Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Sarah Posner, a writer for Talking Points Memo, memorably summed this up with a single tweet: “So will every woman now have to pee in a cup at airports?” It’s a damn good question. And it’s all very ludicrous, except for one thing—it reflects an actual vision for the country, a vision that JD Vance and Donald Trump and a lot of significant MAGA personalities very much share. So we’re talking to Sarah Posner about all of it. Sarah, great to have you on.
Sargent: So the backdrop to all this is the Supreme Court ruling upholding birthright citizenship. This unleashed fury and anxiety among MAGA figures across the spectrum, who started to imagine the United States getting dramatically swamped by far more immigrant babies going forward. One leading MAGA figure said the possible ways forward now should include: “Deny entry to all pregnant foreigners,” “deny entry to all female foreigners,” “require sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry.”
Posner: Well, I think we’re witnessing a sheer level of racism. The anxiety about birth tourism, and women coming to America from China or other places just so they could have a baby who would be an American citizen, has long been a talking point in the anti-immigrant right. So it’s not like it came out of nowhere.
What these people are proposing is the idea that women would be potentially sterilized if they wanted to come to America. That’s insane. Or that testing women, giving women pregnancy tests before they come. I mean, it’s just so bananas. I can’t even believe that they’re not ashamed to talk about it on TV.
Ben Shapiro: “If you’re coming in six months pregnant, we should not give you a four-month visa. We should give you a one-month visa and then kick your ass out, right?”
Posner: Well, for one thing, MAGA has always been very interested in policing women’s bodies, whether it’s preventing them from having an abortion, preventing them from accessing birth control, or in this case, preventing them from being in the United States when they go into labor, right?
And then you add that to their obsession about immigrant, quote-unquote, “invasions”—that these invasions of immigrants are making the United States less pure, are contaminating us. And so you have a movement that’s at its core disgusted by women’s bodies. And that’s why they want to control them.
Sargent: And some leading MAGA women are getting into this act too. Here’s Megyn Kelly.
Sargent: There seems to be this almost zealous desire to stop people from coming here at all. I really think at this point they just want the whole world to go away. Can you talk about that element of this?
But a lot of people did come, right? So they were basically saying either, you know, that’s not going to happen to me, or I’m not afraid of ICE, or maybe they were just thinking, I want to see the World Cup so badly that I don’t care.
Right. And so I think a lot of it is to kind of perform for MAGA, perform for Trump, because they have to coddle their little baby fascist president who just lost a case at the Supreme Court. So they have to show that they are really coming up with other ways to ensure that no foreigner has a baby in the United States anymore, despite the Supreme Court decision.
So you’ve actually got acting Attorney General Todd Blanche going out there saying that there will be concrete action to stop this. He says there will be things the administration might do as part of the visa process to limit it.
Posner: It’s actually not the Department of Homeland—I mean, I don’t know that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche knows this or not, which is kind of sad and pathetic, but it’s not the Department of Homeland Security who decides who gets a visa. It’s the State Department. So he can ask the Department of Homeland Security to do stuff, but they’re not the ones who would stop somebody from getting a visa.
I suppose they could try to do it, but the scale of staff and resources that they would need to do it—now, that doesn’t mean that wouldn’t stop them from making an example of somebody, because they love to produce content for all the people who are watching, all these influencers on their podcasts and on X, talk about stopping all this supposed birth tourism.
Sargent: Yeah, I think it just goes back to what you said before about them performing for the audience of one. They need to let him know that things are being done, because he’s strong and he never just loses. He’s always on offense, right? So here they are on offense again. I really think that is such a crucial piece of the MAGA psyche—to always be on offense, to always be strong, to never be losing, et cetera, et cetera.
And so they also have to perform for the MAGA audience, that they’re worried might be either losing interest or thinking that maybe Trump is failing or losing his power. Trump’s power is ebbing—that can’t be the image.
Stephen Miller (voiceover): Just physically being on U.S. soil does not make you a citizen, or qualified to carry on or capable of executing the inheritance of this country. We have people from all over the world, from third world nations, nations that on their own would have never invented the wheel, let alone modern technology, let alone medicine, let alone air travel. And they can just come into the country, have a baby at a hospital, paid for by you and me, and then that baby’s automatically a citizen. That baby can sit on a jury when he turns 18 and sit in judgment of you and sit in judgment of me and sit in judgment of our loved ones, can decide who our mayors are, our governors are, our presidents are.
But what I think it gets at really is the degree to which stopping birthright citizenship, or upending birthright citizenship, was central to their big project. They really, really, really think that we’re in the midst of a demographic emergency, and that something incredibly drastic and Caesar-like is needed to prevent that from happening.
And it’s just such a crazy, weird thing to say, because obviously it’s not true. Like, Americans have not invented all the great inventions in the history of humanity. And also that he feels like that’s the thing that he has to say.
Sargent: I think what he thinks is that the United States is the privileged inheritor of what he calls Western civilization, and that everybody outside this kind of civilizational charmed circle that he’s invented—which essentially includes Europe, and now includes southern and parts of Eastern Europe, whereas it didn’t before when his relatives came over—he thinks that the charmed circle of civilization has been drawn in a way that it excludes what he calls the third world.
And you’ve written about this as well a number of times. Can you talk about the religious dimension to what I’m talking about there, this kind of vision of civilizational supremacy? There is a religious nationalist dimension to it as well, isn’t there?
And so I think that the religious right has shifted. Like, they’ve gone back and forth between being an anti-immigrant movement, being a movement that pretended for a while that it was interested in bringing people of color and immigrants into their movement and making them part of the Republican Party, and to being completely committed to Donald Trump and his mass deportation policies.
Sargent: I think you really nailed it when you said that they’re going to essentially want women to pee in cups at airports now, because that really captures all the craziness of it—the misogyny, the hostility to women’s bodily functions and so forth.
How does he, do you think, handle that while at the same time appealing to the middle? It seems like this vision is so extreme and so crazy. And someone like JD Vance, whose whole kind of shtick is to be the guy who makes MAGA seem reasonable and puts an intellectual gloss on it—we’re now at a point where it’s getting so crazy that it’s going to be very hard for him to do that. How do you see him managing this?
I think that Vance’s biggest political problem—one of his own creation, obviously, because he’s trying to appeal to the MAGA base and the anti-immigrant base—is that the base is very distrustful of him because his wife is not white and she’s not Christian. And he has to like run in circles to try to convince them that he’s OK and he’s one of them.
I mean, he’s reinvented himself numerous times, but he can’t go anywhere without the MAGA base, right? Because it’s not like he has some natural constituency other than the MAGA base. So it’s not like if you went out there tomorrow and said, I agree with the majority opinion in the birthright citizenship case, that there would be a constituency for him. So he’s stuck with trying to appeal to MAGA.
Posner: Thanks for having me, Greg.
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