MAGA Candidate Says Women Need Help With Strollers, Not Abortion

A Republican candidate for Ohio senator believes that women don’t actually need abortions, just someone to lift heavy things such as strollers for them.

Entrepreneur Bernie Moreno is one of three men running to face off against Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown in the fall. During a discussion with all Republican primary candidates Monday night, the moderator asked the men for their stance on abortion and reproductive rights.

Moreno said his daughter had recently flown home after visiting him. “Mom carrying what looks like an F1 team-worth of equipment,” Moreno said. “People helped her on that plane. Helped put the stroller away, helped her with her seat.”

“Those are the kinds of things that we can do,” he said. “Let’s be a pro-mom, pro-family policy.”

So apparently, Moreno has just volunteered to personally help every parent lift heavy strollers and navigate logistically complicated situations.

In all seriousness, Moreno is technically not wrong. If Republicans are going to force people to have children, then lawmakers need to put systems in place to help care for those children. Unfortunately, the GOP seems dead set on making childrearing harder.

Republicans nationwide are cutting back on free school lunch programs for lower-income families. And Moreno’s fellow Ohio Republicans have banned gender-affirming care for transgender and nonbinary teenagers, despite the fact that those treatments help reduce depression and suicidality in LGBTQ children.

Moreno may also find that his opposition to abortion is pretty unpopular with Ohio voters. In November, people overwhelmingly voted to enshrine abortion protections in the state constitution. The result was a massive blow to Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who had championed the anti-abortion side of the referendum and who is running against Moreno for the Republican Senate nomination.

Apart from Donald Trump’s objectives, political operatives surrounding the GOP front-runner have their own policy goals. At the top of the list? Infusing Christian nationalism into the heart of his next term.

Behind the hidden agenda is Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, who runs the influential conservative think tank the Center for Renewing America. Over the last several years, Vought—who has been rumored to have a good shot at becoming chief of staff should Trump win a second term—has increasingly adopted the ideology that Christian nationalists are under attack.

Documents by CRA staff list several Christian nationalist-oriented goals as a part of the think tank’s top priorities in a second Trump term, reported Politico Tuesday. Other contributions to the list included invoking the Insurrection Act in order to stamp out dissenting protests and creating other ways to expand Trump’s presidential power.

But Vought also serves as an adviser to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which has proposed a flurry of other objectives for a potential second term, including repealing policies that help LGBTQ+ people and single mothers, on the basis that these laws threaten “Americans’ fundamental liberties.”

Vought’s simmering extremism has been influenced by a yearslong partnership with Christian nationalist William Wolfe. Vaught has publicly lauded Wolfe’s work on “scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism,” saying he’s “proud” to be a part of it.

But some of Wolfe’s proposals for the next presidency somehow skew even more radical. In a since-deleted December post on X, Wolfe called for an end to surrogacy, sex education in schools, and no-fault divorce—though that might have a hard time gaining muster in an increasingly divorced Congress, and under Trump who is on his third marriage.

Wolfe has claimed that the government should expand its child support laws by forcing men “to provide for their children as soon as it’s determined the child is theirs.”

“Christians should reject a Christ-less ‘conservatism,’” he wrote in another post on X, “and demand the political movement we are most closely associated with make a return to Christ-centered foundations. Because it’s either Christ or chaos, even on the ‘Right.’”

A paltry attempt to dismiss the Politico report by The Washington Examiner boiled the policy issue down to its theological core for so-called social conservatives: “Are there eternal and transcendent principles that must inform lawmaking? Or is sheer political will and power the only measure of what is right policy since man is the ultimate arbiter of good and evil?”

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is complaining that people who oppose homosexuality were being unfairly branded as bigots, despite that being a dictionary definition of bigotry.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear a case about whether it is legal to exclude potential jurors based on their religion. The case stemmed from a lawsuit filed by Jean Finney, who is lesbian, against her longtime employer, the Missouri Department of Corrections, for workplace discrimination and retaliation due to her sexuality. During jury selection for the trial, which Finney won, her lawyer asked the judge to remove three jurors who had expressed beliefs that homosexuality is a sin. Finney’s lawyer argued their religious beliefs would bias them against LGBTQ people.

The state of Missouri appealed the decision, arguing that the jury selection process had been discriminatory on religious grounds. An appeals court sided with Finney, ruling the jurors had been eliminated due to their beliefs about homosexuality, not because they were Christians. Missouri appealed that decision to the Supreme Court, which declined Tuesday to hear the case.

In a statement, Alito said he agreed with the decision not to hear the lawsuit, but warned he felt the case was a harbinger of greater danger.

The appeals court ruling “exemplifies the danger that I anticipated in Obergefell v. Hodges,” Alitio wrote, referring to the landmark 2015 Supreme Court ruling that legalized marriage equality.

“Namely, that Americans who do not hide their adherence to traditional religious beliefs about homosexual conduct will be ‘labeled as bigots and treated as such’ by the government,” he said. “The opinion of the Court in that case made it clear that the decision should not be used in that way, but I am afraid this admonition is not being heeded by our society.”

For what it’s worth, the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a “bigot” as “a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices, especially: one who regards or treats the members of a group (such as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance.” That kind of sounds like someone who believes that gay people will go to hell.

Conservatives have been blatantly trying to chip away at marriage equality in recent years, including the far-right members of the Supreme Court. After overturning Roe v. Wade, Alito’s fellow extreme Justice Clarence Thomas urged the court to “revisit” other rulings, including Obergefell and Griswold v. Connecticut, which struck down bans on contraceptives for married couples.

In the waning hours of Donald Trump’s presidency, his mind wasn’t lingering on the violent insurgency he had helped perpetuate on January 6, his fake elector scheme to overturn the general election results, or the transfer of power to his successor, Joe Biden. Instead, according to former administration officials, Trump’s mind was consumed by one thing: Snoop Dogg.

“Well, fuck him,” Trump moaned, according to administration officials interviewed by Rolling Stone.

Just hours before Biden’s inauguration, old tensions between Trump and Snoop D.O. Double G had resurfaced, nearly eviscerating the “love and respect” that the two had developed over the second half of Trump’s term while working together on executive clemency for federal prisoners, according to the magazine. That included clemency for one of Snoop’s close friends, Death Row Records co-founder Michael “Harry-O” Harris, who had been refused several appeals in his decades-long sentence on cocaine trafficking–related and attempted murder charges.

But certain administration staffers were skeptical of the president’s sudden soft shoulder on criminal reform, and worked instead to compile a report on the mud that Snoop had slung at the president in the first half of his term, including a music video in which Snoop performed a symbolic execution on a Trump clown, and 2018 comments from the rapper that derided the president and his sycophantic followers as “racist.”

In an instant, the report squashed any good will with the temperamental leader of the free world, ushering in a phase that a former White House official simply described as “chaos.” On January 18, 2021, Trump instructed his aides to remove Harry-O’s name from the clemency list and to toss his paperwork as punishment for Snoop’s past burns.

It took the work of activists, Snoop’s team, and some of Trump’s closest aides to quell the tirade via unreleased documentary footage from the free Harry-O campaign showcasing some of Snoop’s recent, more positive comments on the former game show host. It seemed to work.

On January 19, 2021, Harris got word that he’d be a free man.

“That’s great work for the president and his team on the way out,” Snoop Dogg reportedly said during a call, according to a January 20, 2021, article from Rolling Stone.

But all has not been forgotten—or forgiven. The prolific West Coast rapper has not endorsed Trump in his 2024 race for the White House, and “those close to him say they would be stunned if he ever did,” the magazine reports. Still, some cards have been left on the table. In an interview published by London’s Sunday Times, the rapper repeated himself: “I have nothing but love and respect for Donald Trump.”

E. Jean Carroll’s lawyer has warned that they could sue Donald Trump a third time, because apparently owing $88.3 million isn’t enough for the former president.

Trump owes Carroll the massive amount for sexually abusing her in the mid-1990s and then defaming her twice when denying the assault. Trump is apparently unable to accept his fate, most recently insisting at a rally on Saturday that he doesn’t know who Carroll is.

When asked Monday night about his comments, Carroll’s lawyer Shawn Crowley appeared to hint that a third lawsuit was possible.

“We’re watching, we’re listening,” she told MSNBC. “We had really hoped that, as I think the jury found, that $83 million would maybe be enough to convince him to keep E. Jean Carroll’s name out of his mouth. Apparently, he showed us this weekend that he really cannot control himself and that maybe it wasn’t.”

Carroll revealed in her 2019 memoir that Trump raped her in the Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s. She subsequently sued him twice: The first lawsuit was for the assault and for posts he made about her on social media in 2022. Last spring, a jury unanimously found Trump liable of sexual abuse and defamation, and ordered him to pay Carroll $5 million in damages.

The second lawsuit, which went to trial in January, was over Trump’s allegations in 2019 that Carroll had made up the rape allegation to promote her book. And then, hours after he was found liable for sexual abuse, he went on CNN and repeated comments about Carroll that had just been deemed defamatory. The jury in that case awarded Carroll a total of $83.3 million in damages.

Trump has said he will appeal the rulings, and his lawyers have launched a desperate and so far unsuccessful bid to have the cases thrown out. But more than anything, Trump appears hell-bent on getting Carroll to sue him a third time for the exact same thing. Just minutes after the most recent verdict was handed down, Trump continued to share negative posts about Carroll on Truth Social.