The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 6 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
The right has long been obsessed with the idea that huge numbers of women come illegally to the United States only to have babies. But now Donald Trump’s top officials and the MAGA movement are giving this a new twist. They’re seriously talking about preventing pregnant women from entering the country. This is being discussed all over MAGA media. Some are talking about forced sterilization. Others are talking about pregnancy tests before entry.
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.
Sarah Posner: Thanks for having me again, Greg.
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.”
Wow. What’s your immediate reaction to just the sheer level of fear and anxiety we’re witnessing here?
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.
But never have I seen the range of people talking about such extreme policy proposals, if you can call them that, to try to prevent this thing that can already be prevented by U.S. consulates, who investigate this sort of thing when they’re deciding whether to grant somebody a visa, and can turn down somebody’s visa based on that.
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.
Sargent: Yeah, and they even seem to be enjoying it a whole lot as well. I want to read some quotes from leading MAGA figures. Here’s Mike Davis: “We need to get all illegals out of our country fast, and we need to start with birthing-aged women.”
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?”
Sarah, one interesting thing here is that there’s always been this intense misogyny to MAGA. And here you’re seeing almost a conflation or a bundling of the misogyny and the hysterical hatred of immigrants and the great replacement theory, just really juiced up to the most hyperbolic and insane levels you can imagine. You’re good on the topic of MAGA misogyny. What do you make of that element of it?
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?
Like, all of these things are about making sure that they have control over women’s bodies and women’s reproductive freedom. So that is completely on brand for them, to be obsessed with this.
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.
And here they add to that layer of disgust by talking about immigrant women as being—or, I mean, not just immigrant women, women in general, like women who are coming to the United States to visit family or go see the Empire State Building—you know, that they’re talking about them as being conniving and dirty and wanting to basically defraud America.
Sargent: And some leading MAGA women are getting into this act too. Here’s Megyn Kelly.
Megyn Kelly (voiceover): Would there be the possibility of cracking down on pregnant aliens who are coming over here—revoking visas, pregnancy tests, even? I mean, how far could we go with that?
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?
Posner: Well, I think that they’re creating this image that they’re closing off America to the world, and that they’re going to make it difficult or scary for people to come here, even if it’s just for a vacation. And I think that it is in part a performance for MAGA. Because as we’ve seen from the World Cup—even though the world has seen that ICE is arresting people, and people are being sent to gulags or deported to a country that they’ve never been to, and those fears are real—it made me quite astonished, actually, that lots of people came to see the World Cup anyway.
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.
And the deportations and the arrests and detentions are very real, but I also feel like the scale of what they’re proposing here is so absurd that I’m not sure how they could actually carry it out without completely collapsing the American tourism industry.
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.
Sargent: I think you put a finger there on something really essential about how MAGA and Trump function, which is that when they take a loss, their instant response, almost without exception, is to come up with some way to re-portray themselves as being on offense. Because they can never lose, they can never be weak, they can never be on the wrong end of public opinion, on the wrong end of history, on the wrong end of the law, et cetera, et cetera.
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.
And at one point he actually said that the Justice Department, which he runs, is going to make sure that Homeland Security Investigations agents and the FBI are focused on stopping pregnant people who intend to come here to have a child.
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.
And then in terms of people who are coming here for a shorter time than would require a visa—what’s he proposing? That every single woman of childbearing age who crosses the border from Canada or Mexico, or who flies in an airplane into any of the airports in the United States, will have to be examined to see if she’s pregnant? Like, what are they even talking about? How would that even work?
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.
So you could definitely see them pulling this stunt on a woman entering the country just to scare other people, or to perform, like I said, for Trump or for social media content. But the scale of what they’re talking about is so ludicrous that it’s hard to take seriously as a mass policy.
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.
Posner: But I think in this particular case, it’s not just the audience of one. It’s that that audience of one has had a terrible couple of weeks in terms of his popularity, the complete failure of his Great American State Fair, which has been a complete bust in terms of people coming to it.
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.
Sargent: Let’s listen to something that Stephen Miller said about the birthright citizenship decision, because it really kind of encapsulates the bigger thing that they’re talking about here. Listen to this.
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.
Sargent: So, Sarah, this rant is one of the most crazy things I have ever heard from a Trump administration official, or any administration official ever. It’s absolutely unhinged in every conceivable way.
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.
Posner: Does he think that the wheel was invented in the United States of America? Like, he’s so crazy. And so the idea that he’s trying to invent a reason why—that it’s not just, we don’t want them here. So he’s trying to say, well, the people who want to come here and have their babies are not smart and inventive and creative and coming up with inventing the airplane or anything like that. And so that’s why we can’t let them in.
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.
So I don’t know. I mean, I just find Stephen Miller such a simultaneously dangerous and ridiculous person. But you can’t help but hear that kind of desperation in his voice in that particular clip.
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 so everybody outside this circle, in the third world, none of those people are fit to invent things or fit to inherit the great Western inheritance that we are fortunate to have bequeathed to us. It’s a really, really deeply twisted vision that really is, I guess, civilizational supremacy.
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?
Posner: Well, Christian nationalism is a movement of American superiority and American exceptionalism. There was a point in time in the not-too-distant past that the Republican Party and the evangelical movement believed that the future of their political project depended on immigrants—depended on immigrants who were evangelical or Catholic, coming from Central and South America. And there was a senator by the name of Marco Rubio who was very involved in an effort to engage in immigration reform back in the 2010s. And, I’m sure that Rubio would not want to be reminded of that now.
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.
So I think that the modern religious right has had an identity crisis over this. But now they’re in a place where they cannot deviate from Trump or Stephen Miller or any of his other acolytes. And so they’re all in on whatever his immigration policy is. They don’t question it.
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.
Let’s spool this forward a little bit. Next year, JD Vance is presumably going to be starting his presidential run. He’s going to be trying to figure out how to inherit this kind of coalition that’s been created. And he’s going to have to figure out how to deal with, I guess, a major part of the coalition here, which is extremely frustrated and anxious and angry about having failed at this one fundamental thing, which is so central to their broader agenda.
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?
Posner: I actually don’t see him as trying to put a more moderate gloss on MAGA. I think that that is an image that he has worked hard to promote, and some people in the press have helped him with that. But when you hear him talk, he’s not really doing anything to soften any MAGA positions. He’s typically just saying something that will position him as being maybe less of a loser, say, in the Iran war ceasefire negotiations.
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.
But I think that for someone like him, given his track record, trying to promote the idea that they’re going to police, quote-unquote, “birth tourism” more aggressively will be super convenient, even if he knows that it’s super impractical. But I don’t see him running from this.
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.
Sargent: Yeah, I have to agree with you, Sarah. I think that this is going to be extremely difficult for JD Vance to manage. But the funny thing is, you know, he helped create this monster. And if he gets devoured by it, then, you know, that’s poetic justice. Sarah Posner, always an enormous pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Posner: Thanks for having me, Greg.
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