Me, the animals, yoga, jogging, nothing is exciting.
Really? I'm talking about my story, total.
“The story, how do you feel about the story?”
Yes, I have a lot of time to experience it. Do you have connections or texts? No, just like the story. Wow, and that's easy. The taste is almost automatic.
I feel so. It's exciting! Hold your money, dog. There's a 30-year-old story. What?
I'm talking about the story with the story. Oh, yeah. 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 taught-in 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 bands and Donald Trump and a lot of significant MAGA personalities very much share.
So we're taught into Sarah Posner about all of it. Sarah, great to have you on. Thanks for having me, again, Greg. 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, quote, "Denai entry to all pregnant foreigners.
Require a sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry." Close quote. Wow. What's your immediate reaction to just the sheer level of fear and anxiety we're witnessing here?
“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, doing women pregnancy tests
before they come. I mean, it's just like it's so bananas that I don't even know, I can't even believe that they're not ashamed to talk about it on TV. Yeah, and they even seem to be enjoying it a whole lot as well. I want to read some quotes from leading mega figures.
Here's Mike Davis, quote, "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? Close, quote. Sarah, one interesting thing here is
that there's always been this intense massage
and need to mega. 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 mega misogyny. What do you make of that element of it? 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 or contaminating us. And so, you have a movement that's at its core discussed 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, 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.
And some leading maga women are getting into this act too. Here's Megan Kelly. There will 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? 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?
“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 googs and or deported
to a country that they've never been to,
that none of the less. 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? It's like 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 their arrest and detentions are very real. But I also feel like the scale of what they're proposing here is so absurd that it couldn't. 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, you know, because they have to coddle their little baby
fascist president who just lost a case at this Supreme Court. So they have to show that they are really coming up with other ways to ensure that nobody has, you know, no foreigner has a baby in the United States anymore despite the Supreme Court decision.
“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, always,
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, on the, you know, on the, you know, 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 Blanch, 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. It's actually not the Department of Homeland, I mean, I don't know that that acting attorney general Todd Blanch knows this or not, which is kind of sad and pathetic,
It's not the Department of Homeland Security who decides
who gets a visa, it's the State Department.
“So, you know, he can ask the Department of Homeland Security”
that do stuff, but they're not the ones who would stop somebody from getting a visa. And then in terms of people who are here for a shorter time, who are coming here for a shorter time, then would require a visa, what's he proposing?
That every single woman of child-bearing 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? It's, you know, 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 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 podcast, sent 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, to perform 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. 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's like that is such a crucial piece”
of the mega psyche, I think, to always be on offense to always be strong, to never be losing, et cetera, et cetera. 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 mega audience that their worried might be either losing interest or thinking that maybe Trump is failing or losing his power. Trump's power is adding that can't be the image.
Let's listen to something that Stephen Miller said about the birthright citizenship decision because it really encapsulates the bigger thing that they're talking about here. Listen to this.
Just physically being on US 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
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 and have a baby at a hospital paid for it by you and me. And then that baby is 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. So Sarah, this here, this rant is one of the most crazy things I've 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. Does he think that the wheel was invented
in the United States of America? Like he's so crazy. It's like, you know, and so the idea that he's trying to invent a reason why, you know, that'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, you know, inventing the airplane or anything like that. And so that's why we can't let them in. And it's just such a, like, 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
Also that he feels like
that's the thing that he has to say.
So, I don't know. I mean, like, I just find Steven 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. 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? 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 deportations 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 Steven Miller or any of his other accolades.
And so they're all in on whatever his immigration policy is, they don't question it. 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 I really capture all the craziness of it the misogyny,
you know, the hostility to women's bodily functions and so forth. Let's pull this forward a little bit. Next year,
J.D. 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 J.D. Vance,
whose whole kind of stick is to be the guy who makes mega 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 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
problem is political problem is one of his own creation, obviously because he's trying to appeal to the Maga base in the anti-immigrant base.
The base is very distrustful of him because his wife is not white and she's not Christian
and he has to run in circles
to try to convince them that he's okay and he's one of them. But I think that for someone like him and I think 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.
It's not like he has some natural constituency other than the Maga base. So it's not like if he 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.
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 he helped create this monster
and if he gets devoured by it, then that's poetic justice. Sarah Posner, always in enormous pleasure to talk to you.
Thanks so much for coming on. Thanks for having me, Greg.
