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Competing Moral Visions

At this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, held just one month into Trump’s second term, Attorney General Pam Bondi took the stage to inform the audience that Trump’s cabinet officials were the best of friends. “We’re all on the phone together all the time,” Bondi gushed, calling Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin “a dear friend” and Elon Musk her “buddy.” Bondi was clearly attempting to quell rumors of discord; the day before the conference began, Steve Bannon had called Musk a “parasitic illegal immigrant.” In the preceding weeks, a debate about H-1B visas had driven a wedge between two of the key constituencies that helped carry Trump to victory: the ultranationalists and the tech reactionaries. 

Bondi’s assurances notwithstanding, all is not well in the house of MAGA. There are profound ideological disagreements papered over by similar outward goals: reshoring industry, valorizing the family, ridding the body politic of undesirable immigrants. Today’s right-wing factions have very different visions for how to achieve these lofty aims, to say nothing of underlying values. The coastal tech moguls and heartland ethnonationalists inhabit fundamentally separate moral universes that intersect only in the person of Donald Trump. 

Perhaps no interest group better embodies the contradictions encompassed by the MAGA movement than the right-wing pronatalists, a set of ideologues advocating for drastic action to encourage childbearing. The issue unites religious conservatives who believe in the primacy of the nuclear family with tech rationalists who believe in the primacy of their own genes. Straddling the two camps are hyper-online white supremacist edgelords. All three groups seemed to mingle happily at the 2023 Natal Conference I attended. But recently, the cracks have begun to show. The latest Natal Conference, held in March, was co-sponsored by the far-right publishing house Passage Press. Its publisher, Jonathan Keeperman, gave a speech indicating that while he agrees with the need to encourage family formation, pronatalism “implies the political legitimacy of antinatalism,” turning childbearing into a political act rather than a basic biological function. This, too, is a political statement, as is the implication that we need to normalize childrearing.

Other pronatalists worry that the movement’s tech wing is undermining its moral foundations. In a departure from the previous iteration of NatalCon, the Heritage Foundation was conspicuously absent from this year’s conference, according to a person who was in attendance. In fact, Emma Waters, an analyst at Heritage’s Center for Technology and the Human Person, has long urged her fellow conservatives to be wary of Silicon Valley types like Musk who see low birth rates as a mathematical problem that can be solved through technological innovations like IVF and, more controversially, polygenic risk score tests and the still-developing field of artificial wombs. Waters’s opposition to tech pronatalism is ultimately a product of her anti-abortion priors. The problem with polygenic embryo selection, from her perspective, is not just that it lets the wealthy select for intelligent, healthy children, but that “this technology does not heal the unhealthy embryos — it destroys them.” If evangelical conservatives see their political project as defending all human life from the moment of conception — often at the expense of actually existing human beings — the tech right is hostile to rhetoric that proclaims all life has value. Put another way, the religious right claims to see the dignity in all of God’s creatures, while the tech right believes in no such thing. Sooner or later, these competing moral visions will come to a head. 

Trump himself likely cares about pronatalism just as much as he cares about many of the other policies being pursued by his administration, which is to say not at all. The president’s supporters don’t question his commitments to limited abortion access and subsidized IVF, even though these promises are designed to appeal to competing factions; Trump manages to keep MAGA die-hards in his corner no matter what he says or does. He now has almost a decade of experience managing conflict within his movement, preventing it from sinking the MAGA ship. Throughout Trump’s first term, the White House was divided into clear camps, with each of Trump’s most trusted confidantes ruling over a private, competing fiefdom. New department heads were appointed with much fanfare and ousted when they didn’t bend to Trump’s whims or when the administration needed someone to blame for an unpopular policy. Bannon lasted less than a year. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, reportedly hounded by Trump aides who called her a “squish” until she agreed to let Border Patrol tear children out of their mothers’ arms, was forced to resign over the barbarity of Trump’s family separation policy. Stephen Miller, unrivaled in his obsequiousness, was one of the few who managed to hang on until the end and carry over into the new era. Trump’s second term hasn’t suffered from the same degree of churn that characterized his first, likely because this time around, he has staffed key departments with inexperienced sycophants whose ideological differences are ultimately superseded by their commitment to the chief executive. 

The second Trump administration had, until Musk’s departure, managed to straddle the divide between Christian family values and Silicon Valley-style reactionary futurism. It would be hard to underestimate the political signaling involved in the twin appointments of Musk and JD Vance, whose connections to Peter Thiel and other deep-pocketed right-wingers allowed Silicon Valley’s elites to believe that they’d bought the winning side in November’s election.

Musk’s presence in the ever-expanding MAGA coalition initially suggested that the tech pronatalists had beaten out their trad rivals. On the campaign trail, Trump promised to make either the government or insurers cover IVF, anathema to Catholic conservatives in particular, and he has since called himself the “fertilization president.” Even Vance, a devout Catholic convert, has said “pretty much every Republican that I know is pro-fertility treatments.” But perhaps due to opposition from organizations like the Catholic Medical Association, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and the Heritage Foundation, these early promises to lower the cost of fertility treatments have not yet come to fruition. In February, Trump issued an executive order asking for policy recommendations, to be delivered within ninety days, on “protecting IVF access and aggressively reducing out-of-pocket and health plan costs for IVF treatment.” Producing such a report, which as of this writing has yet to be released, is a staple of the slow, reasoned process that typically characterizes presidential decision-making. But it’s out of place in an administration that moves quickly — and often acts illegally — when it comes to issues that actually matter to Trump, like immigration. In the meantime, Trump has handed the pronatalists a small token to keep them happy: his “big, beautiful” spending bill would give one thousand dollars to each baby born between now and January 2029. 

Musk, who has called population decline the single biggest threat to humanity, resigned after criticizing the spending bill, which he said “undermines the work” of his government-slashing efforts at DOGE. It’s just as likely that Trump has no use for the tech billionaire anymore; he already got what he needed. Trump has followed a similar playbook throughout his political career: offering potential allies power and influence in exchange for sycophancy, incorporating whatever useful rhetoric, fanbase, or capital they have to offer into the MAGA empire, and then pushing them to the sidelines. The longevity of this Republican coalition-building strategy is imperiled by the fact that Trump can’t stay in the White House forever, and no other Republicans have demonstrated the force of will and reality-altering delusion that have proved critical to Trump’s staying power. The Party seems to understand this. At CPAC, organizers circulated a petition calling for a third Trump term. By April, the Trump Organization had started selling “Trump 2028” merch. Long before he was a politician, Trump was a showman. Holding together a MAGA coalition constantly on the verge of tearing itself apart is his greatest spectacle yet. But the show has to end eventually.

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Brutality and Opacity

Among the barrage of edicts issued by Trump in the early days of his second term was Executive Order 14160, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” which seeks to redefine the citizenship clause in the Fourteenth Amendment by revoking birthright citizenship for the children of all undocumented, and some authorized, immigrants. Judge John Coughenour, the Reagan appointee who first stayed the order, called it “blatantly unconstitutional.” So far, every judge who has considered a challenge has agreed. As of this writing, it remains blocked across the nation.

In mid-May, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments regarding the order, but only concerning a technical issue: the Justice Department has asked it to limit lower courts’ use of nationwide injunctions. If enough justices side with the DOJ, the order could go into effect in Trump-friendly jurisdictions while legal challenges to its constitutionality proceed, meaning state lines could determine a child’s citizenship. 

In 2022, in an essay for this magazine, I suggested that “a paranoiac mindset is appropriate” regarding the stability of American citizenship, even for those whose parents, like mine, were born citizens. The Trump administration’s large-scale removal efforts, incarceration of migrants, and use of deportation as threat or punishment for activists are not new in the United States. What is new — the escalation to blatantly illegal deportations, as with the men taken to a prison in El Salvador in defiance of a judge’s order, and the attempt to alter more than a century of legal precedent regarding birthright citizenship — is only possible because of a preexisting level of brutality and opacity, as well as the prevailing apathy of non-immigrants. Such indifference may be the result of failing to grasp that we are all part of a changing and changeable immigration system that determines which “privileges and immunities,” in the language of the Constitution, any of us possess, whether undocumented or citizen. More empathy would help; so would a sense of self-preservation.   

When the Fourteenth Amendment was crafted in 1866, America must have seemed even more internally conflicted than it does in 2025. Nearly a million people had died during the Civil War. The president had been assassinated. The former Confederate states were not yet readmitted to the United States. Four million black people, once considered property, were now legal persons, but with what rights? The Southern states had reacted to emancipation with legislative and physical cruelty largely tolerated by the new president, Andrew Johnson: the flurry of laws known as the “Black Codes” reinstated as much oppression as possible without technically resurrecting slavery, while gruesome terrorism against black people and white Unionists aimed to instill a culture of fear among the enemies of the planter class. After winning large majorities in the 1866 congressional elections, however, radicals in Lincoln’s Republican Party overrode Johnson’s timidity and placed the subdued rebel states under military rule. 

In order to reenter the Union, the Southern states needed to submit to a set of new laws that, taken together, effectively nullified the Black Codes. One of these laws was the Fourteenth Amendment; its ratification was a precondition for readmission. The amendment made a sweeping avowal of equality as the nation’s connective tissue: 

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

In two sentences, the amendment severed race and national origin from citizenship and its attendant rights. (The citizenship clause did not apply to Native Americans, whose nations were treated as distinct sovereignties; in 1924, legislation granted Native people citizenship, though they did not uniformly have the right to vote until 1965.) Emerging from abolitionist commitments, these sentences propose a country that rejects the inheritance of inequality. Just a few years earlier, divorcing legal entitlements from racial categorization would have been unimaginable: Representative James G. Blaine later wrote that before the war this transformation could only have been conjured up by “the wildest fancy of a distempered brain.” That this fancy became a reality still seems, considering the bloodbath that preceded it, quasi-magical, and even today, some historians regard the amendment with a respect verging on religious ardor. In 2015, the historian David Blight argued that its first sentence “ought to be embraced as a holy writ that binds our national community.” 

That sentence, Senator Jacob Howard noted in 1866, had been added to “settle the great question of citizenship” — whether some persons could be excluded from it on racial grounds. Codifying an answer in the Constitution, he said, would put this question “beyond the legislative power, beyond the reach of [those] who would pull the whole system up by the roots and destroy it.” Here it is hard not to picture Donald Trump and his cronies, arms out, hands grasping. 

Fittingly, the Trump administration’s attempt to reopen the “great question” has zeroed in on that same sentence. Trump and his accomplices contend that “those subject to the jurisdiction thereof” excludes children of undocumented immigrants, as well as newcomers whose presence is lawful but temporary (i.e., people who do not intend to make this country their permanent home). This argument relies on changing the usual historical interpretation of what it means to be subject to a “jurisdiction” — from those who fall under the state’s regulatory power to those who swear total political allegiance. Trump’s team also asserts that the 1866 Congress did not intend for the citizenship clause to apply to undocumented immigrants, because no such category existed then. (In fact, as Congress was well aware at the time, there were people living in the U.S. in contravention of existing regulations.) Amanda Frost, an expert on citizenship law, recently summarized the Trump administration’s arguments as “made up out of whole cloth.”

The Fourteenth Amendment’s apparently straightforward wording has proven susceptible to extraordinarily tendentious interpretation in the past, however. In 1898, after the Spanish-American War, the United States acquired a number of territories previously claimed by Spain, including Puerto Rico and the Philippines. At the time, the Fourteenth Amendment was widely understood to ensure citizenship for residents of those territories, if not immediately, then eventually. This prospect made the acquisitions controversial — so much so that, in the words of Representative Frederic Coudert Jr., “the election of 1900 largely turned upon the so-called issue of Imperialism.” Today, when anti-racism and anti-imperialism seem inextricable, it may be surprising to learn that the anti-imperialist rationale in this case was often racist: if every subject became a citizen, it would mean admitting a large group of non-white people as voters. (Similar concerns were raised about Hawaii and New Mexico.) Puerto Rico, with its mixed population, was judged more acceptable than the Philippines, whose inhabitants were deemed, in the words of Senator Carl Schurz, “utterly alien.” 

In the first third of the twentieth century, through the so-called “Insular Cases,” the Supreme Court incrementally addressed the problem posed by the seemingly undeniable claim of people in these new territorial possessions to the rights enjoyed in the United States. These legal decisions slowly built a doctrine of “territorial nonincorporation,” creating the category in which Puerto Rico and other U.S. possessions exist today: “foreign… in a domestic sense,” to use the famous phrase from Justice Edward Douglass White. That is, a place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, populated by U.S. citizens who nonetheless do not have the full rights ordinarily entailed by that status while they reside there. What looks like a transparent violation of the Fourteenth Amendment has been thoroughly normalized. 

In moments when American political authorities have moved to impose a racial hierarchy on the protections of citizenship, like the turn-of-the-century expansion of the United States’ overseas empire, the Fourteenth Amendment has interfered with their designs. In an 1898 case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court affirmed the birthright citizenship of the child of Chinese immigrants, even though, due to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1888, the parents could not naturalize. But as with the Fifteenth Amendment and its protections for voting rights, enemies of racial equality have exploited its every omission and minor ambiguity. The infamous logic of “separate but equal” codified by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1893) allowed the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection guarantee to coexist with nearly a century of Jim Crow rule in the South. Generations of such creative misreading produced a citizenship whose protections have, in fact, profoundly differed by race. 

The Trump regime seems to hope that technicalities and loopholes will let it get away with running roughshod over the spirit of the amendment. If the Court does tackle birthright citizenship on its merits, it is difficult to imagine that it will uphold flagrant textual revision by executive fiat, given the precedent set by Wong Kim Ark, as well as the lower courts’ dramatic and universal rejection of the administration’s logic. Although most of the May oral arguments skirted the question at the heart of the case, Justices Kagan and Sotomayor disparaged and problematized the administration’s reasoning. Even (or especially) the originalists would be hard-pressed to find a way to make a cogent argument for the DOJ’s interpretation. 

But the justices’ views about the Fourteenth Amendment may not matter: so far, the administration appears reluctant to appeal the merits of the case to the Supreme Court, perhaps hoping to leave citizenship as a contested, patchwork right. This development could be only one phase in a gradual metamorphosis. Perhaps Trump’s lawyers expect to lose in the lower courts but hope, by leaning on arguments from the racist fringes of American jurisprudence, to shift those claims to the center. Trump has countless times demonstrated his belief that publicity beats truth, and he may have already accomplished a transformation of perception: birthright citizenship has become, again, a “great question” unsettled in the minds of Americans. It does not always take an obviously radical revision, like the Fourteenth Amendment — or Trump’s executive order — to generate new realities.