As President-elect Donald Trump has aggressively set to work on building his new administration, some have noticed that many of those being selected as his closest advisors are parents with families well above the national average.
The current national average for a family in the U.S. is 1.94, which is below the minimum 2.1 required to replace the population. Meanwhile, some of Trump’s Cabinet members and advisers are well above the replacement level.
Trump is a father of five adult children. Though he has divorced two times, he is said to be a devoted grandfather to his 10 grandchildren, even reportedly spending the morning after election night golfing with his granddaughter, Kai Trump.
Secretary of the Interior nominee Doug Burgum and Deputy Chief of Policy Stephen Miller each have three children. Trump’s picks for the CIA, John Ratcliffe, and Secretary of State pick Marco Rubio have four kids each. Though from several marriages, Health and Human Services nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Department of Defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth both have seven kids.
The grand prize goes to Sean Duffy, Trump’s pick for transportation secretary, who with wife Rachel Campos-Duffy has nine children. In 2019, Duffy stepped down from his role as a Wisconsin congressperson ahead of his ninth child’s birth to spend more time with his family.
“Raising a family is hard work,” he said in a social media post explaining his decision. “I have always been open to signs from God when it comes to balancing my desire to serve both my family and my country.”
By comparison, with four children, President Biden is more of an exception in his administration, which is mainly staffed by people with two or fewer children.
During the campaign, Vice President-elect JD Vance voiced his belief that the government needs to place a greater emphasis on being “pro-family” and make it easier for Americans to have larger families and more kids.
At 40 years old, Vance and his wife, Usha, have three children, and he has voiced his desire to have more.
In his first big speech on the national stage at the Republican National Convention, Vance said “the American Dream that always counted most [to me] was not starting a business or becoming a senator or even being here with you fine people, it was becoming a good husband and a good dad and of giving my family the things I never had as a kid. And that’s the accomplishment I’m proudest of.”
He was hit repeatedly by the Kamala Harris campaign and the media over his 2021 criticism of the country being run by who he called “childless cat ladies.” But the underlying problem of low birth rates in the U.S. poses an increasingly big worry to those paying attention.
Catherine Pakaluk, a social researcher and author, told Fox News Digital that the country’s low birth rate has gotten to a point where it is presenting real problems and dangers for the future.
“We Americans are not having enough children to replace the population,” she said. “What we’re seeing is an inversion of the normal population pyramid where we would think about the normal population pyramid would be a greater number of younger workers supporting a smaller number of older, retired workers.”
Though not yet at the level of countries like Japan and China, which are now facing shrinking populations, Pakaluk said the result is that there are “fewer and fewer workers,” fewer people paying into the tax base, and government programs such as social security and Medicare are becoming increasingly unviable.
Because of this reality, Pakaluk said she appreciates people like Vance pushing for larger families.
“I really value that Vice President-elect Vance is speaking positively about families and talking a lot about how much he would like to have a larger family. … I think a lot of what is very helpful to us today is to have role models talking about how having kids isn’t really all that bad and, in fact, might be better than you expected.”
Most crucial to Pakaluk, however, is advancing values that lead to people choosing to have bigger families. She recently published a book called “Hannah’s Children” in which she did extensive interviews with mothers who decided to have five or more kids. The common denominator among these women, who came from a wide array of faith backgrounds, was a strong religious belief in children as blessings from God.
This led Pakaluk to believe that the solution to what she calls the “birth dearth” is a return to religious convictions on the individual and societal level.
She pointed to Duffy, who is a practicing Catholic, as an example.
“What I like to say is, I don’t know that you can get more children out of being pro-child. … But I think you can get more children if you’re pro-church or pro-religious community,” she said. “If people encounter strong religious communities on a more regular basis, this can change in a generation.”
