Ignore ‘Protect the Children’ Hysterics — MAGA is an Anti-Child, Anti-Future Movement

Free-use image of an anti-abortion demonstration

Edited by Emilia Grabowski, Jordan Collinson, Owen Andrews, and Sarah Ahmad

Not even halfway through his second term, Donald Trump’s approval rating has reached new lows across nearly every polling demographic. At the end of September, the Economist compared Trump’s worst marks to former Presidents Obama and Biden’s career lows, and the result wasn’t pretty. Obama’s lowest approval rating dipped to six percent, while Biden’s was negative six percent. Trump’s current rating is negative seventeen, which is eleven points lower than his predecessor’s and twenty-three points lower than Obama’s. 

Despite the hemorrhaging of his public support, there is one group that Trump can still count on for overwhelmingly positive feedback — white evangelicals.  Even though no other group climbs much higher than evenly split on the current president, over seventy percent of this group report positive overall opinions towards him and his administration. 

One of the factors in Trump’s particularly strong hold on white evangelicals is abortion. Many Trump-voting evangelicals elected him in 2016 with the understanding that, once in office, he would pack the court with enough conservative judges to overturn the precedent set by Roe v. Wade for federal protection of abortion rights, sending the issue back to the states and allowing for dormant abortion bans, some even originating in the nineteenth century, to take effect. 

Another element of evangelical support for Trump is his socially conservative policies and aggressive rhetoric toward transgender persons. Trump and other conservatives have stoked flames of hysteria toward trans people, successfully manufacturing a moral panic. In 2021, one hundred and fifty-three bills affecting this group were either considered or passed. So far this year, that number has reached nearly a thousand. 

It is worthwhile to note that transgender persons make up less than one percent of the population, which makes this malevolent focus on them all the more bizarre. One way to understand this phenomenon is that for Trump’s supporters, ‘trans’ is a word that they have been conditioned to burden with negative connotations. These connotations, in large part, come from Trump himself.

The reason Trump and his administration have found an effective strategy in targeting this community is ultimately the same reason abortion was such a strong issue for him in 2016: a threat toward children, whether that be children at large or your children, is a powerful tool. A primary theme of the panic around transgender persons is encapsulated in the word ‘groomer,’ a term that has been levied against the community to invoke comparisons to pedophilia or cult-like indoctrination. 

This strategy isn’t exactly new — it’s been used in manufacturing similar moral panics toward gay men — and the impact of this sort of rhetoric isn’t new either, as it has ultimately inflicted more harm than good on America’s children. In fact, despite successfully weaponizing voters' instincts of ‘protecting the children,’ the Trump administration has itself been dead set on compromising the welfare and safety of children, domestically and abroad. 

A specific policy that has emerged from Trump’s trans-centered crusade is the termination of an option on the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline for counselors specifically trained for LGBTQ+ youth support. Since the option’s launch in 2022, almost a million and a half calls were routed to the service, coinciding with increases in trans-related legislation and dramatic rises in trans youth suicidality. This is just the beginning of this administration’s errant healthcare policies, which assault children’s lives, a trend that continues with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s transgressions towards public health at home and abroad.

Kennedy Jr., akin to a surgeon prone to manslaughter, has spent his first year as Secretary of Health and Human Services taking a shaky scalpel to healthcare institutions and infrastructure. Perhaps the most dramatic betrayal of his duty to public health has come with his bizarre and irrational vendetta against vaccines. Kennedy has unilaterally shut down federal investment in mRNA vaccine technology, setting research into curing pediatric cancer back decades, and pulled out of funding Gavi, a global vaccine alliance that relies on America for thirteen percent of its budget. 

Since its founding in 2000, Gavi has prevented nearly twenty million deaths, and without funding from the Trump administration, over one million children are estimated to die over the next five years from diseases that they otherwise would have been vaccinated for. Kennedy, regrettably, is not the only contributor to the pile of small bodies cast to the ground by this administration's cold hands. Other actions from the White House pose similar particular harm to international children as well. 

One of the first major institutions Trump wielded his executive power to slash was the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID. By cutting ninety percent of the agency’s foreign aid contracts, Trump effectively killed programs that were responsible for fifty percent of the worldwide supply of food to malnourished children. As a direct result of these cuts, hundreds of thousands — perhaps millions — of children will starve to death. 

According to a statement from Secretary of State Marco Rubio in March, the Trump administration up to that point had provided twelve billion dollars in military aid to Israel. Trump has maintained a strong relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since then and has continued to support the country’s assault on Gaza in Palestine. Since offensives on Gaza began in 2023, an average of twenty-eight children per day have been killed, directly and indirectly, by Israeli Defense Force operations, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund. That’s an average of more than one child dead an hour. 

In 2021, President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) into law. Included were temporary expansions to the Child Tax Credit. During the year-long period during which this policy was active, child poverty fell by almost fifty percent — ninety percent of which was attributable to the credit — and a record overall low rate, a little over five percent. Congress did not extend the expansion, however, and by the end of 2022, the poverty rate had returned near to previous levels. Rather than returning to an expansion, the Trump administration has signed off on changes to the Child Tax Credit (CTC) within the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act’ (OBBB), which increases the number of children excluded from the CTC due to their parents making below the minimum required income. The expiration of the expansion from the ARPA left seventeen million children behind. The changes in the OBBB raised that number to nineteen million. 

The Trump administration is an anti-child regime in the immediate sense. Its policies will murder children. These people are anti-future as well, and not just because the children are our future. A philosophy of kicking the can down the road on important issues, demonstrated by this administration, renders the president and his supporters as unabashedly opposed to the future of our country and of the world. 

Whether it be a complete abandonment of any efforts to mitigate climate change or the addition of over three trillion dollars to the budget deficit through 2034, the official position of this administration towards the future is one of abject neglect. Trump and his cabinet would rather “drill, baby, drill,” now and let future generations handle the consequences than aim for beneficial policy towards anyone outside of themselves and their in-groups. 

Members of the MAGA movement wholeheartedly support all of this. They may express sympathy when faced with concrete examples of this administration’s political violence — that is, if they don’t just deny, deny, deny — but they voted for it. Trump-appointed judges did, in fact, overturn Roe v. Wade. Trump, already, has implemented numerous policies targeting trans people in his second term. Though evangelicals’ concerns may have been assuaged by these changes, that’s not where this ends. Trump’s administration has ensured that more children will die because the president is in power than if he had lost the election. This is what MAGA chose to sanction with their votes and continued cultural movement in support of this man and his associates. 

At the heart of the MAGA Republican, there is a baseline empathy and care for the welfare of children that most people in the world have. However, whatever is in there is an insufficient motivator to sacrifice time and energy to educate themselves and vote, act, and speak with empathy.