What The Hell America!

The Trump administration’s motherhood agenda touts family values—while gutting the tax breaks, healthcare and childcare programs that real moms rely on.

This Sunday marks the 111th year that families across the nation will gather to celebrate all the love, care and work provided by the mothers in their lives. Woodrow Wilson declared Mother’s Day a federal holiday nearly a year after he established the basis of today’s modern income tax system, allowing him to lower tariff rates on many of the basic necessities American families relied on in 1914. It is darkly ironic that more than a century later, the Trump administration is attempting to reverse these pro-family policies while at the same time promoting a pronatalist agenda aimed at creating more mothers and larger families. 

Trump continues to publicly voice his desire to replace income taxes with tariffs. At the same time, Vice President JD Vance is echoing far-right Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s tax and financial policies aimed at spiking birth rates. But, these regressive policies won’t solve the problems mothers face today. 

In 2023, 45 percent of mothers served as the primary breadwinners for their families. More than half of them were the family breadwinner because they’re the family’s only working adult: They’re single moms. As these pronatalist policies—rooted in Christian nationalist ideology—take hold across the Republican Party, it’s important to note that they’re only intended to help some families and not others.

For example, consider those income taxes that have existed in their modern form since the Wilson administration. If they aren’t slashed entirely, House Republican leadership has also suggested eliminating the “head of household” status, overwhelmingly used by single moms to help lower their tax liability and save more money for family necessities. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s tariffs are already raising prices on those same basic necessities. For example, the price of a car seat could be expected to rise from $59 to $145 as a direct result of Trump’s tariffs on China. 

While the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are working together to raise prices and taxes on single-mom families in order to pay for tax cuts for the rich, they’re also trying to defund the social safety net programs so many of these moms rely on like Medicaid and SNAP. Across the nation, more than four in 10 births are financed by Medicaid. How do congressional Republicans expect women to want to have children without healthcare? How do they expect families to thrive without SNAP, which helps nearly 40 percent of single moms put food on their tables?

The answer is, they don’t. Republicans are envisioning the white-washed Leave it to Beaver-style families that only existed on TV 60 years ago. But the average mother of today is certainly more than a background fixture doing laundry like June Cleaver. She’s a breadwinner or co-breadwinner working hard for her family. She might even be her family’s sole provider, and she almost definitely isn’t a white woman wearing pearls and heels. The majority of breadwinning mothers are women of color—and for Black moms, there’s a seven in 10 chance she’s the one bringing home the bacon. 

If this administration really wanted to support moms, they would expand the child tax credit and make it fully refundable with additional provisions for young children—something Vance conveniently skipped voting on as a senator.  And what’s more, if congressional Republicans really cared about supporting motherhood, they would implement paid family and medical leave and paid sick time so that becoming ill, having a baby or caring for a sick child doesn’t put moms at risk of losing their source of income. 

But instead, the Trump administration is leaving children and families to fend for themselves by slashing Head Start, which provides vital childcare and early learning support as well as other wraparound services like nutrition programs for some of the nation’s lowest-income kids and families. More than three-quarters of mothers in poverty—who are most likely to use Head Start and other social safety net programs—serve as the family breadwinner. They’re working hard, and the money spent to help them feed their family or find reliable childcare pays off. 

We don’t need obscure approaches that only apply to a tiny fraction of parents, like JD Vance has publicly championed. We need to ensure that even low-income moms and their kids have access to insurance through Medicaid, that they can put food on their families’ tables, and that they can take paid leave when they need it.

Let’s take a step back and look at how far American moms have taken us since Woodrow Wilson’s Mother’s Day proclamation in 1914. Mothers are a bedrock of modern society and our economy. They’re a force to be reckoned with, and a source of incredible power, wisdom and love. We need 21st-century policies that uplift working moms, not policies reminiscent of a time when women didn’t even have the right to vote.