitchener goes on to outline, We have named their kids things like Octavian and
Titan.
They are young, white, and in many ways the face of the pro-natalist movement, though many in that community actually don't think they should be the public representatives.
One of them, though, is one of the executive orders, ideas coming from the Collins, is a national medal of motherhood to mothers with six or more children.
I want to just break this down, because there's a lot of aspects of this, but it's going to lead us to Hungary.
And I know some of you are wondering how and why, and I'll get there, I promise.
I'll land the plane.
A couple of things.
We have a deep anxiety about population, and we have a pronatalist movement that wants to incentivize people to have children.
This has been going on, friends, since the 1960s, and of course before that, but...
In the 1960s, you had a freakout.
Once the birth control pill was introduced and people started practicing, having sex lives that meant that reproduction and getting pregnant and childbirth were much more able to be planned and controlled,
there was an absolute freakout.
But the 1960s also saw a freakout for a number of reasons when it came to childbirth and population.
In the United States, you had widespread immigration reform.
You had a black civil rights movement.
You had reforms that allowed women to enter the workplace in ways that were prohibited or at least blocked by way of policy or a lack of equal pay, sexual discrimination, sexual, etc.
before that.
In essence, the pro-natalist movement has always been a concern about white women having babies.
You can listen to Sarah Mosliner's work in Pure White.
And trace this all the way back to the 19th century.
But there's a concern that there's not enough white babies.
Now, many of you listening are already going to know this links up with Great Replacement Theory and white anxiety about brown and black and Asian babies outnumbering the white ones.
This is like a common trope if you ever listen to Tucker Carlson, Fox News, Newsmax, etc.
It links up with white nationalist movements that have been on this train for a long time.
It links up with anti-immigrant and refugee sentiments that don't want there to be non-white children in the country who are citizens simply by being born here and so on and so on and so on.
The other thing that we should notice is that this is an explicit attempt by the government to shape what the proper American family looks like.
So if you're going to give people Fulbright scholarships because they are married And or have children.
You are saying to the American citizen, you are more worthy of prestigious awards from the government if you have a family that looks a certain way.
The government is saying to you, the American family should look like this.
And now if it doesn't look like that, it doesn't mean you're not going to go to jail, perhaps, at least yet.
You're not going to be behind bars at least yet.
But things like a Fulbright scholarship may not be available to you unless you're married.
Or have children.
Or both.
If you give birth, we'll give you $5,000.
Let's educate women on their menstrual cycles.
And so, in part, so they can better understand when they are ovulating and able to conceive.
So let's do everything before they have children to make sure they know when they are ovulating.
Let's give a $5,000 bonus.
But, and I know all of you are thinking this already, and I don't need to say it, but I will anyway.
There's nothing here about universal childcare, pre-K, paid leave for families, paid leave for mothers.
All of the things that would make having children in this world easier, or at least in this country, easier, more affordable, less stressful.
I am the parent of two kids.
I'm not going to tell you how much we pay in daycare every month, but it is a lot.
It's stressful.
My partner, she works full-time as a...
Demanding job.
And I have a demanding job, too.
And it means we are always juggling.
Now, just to kind of get to the point here, not only is the government telling you that you're the right American, you're the real American if you are married with children, and we'll incentivize that.
We'll give you money, $5,000.
We might give you a Fulbright scholarship.
We might give you a Medal of Honor if you have enough kids.
So, you know, you'll be a national hero.
All of this has roots in places that you might expect, and one of those places is Project 2025.
On page 486 of Project 2025, it says, instead of providing universal daycare, funding should go to parents either to offset the cost of staying home with the child or to pay for familial in-home child care.
So here's Project 2025 basically saying, hey, give...
Money to new parents to offset the cost of staying home with a child.
So what does that mean?
I mean, does that mean that women should not work at all?
There's an article at Bloomberg by Claire Sudeth who asks, look, I'm a working mom.
I work for a salary.
Are they going to pay my entire salary?
Is that what you're going to do?
How is that going to happen?
Instead of universal daycare, you should have money to stay home and I'll just...
We all know this, and I don't think I need to say it, but $5,000 isn't going to go very far.
If you're saying to a mother or a father or whoever the parent is, you need to stay home and not work, here's $5,000, one-time payment.
So that's not going to work.
Does Project 2025 have anything else in mind?
Now, the familial part, I think, should remind everybody of J.D. Vance's comments in the run-up to the election where he said that...
Women over 50, their entire existence, their post-menopausal existence is to take care of their grandchildren.
He said, that's what we need in this country.
We need more women who are grandmothers basically taking care of their kids.
Now, I'm not against that.
That's great.
That's wonderful.
My mom is a huge help to me when she can.
There's nothing in my view wrong with grandparents, great-grandparents, other family members chipping in.
That's awesome.
The issue to me, and again, I think it's pretty obvious to anybody who's listening, is there's not a system set up for people to succeed in terms of living in an economy that almost universally demands two people work in order in the household,
or having families that just don't fit this government Christian nationalist vision of what a family is, a heterosexual couple with two parents and...
So, if you don't have that right family structure according to them, or if you're not independently wealthy or have one of the people in the household making tons and tons of money, you're going to need what?
You're going to need childcare.
You're going to need parental leave.
You're going to need parental protection so you don't get fired because you take parental leave.
You're going to would love to have universal pre-K, things like that.
Maybe some, I don't know, healthcare, like that would like offset that cost.
Maybe it costing 10 grand to have a baby in a hospital isn't a great system.
There's so many things we could talk about.
But the answer here is, well, yeah, get grandma to jump in.
That'll solve it.
Here's 5K.
Why don't you just quit your job, mom?
Why don't you do that?
So we know this comes from Project 2025.
But Project 2025's publisher is the Heritage Foundation.
The Heritage Foundation is led by Kevin Roberts, who is a very conservative Catholic.
And, you know, Catholics on the whole, at least the majority, many who don't agree with this, but there are many, this is the official teaching of the Catholic Church, that birth control is not permitted.
And so we have in Kevin Roberts a reactionary Catholic who's against birth control, who in Project 2025, there is this...
Instead of universal daycare, we should have money for parents and familial help.
Kevin Roberts, though, and this is where we're going to connect some dots, is also somebody who has said this about Hungary.
He says that Hungary is not just a model for the modern statecraft, but the model.
So here's Kevin Roberts, the guy who oversees Project 2025, which I think is a huge inspiration.
On this whole idea of a $5,000 payment to parents for having kids.
And he is also saying that he thinks Hungary is the model, the exemplar of a modern state, which leads me to this.
Hungary, and I'm reading from a piece by Eva Fedor, who is professor of gender studies at the Central European University in Vienna.
Illiberal Hungary has become famous in recent years for paying families to have or pledge to have children.
This has transformed the criteria and practice for social citizenship and democratic participation.
So, this comes from Hungary.
Viktor Orban has put in place programs that are state-sponsored remuneration programs.
Women or families, to be more precise, are now receiving significant sums of government money for having and raising children, writes Fedor.
During pandemic lockdowns, the state publicly applauded women for their devotion to child care.
Those who have or pledge to have children are eligible for a baby grant of roughly five years minimum wage.
Families who choose to have three or more children can access especially generous tax breaks and a highly subsidized mortgage.
There's other things here, but she says this, only heterosexual married women aged under 40 and earning above the minimum wage can access the most generous of Hungary's childcare benefits.
So this is, again, the government shaping family.
Like, the government is taking an active role in saying the American family or the Hungarian family should look like this, and we're going to give you money and have policies.
That structure American families this way, because it's this way that you get funding, you get childcare, you get money for staying home to watch your child, and you might get a good mortgage or Fulbright.
Who knows?
But as Fedor says, it changes the criteria for social citizenship.
Who's looked at as the real American, the good American, the good Hungarian?
What does it mean to participate in democracy?
Now, at home here in the United States, I can tell you that this is still about white babies because for a long time in this country, and I don't have time to go over it today, for a long time, long, long, long, long, long time in this country, marriage and heterosexual monogamy have been formed in and around and from the systems that were set up in a white supremacist way going back to chattel slavery and other moments and eras in this country's history where White people,
by policy, were privileged, period.
Chinese inclusion, whether that is talking about taking native land, but also native boarding schools and the ways reservations were set up, blah, blah, blah.
Jim Crow, and so on.
Marriage, the nuclear family, has always been formed around the white family.
Now, that doesn't mean that there's not nuclear families that are not white and all that stuff.
Don't misquote me, okay?
But still today, the statistics show that in terms of heterosexual marriages, white people are more likely to get married.
There's economic reasons for that.
There's cultural reasons for that.
And so on.
So, the government in Hungary has taken this approach.
In many ways, Hungary is the model for some of Project 2025's ideas about family and gender.
It is also Hungary, and Viktor Orban in particular, are, of course, the fascination of the American right.
And I'll just go through a couple of examples, then I'll read some from a piece at The Atlantic by Ann Applebaum.
Some of the examples include the fact that in 2022, Viktor Orban was invited to the United States to talk at CPAC.
There was a whole CPAC conference in Hungary itself.
Some of you might remember when Tucker Carlson went to Hungary and was, was just slobbering all over the Hungarian state.
Some of you are familiar with Rod Dreher who wrote the Benedict Option and moved to Hungary and, and talks about how it is a model.
Kevin Roberts, as I just mentioned, talks about Hungary as the model for modern statecraft during the one, the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
He was...
There was an accusation that Trump is not respected by foreign leaders and...
Heads of state.
And his very first example was that Viktor Orban loves him and thinks he's awesome.
Okay?
So I don't think I need to like prove to all of you that Hungary is a fascination of the American right.
It is a place that has become this like imagined ideal country.
Okay?
And Applebaum writes it this way.
In May 2022, a pro-Orban think tank hosted CPAC, the right-wing conference in Budapest, and three months later, Orban went to Texas to speak at the CPAC-Dallas conference.
Last year, at the third edition of CPAC Hungary, a Republican congressman described the country as one of the most successful models as a leader for conservative principles and governance.
In a video message, Steve Bannon called Hungary an inspiration to the world.
Notwithstanding his own institution's analysis of Hungarian governance, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation said it is the model of modern statecraft.
Now, I want to connect the dots between the idea of paying people to have children and hungry with Project 2025 in the middle.
Because there's something you should know about hungry.
Actually, there's some things you should know about hungry.
Hungry gets brought up all the time by people in the American right as we should be like that.
We should have a leader like that.
We should have a country that looks like that.
Why?
And you say, why?
And they'll say, well, they protect families.
They have anti-LGBT policies.
They don't allow immigrants, for the most part, to come, especially refugees from North Africa.
They are very protective of their people in terms of they're part of the EU, but they don't want to be seen as part of the like larger European project where all the borders are melted in and there's open borders and George Soros and that whole thing.
There's a sense of Hungary having a national identity separate from the rest of Europe.
And there's a nationalist ethos.
Hungary is seen as this place that protects its very particular story in the world.
Now, in some small way, I can understand the idea of wanting to protect your story.
But the way the story is concocted and implemented is, in order to protect Christian Hungarian values, we have to be vehemently and violently anti-immigrant, anti-non-Christian, anti-LGBT, and so on.
There's no other way to tell the story of our Christian heritage except for that way, which is very familiar for all of us in this country.
But let me tell you about Hungary, because we have congressmen, we have Steve Bannon, we have Kevin Roberts, we have Donald Trump, we have Tucker Carlson, we have the American right thinking, make America hungry.
Okay?
What is Hungary like?
Let me read from Ann Applebaum at The Atlantic in May 2025.
Hungary is now one of the poorest countries and possibly the poorest in the European Union.
Industrial production is falling year over year.
Productivity is close to the lowest in the region.
unemployment is creeping upwards.
Despite the ruling party's loud talk about traditional values, the population is shrinking.
Perhaps that's because young people don't want to have children in a place where two thirds of the citizens describe the national education system as bad, where hospital departments are closing because so many doctors have moved abroad.
Maybe talented people don't want to stay in a country perceived as the most corrupt in the EU for three years in a row.
Even the Heritage Foundation?
Ranked Hungary at the bottom of the EU in its ranking of government integrity.
So, think about this.
The place that Republican congresspeople and Kevin Roberts and Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson, all of those folks at CPAC, they think, yeah, Hungary's the answer.
The poorest country in the EU.
The population is shrinking.
People perceive the education system as terrible.
Doctors have moved abroad and hospitals are failing.
It's ranked the most corrupt in the European Union.
Why would you want to be hungry?
I think there's two reasons.
One is for Kevin Roberts and Christian nationalists like him.
The idea of a Christian state is more important than the flourishing of the people.
They believe, contrary to evidence, contrary to
To reality, that if they implement Christian nationalist policies, like paying people to have kids, paying people minimum wage or $5,000, giving people a medal of honor or a good mortgage rate, that that will increase the population.
Well, it hasn't in Hungary.
They believe that if you run out the universities, you'll fix your education system.
Well, a lot of young Hungarians leave the country because they don't want to be there.
A lot of Hungarian families leave Hungary because they want to educate their children somewhere else.
There's a sense that the government is corrupt and cannot be trusted.
This is not a place, and I should say, that church attendance, like identity as a Christian in Hungary, is not like through the roof.
It is not a place where you have like...
Just overwhelming amounts of people who are in church every Sunday.
This is not a place where like 85% of people trudge themselves to Hungary, to church every Sunday.
I'm just pulling up the stats and it's about 15% go to church and less than half identify as Christians.
Think about what I just said.
You have the most Christian nationalist government in terms of family structure.
You have Trumpism.
In its, like, ideal form, according to the American right.
This is what Kevin Roberts wants to be.
This is what so many of the Christian Congress people think of as the example.
And the population doesn't really go to church.
The population isn't growing.
It's the poorest country in the EU.
It's seen as corrupt.
Doctors are moving.
Why would you want to be hungry?
Because the power of imposing a Christian society according to their understanding of God's vision is more important than anything I just said.
That's one.
But the second group is the Donald Trump oligarchy group.
Why would they want to emulate Hungary?
And Applebaum talks in the piece about the ways Orban has...
Surrounded himself with oligarchs.
Orban talks a lot about the people while using his near absolute power not to build Hungarian prosperity, but to enrich a small group of wealthy businessmen, some of whom are members of his family.
In Budapest, these oligarchs are sometimes called the NER.
And I'll stop there.
I won't go into the details.
But if you read the article, Applebaum just outlines the ways that Orban is consistently telling the Hungarian people to trust him.
Telling them that they will get inflation, he will get inflation down.
Does that sound familiar?
Telling them that prosperity is coming.
All the while, all the while, inflation is on the rise and the economy shrinks.
But it doesn't matter to Orban and it doesn't matter to his son-in-law and it doesn't matter to the 10 or 20 or 50 oligarchs around him.
They are becoming more powerful and wealthy than they could have ever imagined.
They are getting exactly what they want.
Near total control of the country and almost all of the country's wealth.
I don't think Donald Trump lays awake at night hoping for a city of God.
I don't think he dreams like Mike Johnson or Kevin Roberts of some sort of ideal Christian society where Christianity is the public religion.
Where atheists are put in jail for not going to church.
where women are given money to have babies.
And we track people's ovulation cycles so we can knock on their doors, the government and say, "Hey, get to it because it's time for you to get pregnant."
The handmaid's tale, whatever example you want to bring up.
But I do think Donald Trump loves this model, this Hungarian model, for the second reason.
If you are the Trump administration and you are an oligarch who wants to have more power and money than you could have ever imagined, Hungary is also a good model for you.
So Hungary is a place where the dreams of the Catholic and Protestant Christian nationalists and the 1% oligarch, the supervillain who wants all the power and all the money, they can see Hungary as their ideal despite the fact that as Ann Applebaum lays out very succinctly,
if you look at the numbers, Hungary is the poorest country in the EU.
Its population is shrinking.
People don't want to go to school there.
People see their government as not representing them.
They don't trust the government.
They don't see it as representing them in any way or looking out for their best interests.
This is not a place where personal liberty flourishes, where you can have the life you've wanted without the government interfering or without the government glad-handing those who have a family and identity different than you.
This is a place that tells a story, at least its leaders do, about the beautiful Hungarian heritage and always how they're going to restore that for the people by keeping immigrants out, by punishing gay people.
But the result is one of the worst, on average, standards of living compared to some of its neighbors.
Now, one of the things that I think I'll just mention very quickly.
Is that the anti-immigrant sediments in Hungary are perhaps fueled, and this comes right from Ivan Kroshtev and Stephen Holmes in the light that failed, from the idea that they're so worried about losing their own.
That because Hungary is part of the EU, that their young people can leave.
They can go get jobs in other Central European countries or they can go to big Western European countries like Germany or the UK or anywhere else.
There's a sense of like, the young people don't want to stay here.
The anti-immigrant sentiment seems to be a kind of mirror image anxiety about that.
That, oh, it's the immigrants who are driving them out.
Not the authoritarian leader who's ruined the standard of living.
It's the immigrants.
Does this all sound familiar, guys?
And I always think of, like, this country and the Midwest and the South and places where people are afraid of losing their young folks to the big city, to the coasts.
Places like in the middle of the country that are so far, I mean, we're talking thousands of miles from the border, or Idaho, which is very far from the southern border, where the fear of immigrants is highest.
I sense there something that's similar in Hungary, this fear that the young people are leaving not because the policies we support, the way of life we've set up, the education systems that we have constructed and deconstructed, the medical infrastructure.
That we have torn apart the culture of fear and propaganda, the anti-LGBT sentiment, the idea that unless you're married with three or four children, you're not a real citizen.
Maybe it's that driving them out.
I don't know.
Could be.
But nah, blame the immigrants, right?
It's their fault.
They're the ones who did it.
You can see this sense of like, you know, as...
As Lucas Kwon calls it in our series that we did a couple years ago, the monster in the mirror.
That you don't want to look in the mirror and think, oh, what I've created, or not maybe me, but what I've supported, is actually a reason that somebody who's 21 may not want to be here anymore and raise their family or be who they are.
I see that in Hungary and I also see that across our country too.
The takeaway is, when you hear about the Trump administration offering to pay people $5,000 or give them some app that tracks their ovulation, when you hear about executive orders for a National Motherhood Medal of Honor, when you hear about these kinds of policies,
you should think about Project 2025, yes.
You should think about Hungary as well.
And you should think about the ways that these policies mask something in Hungary.
That is not good for most Hungarians at all.
You should think of a place that is not flourishing, at least by comparison to its neighbors.
I think the last takeaway I'll say is there's a strategy here, of course, that if the Trump administration focuses on the culture wars, they can distract enough people.
They can enrage enough people.
They can convince enough people.
So they're not paying attention to the wholesale sell-off of the United States.
Just like...
Orban's done with the oligarchs.
Trump is underwater on every metric and every issue, but the one he's closest to even on is immigration.
Immigration continues to be a place where he can take a hard line, dehumanize undocumented immigrants, and like almost 50%, not 50%, but almost 50% of Americans will be like, yeah, I'm kind of into that.
So tell the story of how the immigrants are ruining your country while the oligarchs take it from you.
Tell the story about how we don't have enough white babies and the immigrants are coming to overrun you while we destroy your healthcare and your schools and everything else.
That's the play.
We already know the play because it happened in Hungary.
It's not guesswork.
We know the playbook.
We know where Heritage got some of their ideas and we know where the Trump administration is getting some of theirs.
I'm Brad Onishi.
Thanks for listening today.
Apologize for being under the weather, but did my best, and hopefully it was helpful in some form.
