Maga leaders want ‘traditional American families’ – but can’t stop having affairs

Welcome to Trump’s America, The i Paper’s World Insight series presenting the sharpest, deepest thinking on an era-defining shift in history and politics, investigating how Donald Trump and his administration have changed the US and the world – and where we go from here.

• How America’s conspiracy theorists broke the US
• The US is becoming impossible to live in
• I told Trump over dinner he didn’t have my loyalty – it sealed my fate
• This is how the world will look after Trump
• Sin City has lost its shine. It shows how far America has fallen
• The influencer who turned on Maga – claiming it has a dark secret
• Inside America’s most loyal Trump town – where people still think he’s ‘a good man’

Hillary Clinton was roasted in 2016 when she called Donald Trump supporters “a basket of deplorables”. Yet the Maga movement has gone some way to proving her right – making them look like a bunch of weapons-grade hypocrites.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in Maga’s push for America to be a family-first country, promoting the notion of the “traditional”, nuclear family, where the man goes out to work while his loving wife stays at home with the kids.

The message that men are the providers and women the nurturers has gone hand-in-hand with fear over the fact that America’s birth rate has been declining – it’s now down to 1.57 births per woman – while the foreign-born population rose to a high of 53 million in 2025 before Trump’s deportations.

On American Mothers’ Day last month, the Trump administration launched moms.gov, offering advice on diet, pregnancy and health centre access, as well as information on setting up “Trump Accounts” for children who are US citizens – containing $1,000 from the US Treasury.

Erika Kirk, the wife of Charlie Kirk, the leader of the youth group, Turning Point USA, who was horribly assassinated last autumn, summed up Maga’s pro-tradwife message in April 2025 on her husband’s YouTube channel. “Your husband has to be the one that goes out into the world and builds and battles and comes home. Conquers… The wife is like, ‘Welcome home babe, whatever you need, we’re here.’”

The pro-Trump Heritage Foundation reinforced this message in January with a policy paper, Saving America by Saving the Family, calling for increased tax breaks for married couples, newlywed early “starter” trust (Nest) accounts, and financial help for stay-at-home parents.

These policy moves are designed to incentivise a return to the concept of the father as breadwinner, while women are encouraged to quit their jobs before giving birth – receiving care and support in return. They called this a plan for America’s “next 250 years”.

According to the report, “The family is the foundation of civilization, and marriage – the committed union of one man and one woman – is its cornerstone.”

But it is in this idea of marriage – as a committed union between individuals – which is where Maga’s ideals become undone. First, because some Maga personalities can’t seem to be faithful to their wives, and secondly because the movement just doesn’t really seem to care.

Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News host who has turned against Trump over the Iran war, pointed out the hypocrisy when she recently marvelled at Trump’s chutzpah for attacking Republican critics over their marital conduct. “Talk about a glass house!” she said on her podcast.

Kelly may have been thinking of Trump’s alleged entanglement with the adult film star Stormy Daniels, which he has strenuously denied. However, he famously boasted on a leaked Access Hollywood tape that, “when you’re a star”, you can, “Grab [women] by the p***y. You can do anything.” This was in 2005, the year he married Melania.

Maga’s tolerance of Trump’s alleged transgressions extends to his allies. His supporters last month emphatically backed Ken Paxton, 63, a scandal-plagued Texan Republican, in his successful Senate primary battle against the straight-laced incumbent Senator John Cornyn.

Paxton’s wife, Angela, filed for divorce last year on what she euphemistically called “biblical grounds”. According to the Daily Mail, Paxton recently set up home with his “Christian influencer” mistress in a $2m love-nest in a Dallas suburb. Paxton has not denied the affair.

Ethically-challenged politicians are not confined to one party, of course, and the Democrats have had their fair share of scandal. But in Trumpland, the hypocrisy between pushing a family-first narrative and mostly turning a blind eye to infidelity goes unnoticed.

Defence secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly admitted to cheating multiple times on his first wife, and his second marriage ended after he fathered a child with his Fox News producer, Jennifer Rauchet. Hegseth and Rauchet married in 2019.

Health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr reportedly used to document his frequent sexual encounters during his first marriage in a little black book. More recently, he engaged in a “sexting” affair with the political journalist, Olivia Nuzzi (but denied their relationship went further).

Kennedy’s admiring legions of Maha (Make America Healthy Again) Moms have an affinity with Maga-adjacent tradwives, who think a women’s place is in the home, cooking, having babies and coddling their husbands. They couldn’t be further from the world of Nuzzi, a writer with a previously glittering career who has now been cast aside as a femme fatale while Kennedy continues to thrive.

Ashley St Clair, the former rightwing influencer and mother of two, who gave birth to Elon Musk’s 14th child in 2024, found herself similarly outcast after crossing the world’s richest pro-natalist. Rather sadly, she recently confessed on TikTok to feeling “stained as a single Mom” within the Maga movement, and thought the “chances of me getting married and the white picket fence and the white dress…[were] out of the window”.

Amid all this scandal, you would think Republicans wouldn’t have the nerve to celebrate stay-at-home “trad wives” and motherhood. But it’s more a case of one rule for the lads and a decidedly different one for the ladies.

It’s almost enough to make a generation of female Maga-acolytes think there might be something to feminism after all. When Trump was re-elected, young women and men celebrated “Making America Hot Again”. New York magazine published an influential article, “At the Cruel Kids’ Table”, about how cool it was to be cruel.

But slowly, things are changing. Spoiler alert: the party has stopped being so much fun, at least for one sex. The same magazine, writing this year about “The Young Women Leaving the New Right”, found that women who exulted in being sexy, edgy and transgressive found their young male peers were telling them to shut up and breed.

Instead of drawing closer together ideologically, there’s a new gender divide opening on the right between women who thought they could join the boy’s club but found they weren’t wanted on an equal basis.

Anna, a former rightwing influencer, said, “Over time, the language of New Right misogyny got way more tuned in to red-pill-type stuff” – a popular phrase in the manosphere referring to facing a harsh truth about gender difference.

The “vibe shift” women like her thought Trump represented has moved towards the “incel” wing of Maga, where men exult in belittling women while women head for the exits, leaving the boorish guys to shout at themselves.

The rise in internet celebrity of the self-proclaimed Nazi sympathiser and celibate, Nick Fuentes, has been blamed for exacerbating the trend. This particular 27-year-old charmer has recommended that women should be sent to “breeding gulags” and asserted there are “no female philosophers. No female generals or billionaires. They are mothers, whores, nuns. End of list.”

So now we know. Women are supposed to stay at home and put a lid on their ambitions while men are permitted to stray.

Women, you have been warned. Maga is for men, not you.