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It is Donald Trump’s special ability to paint every issue — even those as dry and unapproachable as global trade policy — in the luster of cultural warfare. The administration’s tariff regime is a buy-one-get-one-free restoration of American economic might and American masculinity, both of which are in crisis, according to the MAGA right. Even as the administration goes back and forth on the tariffs, it has doubled down many times over on its aggressive protectionism, packaged and sold as nostalgic escapism. It’s back to the factory for men everywhere, finally able to shrug off the tyranny of effete email jobs or the seclusion of mom’s basement, where they can only simulate manliness under the auspices of a first-person-shooter game. The new regime means a return to the real thing. Men can make something with their hands again — something they can be proud of! “When you sit behind a screen all day, it makes you a woman. Studies have shown this,” Fox News’ Jesse Watters said in April. “If you’re out working, like building robots, you are around other guys; you’re not around HR ladies and lawyers that give you estrogen.”
On its merits, it’s easy enough to see how this fantasy trades on genuine criticisms of our shredded social fabric and broken economies. The escape back to the analog world, fraternal bonding, manufacturing, and well-paid work in communities laid out by deindustrialization — you can see how each element reaches for a solution to real problems of alienation under globalized capitalism. A poll from last summer found that 80 percent of Americans believe the country would be better off if more of us worked in manufacturing than we currently do. But taken altogether, you get the sense that there’s a missing piece of the puzzle. Maybe even a missing person. Come to think of it, is there a woman to be found anywhere in this brave new world?
There is, and she’s right where you’d expect her to be. Trump and his allies were coy about her role at first (though one could read between the lines of what it might mean for women as they extolled the glories of American society under President McKinley). Now, though, they are being explicit: Trump has christened himself the “fertilization president” and is reported to be soliciting a suite of policies to incentivize American women to have babies, including a onetime cash “bonus” after delivery. If the American worker who required protection from China or immigrants was only implicitly male before, now the vision of gender relations comes fully into focus.
The crisis of disaffected men will be solved, we’re told, through emotional connection and dignity through work. Under the covenant of Trumponomics, women and all the loving care and babies they provide will be man’s reward for his manual labor, while her unwaged domestic labor becomes essential to an economy made up of single-income American households, each headed by a stoic Trumpist patriarch. As J.D. Vance has said, “You have women who think that truly the liberationist path is to spend 90 hours a week working in a cubicle at McKinsey instead of starting a family and having children,” which the vice-president claims is “a path to misery.” After all, the industrial utopia can only come to pass if the men rediscovering their virility on the assembly line aren’t expected to come home from a long day at the shoe factory and make their own dinner. The promise of tradmasculinity has to be matched one for one with the dream of tradwifery.
Lucky for the MAGA right, American women have been primed for this cultural reset. Much has been said about the rise of trad influencers in the past several years, but despite all the rigorous ethnographic analysis and the breathless attention paid to them, there has always been a lingering question of whether any of it matters. Who is it hurting, anyway, if a woman in a nap dress wants to make toothpaste by scratch? And isn’t some or maybe most of tradlife content just abiding the core imperative of modern-day influencing — to shock, awe, and embellish in order to game our algorithms and monetize? In the internet power struggles of 2025, the greatest faux pas is to earnestly engage with what amounts to an elaborate troll.
The ideologies of tradwife influencers range from an affinity for white cotton and place settings to actual right-wing propaganda. Still, “what unites tradwives,” as Zoe Hu wrote in Dissent, “is their rejection of both capitalism and feminism, which are conflated in the gloomy figure of the working woman.” In 2025, the working woman is made all the gloomier by being a symbol of globalized capital, she who goes so far as to celebrate her own “nothing job,” click-clacking away at her laptop instead of the more tactile and patriotic labor of child care or housework or domestic manufacturing. It is painfully obvious that this delocalized girlboss — this “Gen Z boss and a mini” of viral fame — doesn’t capture the reality of working women in the American labor force. Nevertheless, she is the specter that animates both the tradwives and the architects of our economic nationalism.
I do not mean to lay the worldview of a fascistic regime or the prospect of a spiraling economy at the ballet-flat-clad feet of a handful of women just trying to hustle on the internet. Still, one need not treat them uniformly as foot soldiers of the radical right, or prescient trailblazers setting the foundation for Trumponomics in 2025, in order to see how conveniently situated they are in its service. It’s just as difficult to imagine a mass exodus of women lured out of the workforce by the aesthetics of homesteading as it is to picture their husbands flooding back into shiny new factories. But as the administration launches its policy agenda, it will surely make use of whatever cultural fantasies will provide a soft landing. For better or worse, the tradwives spent several years whipping up aspirational messaging around escaping the workforce, having lots of (white) babies, and serving your husband, and now the MAGA right is cashing in.
There are salient criticisms to be made of an economy that privileges urbanized, white-collar jobs at the expense of working-class or rural communities. The same goes for the American appetite for cheap luxury goods or the ill effects of free-market trade policies. The fetish to continually frame these debates in gendered terms, though, is bizarre and sinister. In response to Trump’s unsettling fixation on the number of dolls little girls should own as a consequence of his tariffs — “She could be very happy with two or three or four or five,” he said — Moira Donegan in The Guardian writes, “Trump is drawing on a long tradition of economic rhetoric that aims to cast consumption as feminine, decadent and morally suspect — and to contrast it with the supposedly more manly and virtuous productive side of the economy.”
Trump’s tariff policy is so frenetic and nonsensical that perhaps it can only really be understood through its psychosexual symbolism — one whose appeal is not confined to the right. On the left, a new generation of pronatalists is echoing the call for women to take up social reproduction, if not economic output. Unlike their counterparts on the right, they tend to be more passionate about instituting the socially democratic policies that serve mothers and children and less so about executing a 21st-century eugenics program to stave off multiculturalism. However, no matter its attendant politics, pronatalism goes a step further than advocating support for women who want to be mothers — it advances the moral imperative for women to be mothers. For The Atlantic’s Elizabeth Bruenig or the leftist authors of the recent book What Are Children For?, the stakes for women couldn’t be higher — children, they argue, are how we tie ourselves, politically and ethically, to the potentiality of a human future.
This is fine and even true. But pronatalist movements tend to rear their heads in moments of widespread anxiety around gender roles in politics and work, such as in the 1920s directly following women’s suffrage, and such as we’re seeing now. The right has long been invested in a social arrangement in which men act out their politics in public, in the workplace, while women do so privately in the home. Pronatalism, even when it’s couched in progressive values, risks doing the same.
Besides, there is another way that women, mothers and childless ones alike, have historically tied themselves to a political future, and it’s called feminism. Tragically, ironically, feminism is today suffering from something of a PR crisis, just as the men of the right consolidate their political power at a dizzying clip. But at least now it’s clear that Trump’s tariffs aren’t just about attacking America’s trading partners but a whole way of life — and the women who might object to such a world can respond accordingly.
