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.