Donald Trump’s appearance last night at Moms for Liberty’s annual gathering was intended as a classic campaign stop—a chance for the candidate to preen in front of a friendly audience.
And this audience certainly was friendly. At this week’s “Joyful Warriors” summit in Washington, D.C., members of the three-year-old conservative organization attended a seminar on the history of Marxism and a session on abolishing the Department of Education—led by a contributor to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. They packed their tote bags full of pamphlets about “wokecraft” and the “toxic culture” in public schools. They wore bejeweled TRUMP hats and glittering American-flag pins. They stood in awe of a painting depicting Kamala Harris devouring the bloody corpse of a bald eagle.
But right now, both Trump and Moms for Liberty are struggling to be relevant and relatable to American women. “The more popular you get, the devil will work harder on you,” Jessica Caiazzo, a member from Oahu, Hawaii, told me yesterday with a shrug, when I asked about the group’s combative reputation. Beelzebub has certainly been punching the clock. A Google search for Moms for Liberty in the past year would have yielded stories about not just significant election losses of candidates endorsed by the group, but a rape allegation, a ménage-à-trois scandal, and an ill-considered Adolf Hitler quote.
Thanks to these developments, Moms for Liberty has lost momentum—something it has in common with Trump’s campaign in recent weeks.
With Biden’s exit from the presidential race, the mantle of older, less coherent candidate has fallen on Trump. He has also spent the past few days fending off criticism that he is insufficiently pro-life, while simultaneously combating the perception that he and his running mate, J. D. Vance, are a threat to women’s rights.
Moms for Liberty’s national summit, which was held just a few blocks from the White House, was slightly smaller this year, with some 600 attendees, compared with the roughly 700 who attended the group’s 2023 gathering in Philadelphia. (The organization did not respond to a request for attendance numbers.) That year had an impressive lineup of speakers, including not only Trump but also Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, and Ron DeSantis. The event also attracted major protests from progressive activists and some elected Democrats.
This year was much quieter. Trump aside, the headliners were B-list: the former Democratic representative turned MAGA missionary Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, The Blaze’s Glenn Beck, and the actor Rob Schneider, of Deuce Bigalow fame. A hyped “March for Kids” evolved into a lackluster indoor assembly this morning. No protesters bothered to show up this week.
But at least the Moms had Trump—though they seemed to want to keep him reined in, rather than give over their platform to one of his two-hour stream-of-consciousness monologues. His appearance last night was structured as a conversation with Tiffany Justice, one of the group’s co-founders—and she was not afraid to cut him off.
Trump “reined in” is relative, and the conversation still meandered. Topics included: his daughter Ivanka (she could’ve been “a great ambassador to the United Nations … nobody could compete with her rat-tat-tat!”), his hit TV show The Apprentice (“It’s sort of Survivor with the asphalt-jungle aspect”), how he as president would treat transgender children (“Think of it: Your kid goes to school, and comes home a few days later with an operation”), and his recent visit to Arlington National Cemetery to highlight service members killed during the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan (“These people were killed by Biden as far as I’m concerned”).
At one point, Justice asked Trump to give members advice on running for office. “I always say, ‘Don’t do it!’” he replied. The crowd laughed, but Justice looked panicked: “No, run for office! We want you to run for office!”
The group, after all, now needs all the energy and participation it can get. When Moms for Liberty was founded in Florida by Justice, Tina Descovich, and Bridget Ziegler in 2021, in direct response to pandemic school closures, it came in hot. Across the country, group members disrupted school-board meetings and helped vote out moderate and liberal officials. In 2022, roughly 47 percent of candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty won their election, according to a Brookings Institution analysis.
But by the following year, that number had shrunk to 33 percent (though Moms for Liberty disputes these figures). The same year, group members were photographed posing with Proud Boys, and one chapter leader quoted Hitler in a newsletter. Late last year, news broke that Ziegler’s husband, the chair of the Florida Republican Party, had been accused of rape by a woman with whom the couple had allegedly had a three-way sexual encounter.
Last week’s GOP primary elections in Florida were not a great sign for the group’s 2024 progress: Six of its endorsed candidates lost, three won, and five went into runoff elections. In two counties where Republican voters outnumber Democrats two to one, four Moms for Liberty candidates were sent packing. These setbacks were a sharp reversal of the group’s earlier success.
“If you have a low profile, you can get a relatively small number of people to vote for your candidates, and you can actually flip school-board seats,” given the low turnout in such elections, Jon Valant, the director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings, told me. “What happened to [Moms for Liberty] is that, as people got to know them a bit better and the scandals started occurring, the brand grew more toxic.” The group’s initial complaints about coronavirus closures caught the public mood at the time, but the Moms’ focus soon evolved into efforts to remove from schools books seen as progressive or subversive and to restrict lessons on sexuality and the legacy of slavery in America—issues, Valant said, that are far less popular. For candidates to have the Moms for Liberty brand attached now is “probably doing them just as much harm as good.”
The upcoming presidential election is poised to have the largest gender gap in history, and given his deficit with women voters, Trump is probably glad to appear in front of any enthusiastic female audience. But last night, he didn’t mention any of his latest attempts to get women to support the Republican ticket. He did not, for example, reassert his rather frantic promise that he “will be great for women and their reproductive rights,” nor did he attempt to clarify his position on a Florida abortion amendment after his apparent flip and subsequent intense pressure from pro-life leaders. Trump also neglected to repeat his offhanded pledge earlier this week to make IVF treatment free for all Americans, a response to accusations that he and Vance oppose the practice.
Of course, the Moms for Liberty didn’t need to hear any of that. These members love Trump no matter what. To them, he is Goldilocks on abortion—not too prohibitive, not too permissive, but somewhere just right. “He literally just said no to federal [restrictions], and if you are a true Republican or even a libertarian, the government should not rule you and tell you what to do,” Caiazzo, the member from Hawaii, told me. Trump is “saying his truth,” another attendee, Jennifer White of Round Rock, Texas, told me. Like Trump, she said, “I am pro-life, but I do understand and I do have compassion about rape and incest and a mother’s life.” Plus, White added, maybe Vance has a point about childless women. Kamala Harris “has never birthed a baby,” she said. “I have a hard time with people who may not have children who want to parent my children.”
Onstage, Trump would have kept talking about his troubled interaction at Arlington cemetery, but right around 10 p.m., Justice wisely interrupted him. “Sir, thank you for loving the American people, and thank you for working to make America great again,” she said, beaming at him. Moms for Liberty has said it plans to spend more than $3 million in key battleground states ahead of the presidential election. And although the organization typically endorses only school-board candidates, Justice told Trump last night, “I wanna tell you personally, sir, that I endorse you for president of the United States.”
The room erupted in cheers, Trump looked pleased, and the two began to dance to a Trump favorite, the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” The women in the audience were happy to see them side by side. But these aren’t the women Trump needs to win over.
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