A Trump Baby Boom? A Baby Bust Is More Likely.

In other words: Don’t call it rhythm!

Just less than a year after I wrote about the HHS manifesto, The New York Times informs us that the Trump administration is assessing “ways to persuade women to have more children.” The paper finds that “baby bonuses and menstrual cycle classes are among the ideas pitched to Trump aides as they consider plans to try boosting the birthrate.”

“I just think this administration is inherently pronatalist,” mom-activist Simone Collins told the Times. Her husband, Malcolm Collins, agreed: “Look at the number of kids that major leaders in the administration have.”

Well, Donald Trump does have five children with three mothers, and Elon Musk has at least 14 with a minimum of four mothers. Vice President JD Vance, a big booster of women having more children (else they’ll turn into miserable cat ladies), is just getting started with his three. “Babies are good, and a country that has children is a healthy country,” Vance told a conservative think tank in 2021. “I want a baby boom!” Donald Trump told the Conservative Political Action Committee in 2023. 

But Simone and Malcolm Collins are at the center of the article. If their names are familiar, that’s because they’ve been everywhere, from The Guardian to Business Insider to The Washington Post. In February, Slate screamed: “For the Love of God, Please Stop Profiling This Couple!” They indeed seem like an odd one-family universe, not exactly a trend. But they’ve been transformed into clickbait nonetheless.

I never intended to write about the Collinses until I got curious about why The New York Times went down this rabbit hole, with four pieces in five days about pronatalism. I guess it’s part of the paper’s seven-year quest to take the right seriously, after missing Trump’s first presidential win.

First let me dispense with the Collinses.

They are geekily attractive and well educated. They are white. Their website, pronatalist.org, announces they “have operated companies on five continents that collectively pulled in 70 million dollars annually, raised a PE fund, directed strategy at top, early-stage VC firms, written five best-selling books” and much more. In goofy hipster glasses, they tell reporters they plan to have “tons” of kids, though, in their late 30s, they only have four so far, but are working on their fifth. They use IVF to make the process easier and to select for IQ and good health.

Unlike others in their movement, they aren’t Christians; they’re atheists who believe the developed world is on the brink of collapse. “There are going to be countries of old people starving to death,” Malcolm told The Guardian.

They’ve founded their own religion, they told the Times, that holds people responsible for every life they choose not to bring into the world. Unlike many of their cohort, they are not anti-immigration, but they do describe themselves as “the new right”—examples of the conservative thought that “will come to dominate once Trump is gone.” The average pronatalist is “young, nerdy, contrarian, autist,” he said, adding that “the vast majority of right-leaning people in Silicon Valley [where they once worked] are pronatalist.” They give their kids androgynous, powerful names like Titan, Industry, Octavian, and insist their project is not dedicated to women’s subjugation. The Collinses allow reporters to make a smart quirky couple who’s not into misogyny or racism the face of a movement that’s frankly rife with both.

Their commitment to gender equality isn’t true for many of their fellow pro-natalists, as it wasn’t true of the Project 2025 family plan. “Our ultimate goal is not just more babies, but more families formed,” Emma Watson of the Heritage Foundation, sponsor of Project 2025, told the Times. More families, but less childcare outside the home. Project 2025 proposed eliminating Head Start, the preschool project for low-income children, and other out-of-home childcare programs.

The Trump administration has floated other ideas for encouraging family formation. Some are bizarre. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who has nine kids, wants to direct his agency’s funding toward areas with higher than average birth and marriage rates. Another proposal would reserve a percentage of Fulbright fellowships for married applicants. “What the government is doing with these programs is conferring status,” pronatalist Lyman Stone told the Times. “That being the case, it’s bad for the government to blindly confer status on people for their singleness.” The Collinses have proposed a “National Medal of Motherhood” to go to women with at least six children.

Another Times feature in the last week focused on pronatalism with at least a little more skepticism. It, too, featured the Collinses—this time at the Natal Conference in Austin, Texas. The conference was founded by conservative Kevin Dolan, who started the gathering after hearing about men’s declining testosterone levels. Pizzagate conspirator Jack Posobiec addressed the mostly male crowd. “We are not replacing ourselves,” he told the crowd. “Meanwhile, those who don’t share our values are.”

In the afternoon, Collins and a right-wing mother who pseudonymously wrote the book Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War, interviewed two “very eligible bachelorettes.” But the single men in the crowd seemed more interested in getting advice than getting to know a real live woman who, by being at a natal conference, evinced her willingness to have children. “I’d love to hear your thoughts on trying to date women who are both educated and capable,” one asked, complaining about his “bad” dating experiences with “progressive women.” Collins’s copanelist urged the men to date younger women. Rebecca Luttinen, a single PhD student in demography, came away disappointed: “It was a bunch of men in the room talking about how we can try to change women’s behavior and make them have more babies.”

A third Times feature this week focused on the pronatalist in chief, Elon Musk, father of a “legion,” as he puts it, of at least 14 children. He is hardly a poster boy for marriage, since he’s been divorced three times (twice from the same woman) and has fathered children outside of marriage. But hey, a fledgling movement needs to have a wide tent, and by signing up for Trump world, he’s signed up for the Project 2025 agenda. Although Roger Severino, author of its chapter on HHS, told the Times that Musk shouldn’t be held up as a role model. “Babies aren’t to be treated as commodities,” he said.

The fourth Times piece on pronatalism is a blessedly skeptical take, by Michelle Goldberg, on why “MAGA natalism is doomed to fail.” Goldberg looks at the push by Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orbán, to hike birth rates. According to Goldberg:

He then announced a seven-point “family protection action plan” meant to encourage marriage and baby-making. It included government loans of 10 million Hungarian forints (at the time almost $35,000) to women under 40 when they married, which would be forgiven if they had at least three children. Large families would receive help buying cars and houses, and women who had at least four children would be exempt from personal income taxes for life.

Vance declared himself a fan, asking in 2021, “Why can’t we do that here?”

Because such policies haven’t worked. Since Orbán launched his plan, Hungary’s birthrate has fallen from 1.51 to 1.3. Goldberg found that the industrialized countries with the lowest birthrates—they’re falling everywhere in the “developed” West—“are both modern and highly patriarchal.” In those nations, men want to have children more than women. The Nobel Prize–winning Harvard economist Claudia Goldin concluded, “If fathers and husbands can credibly commit to providing the time and the resources, the difference in the fertility desires between the genders would disappear.”

Equal parenting does not appear to be on the agenda of the pronatalism movement. (To their credit, the Collins have some sort of split: Simone has primary responsibility for the first 18 months, Malcolm after that.) Project 2025 wants to strip women of abortion rights, public funding for contraception and out of home childcare, make motherhood a proud duty, but only with a husband in the home.

The ability to plan their families—to have fewer children or no children at all—gives women freedom and control. (Sure, baby bonuses would be nice, but under the current regime, they’d be unlikely to go to single mothers.) And thanks to increasing political polarization under Trump, young women are trending more liberal than young men. While 58 percent of women 18–29 voted for Kamala Harris, 56 percent of men that age voted for Trump in 2024 (the numbers were different among young voters of color, but more young men of all races ditched the Democrats for Trump). That ideological mismatch is by most accounts making dating, let alone marriage, tougher for this generation, with surveys finding young women, especially college-educated women, unlikely to date a Trump supporter.

Add in economic troubles, and it’s clear that annual Natal Conferences and modest benefits for married couples with children aren’t going to move the fertility needle. It’s fine to cover the pronatalism movement as a curiosity, while paying attention to the fact that it’s “an emerging coalition of the rather far right, whose pronatalist ideas are sometimes intermixed with white supremacy, misogyny, and eugenics,” as The Atlantic’s Elizabeth Bruenig did. (She got in social media trouble for lamenting that there aren’t more liberals and leftists involved in the movement, even though her detailing its “white supremacy, misogyny, and eugenics” made the reasons for that kind of self-evident.)

But taking seriously a possible Trump administration funding boom for a baby boom, as the Times feature did? That’s ridiculous, especially as the paper covers Trump’s tariffs and massive federal workforce cuts, and the GOP crusade to slash Medicaid, nutrition support and other social programs. Once “pronatalist” Musk and Trump are finished slashing the country’s already inadequate safety net, the United States is more likely to suffer a baby bust, not boom.