MAGA loves bad dads

What makes someone a good father? Answers vary. Some folks might cite being hard-working or handy, but most people would likely circle around concepts of well-being and strong values. Good dads make kids feel safe and loved. They raise children with moral fiber, to care about the people in their lives as well as the larger world around them.

But MAGA media has a very different idea of how to measure the worth of a father. They believe it’s by how many kids he has produced. In this worldview, the father deserves most of the credit, despite putting almost no effort into the production side of having babies. In an era when most people can barely afford to raise one kid, this focus on quantity isn’t just tone-deaf. It reduces kids to a commodity, which in turn encourages neglectful, toxic or even abusive approaches to parenting.

Before his death, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was a perfect example of these damaging ideas. He hyped the idea that having “a ton of children” is inherently virtuous, at least for white people. (He was less happy about Black people having a lot of kids.) But Kirk also argued that people should “get married young and have more kids than they can afford” — a message that was no doubt pleasing to his old-fashioned GOP donors who want their daughters to give up their careers and move back to their parents’ suburban neighborhoods. But for actual families, it’s a bad idea, especially as Republicans like Kirk want to simultaneously gut public education and social spending. Growing up in poverty isn’t fun or romantic. It’s stressful and leads to long-term problems for a lot of kids. 

From Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth bragging about his seven kids to Vice President JD Vance gloating about his fourth that is on the way, the idea that having a big family is the same as having a happy family is ubiquitous on the right. As I explained on a recent episode of “Standing Room Only,” Fox News even had a segment where they ranked Donald Trump‘s Cabinet members by how many kids they have.

Most famously, Tesla CEO Elon Musk is so obsessed with having kids — he has at least 14 — that he reportedly hits up women he’s never met up on X, asking them to have babies for him, often through in vitro fertilization. He is exhibit number one in why this casual conflation of quantity with quality in fatherhood is so misguided.

Musk is a terrible father. This is most obvious when it comes to his eldest daughter, who he has reportedly rejected for being transgender. But the billionaire appears to have a strained relationship with many of his children, in no small part because he can’t stop getting into pointless conflicts with their many mothers. He appears to be estranged from his young son with reformed influencer Ashley St. Clair; apparently he’s mad at her for trying to get him to acknowledge their child. Musk does seem attached to X, a son he had with the musician Grimes, but he’s been accused of neglecting his other children with her and refusing her visitation time with her son.

Neglect, and in some cases, even outright abuse, is normalized in the MAGA world. Katie Miller, the wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, hosts a podcast that seems to exist for no other reason than to give MAGA leaders a friction-free environment to present themselves as idealized fathers and husbands. And yet even in that context, the men give unconvincing performances. Hegseth sounded like he barely knows his kids, and he admitted that his wife Jennifer is “the rock and the stability” of their home. Vance copped to responding to a child’s tantrum poorly: “I immediately grab them, take them to the bathroom and say, ‘You got to cut that s**t out.'” In perhaps the weirdest admission, Katie Miller griped that her husband wears shoes in the house against her will, which she dislikes because “the kids eat off the floor.”

The most glaring example of this is Trump himself, who seems to know so little about his youngest son that the only qualities the president can name about Barron is that he is really tall and knows how to turn on a laptop. But since Trump is a father of five, he gets treated like a parenting expert in conservative media. Christian podcast host Dave Ramsey even asked Trump about his rules for parenting. He nodded along as the president, clearly having no idea what he was talking about, grasped at “no drugs” before arguing that all that matters in the end is “genetics” — which is exactly what a dad who had no hand in raising his own kids would say.

None of this registers as weird or bad on the right, though, because MAGA is all about retrograde gender roles that treat raising kids as women’s work. When dads do dip in, it’s often about pushing toxic, backward notions about gender and sexuality on their kids.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has a long, public history of being really creepy about his kids and sex. He has made his daughters pledge their virginity and has monitored his son’s electronic devices to prevent him from accessing adult content. Johnson has learned nothing from being widely ridiculed for this behavior. When asked on Katie Miller’s podcast how to prevent kids from being trans, he acted like this was a perfectly normal question. “What we tolerate in moderation, our children excuse in excess,” he replied, which was just a fancy way of saying that he punishes even the slightest perceived gender deviance — as if stopping your son from crying now will keep him from being queer later.

Katie Miller and her guests avoid talking too bluntly about how disciplining children is achieved. But make no mistake, the right has not given up on their faith in beating children into submission. On her podcast for TPUSA, Alex Clark recently interviewed Doug Wilson, the far-right pastor who leads the denomination to which Hegseth belongs. Wilson spent the entire interview advocating for spanking as a way to teach “obedience” and to drum “bad attitudes” out of children. His view of a “bad attitude” is, unsurprisingly, rooted in sexism. Boys “have to be tough,” he argued. But his belief also reflects a larger tendency on the right to commodify children.

---

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics?  Sign up for her free newsletter, Standing Room Only, now also on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

---

Wilson insisted that he wants kids to have “emotional control” to prevent living in a “clown world,” a point that makes sense at first glance. After all, teaching kids to behave appropriately is a big part of parenting. But seen within Wilson’s larger worldview, this is dangerous stuff. “Don’t lie. Don’t disobey. Don’t disrespect your mother,” he has ranted. “Life is simple.”

But life is not, in fact, simple. It is complicated, and so is raising kids. Wilson clearly desires children to be quiet little automatons, instead of living, complex human beings. He has argued, “In this family, we prioritize being in fellowship.” But people who can read right-wing Christian lingo know that “fellowship,” at least in this context, is code for being in lockstep.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is the father of nine, and in December he offered an odd defense of the Trump administration lowering fuel efficiency standards. “This rule will actually allow you to bring back the 1970s station wagon — maybe a little wood paneling on the side,” he said, as if gas consumption — and not changing tastes — explain the shift in automative exteriors. It was a weird statement, but also the perfect distillation of what’s so wrong with MAGA views on fatherhood.

By reducing fuel efficiency standards, Duffy is actively doing harm to children. In the short term, this change could lead to an increase air pollution, which results in chronic conditions like childhood asthma. In the long term, of course, this will also contribute to climate change, which will do real, lasting damage on the ability of today’s young generation to have safe, comfortable adulthoods.

But that’s MAGA fatherhood in a nutshell: all the focus is placed on appearances, at the expense of what families actually need to raise happy, healthy kids. 

The post MAGA loves bad dads appeared first on Salon.com.