Karoline Leavitt’s baby news is a political asset for Trump

It’s been an eventful month for White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. First, there was the close-up photo, with Leavitt’s mouth front and center, that appeared in a Vanity Fair feature about Trump’s White House staff. What looked very much like fresh injection marks on her lips were difficult to ignore, and sent beauty writers scrambling for comment from dermatologists and newshounds demanding answers from photographer Christopher Anderson. (“I didn’t put the injection sites on her,” Anderson said. “People seem to be shocked that I didn’t use Photoshop to retouch out blemishes and her injection marks. I find it shocking that someone would expect me to retouch out those things.”)

Then came the December 26 announcement on Leavitt’s Instagram that she and her husband were expecting their second child, which, if it was intended to take the spotlight off her cosmetically enhanced mouth, backfired spectacularly. There’s no hard data on the safety of lip fillers during pregnancy, but doctors (at least those not named Oz) generally recommend avoiding them out of an abundance of caution. Readers who did the math realized that Leavitt would have already been pregnant on November 13 when the Vanity Fair photos were taken, meaning that she likely flouted medical advice in getting them. And that’s prompted a renewed focus not just on Leavitt’s mouth, but on the possible harm her vanity might bring to her developing bundle of joy.

Does this matter? After all, it’s not like Leavitt took a Tylenol. But being the White House’s first pregnant press secretary means that Leavitt — assuming she stays in the role for the duration — might want to get acclimated to an extra measure of scrutiny. As the official voice of an administration engaged in reckless and indiscriminate attacks on people it deems illegitimate Americans, her pregnancy is more than a pregnancy: It’s a visible advertisement for a big, beautiful white ethnostate, growing in real time.

Donald Trump’s fulsome and creepy campaign-trail announcement that “We want fertilization, and it’s all the way” came in the wake of revelations that the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade was not bringing about a new baby boom. (Who could have predicted that making abortion illegal and threatening the livelihoods of doctors who perform them would make intentional, wanted pregnancies even riskier, besides anyone who knew the first thing about reproductive care?) The unpopularity of the Dobbs vs. Jackson decision and the horrifying aftermath of patients bleeding out in parking lots and waiting rooms required Trump 2.0 to come up with a fresh, family-friendly spin on withholding reproductive choice and care.

For Trump, this meant embracing babymaking in all its forms, and one of his most hyped campaign promises was that cost-intensive in vitro fertilization treatments would be paid for by the U.S. government —  or would, at the very least, be covered under employer-provided insurance plans. Once back in office, Trump’s grandiose promises to be “the father of IVF” quickly subsided, and by August 2025, it was clear not only that Americans would not be fertilized on the government’s dime, but that such a promise was always a nonstarter given both the cost burden for insurers and the Christian Right’s moral opposition to IVF. An August 3rd Washington Post dispatch revealed that the administration’s advisory meetings with Kaylen Silverberg, the chairman of Americans for IVF, had shifted from a focus on facilitating access to treatments toward one prioritizing “restorative reproductive medicine,” a fancy — and Heritage Foundation–approved — phrase that translates to “try harder.” Per Silverberg, “We’re fine and dandy with that . . . But we don’t want to be forced to ignore 40 years of scientific research that has resulted in the development of all these new technologies.”

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Leavitt’s pregnancy is exactly the kind desired by Trump’s conservative-Christian supporters: natural, God-given, occurring in the context of marriage (though, notably, the age of Leavitt’s husband poses some consequential risks for their offspring). It’s also a gift to his administration in other ways: At a moment when the president’s approval ratings have cratered, his appearance in the Epstein Files under more scrutiny than ever, and his declining mental acuity unignorable, she is evidence, however scant, that babies — the right babies — are indeed being made on his watch.

More dramatically, her pregnancy is a way to punctuate the administration’s ongoing persecution of people they believe to be “bad for America.” Even as the Department of Homeland Security’s nakedly racist anti-immigrant actions are repeatedly exposed as dangerous political theater, the department’s lead goons have grown even uglier — not to mention comically inaccurate, in the case of Stephen Miller  — in their public statements. Even outlets that were once notably reluctant to link Trump’s presidency with words like “fascist” and “authoritarian” are running out of softer alternatives thanks to the increasingly blatant promotion of Trump’s America as a white ethnostate; Leavitt’s pregnancy offers a new chance to say the quiet part without actually saying it.

(Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) Karoline Leavitt arrives for a news conference in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on December 01, 2025

Trump’s public use of eugenic dog whistles dates back to the early 1980s; during his first presidential term, his fixation on “clean” bloodlines and IQs were downplayed, and the vocal warnings of disability activists largely brushed off as alarmist. Fifteen years ago, the GOP was ginning up rumors that Obama’s Affordable Care Act would result in “death panels”; these days, they sit quietly by as the president and his Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., assemble their own.

The crux of Trump’s 2024 campaign was “restor[ing] the family as the centerpiece of American life.” The silent asterisk at the end of the statement: the white family. We’re used to a conservative wing of the GOP that sells itself as “pro-life” while ignoring the emergent child-related needs of a majority American families. Trump has taken the reins, repeatedly spitting in the face of existing children while weaving flowery appeals to a future shaped by a master race. His vision of a fertile new America echoes the gendered political philosophy of Kinder, Kϋche, Kirche that, under Nazi rule, dictated that women of Germany owed it to their country to leave the public realm and devote themselves to children, kitchen and church.

And though you absolutely do not have to hand it to Nazi Germany, Kinder, Kϋche, Kirche was an appeal to women to view their own domestic labor as both valuable and sacrosanct is a hallmark of fascist movements. Not surprisingly, little about Trump 2.0’s efforts to get more women in the family way has made them feel valued. One way for a country wanting to bump up birth rates is to create conditions that make people want to have children, as well as ones that ensure families can thrive. South Korea, whose dropping birth rates have paralleled those in the United States, has begun incentivizing would-be parents with expanded leave policies for both parents (including near-full wage replacement offered to men who take at least six months of paternity leave), subsidized in vitro fertilization and housing assurance — measures that have already resulted in a notable rebound.

The 2025 American Family Survey found that more than half of women under the age of 50 without children do not intend to have them, and that more than 70% of the adults surveyed named cost and employment insecurity as the reason. The United States could certainly put programs like South Korea’s in place: It could federally mandate paid family leave and keep affordable housing out of the grabby hands of private equity. It could increase access to affordable childcare and decrease access to guns. Instead, its policy blueprint, Project 2025, is 900-plus pages of paternalistic wish fulfillment that would prefer to disempower, punish and force women into the allegedly “natural” role of incubator.

Among the remedies mentioned in an April New York Times piece titled “White House assesses ways to persuade women to have more children” are either bare-minimum efforts like classes to help women understand their menstrual cycle, or nationalistic pomp like awarding a “National Medal of Motherhood” to those who birth six or more children. (The latter, in fact, is pulled directly from the reigns of Hitler and Stalin.) The piece was among a full-court press of baby boosterism this past spring — other NYT headlines included  “The women who think the world needs more babies” and “They want more babies. now they have friends in the White House” — that highlighted two different camps of pronatalist philosophy, one championed by JD Vance and the other by Elon Musk and, not coincidentally, displayed how little pronatalism has to do with parenting. Vance’s beliefs are motivated by religion and moralism, Musk’s by a belief that a tech-forward approach to procreation is necessary to stave off demographic collapse. Both are tactics of a political minority whose explicitly white-nationalist agenda sees women as vessels and children as weapons.

This does make a person wonder what’s in store for the woman who, despite being prized for her “machine-gun” lips, is still only, you know, a woman. Leavitt’s determination not to let being a mother interfere with her high-profile job — notably, she cut short her maternity leave after the assassination attempt against the president — suggests that, despite her Kinder, Kϋche, Kirche bona fides, she ultimately wants more than a Project 2025 life. Leavitt’s pregnancy is undoubtedly useful to the White House project of determining who does and doesn’t belong in and to the United States. But it’s also positioned to highlight the contradictions and hypocrisies of an administration that has never hidden its fundamental contempt for women.