“I intentionally decided not to do a gotcha,” Reshma Saujani tells me.
She’s talking about Donald Trump and the viral clip of her asking him how he plans to make childcare affordable. This was during his campaign for reelection in 2024, when he’d already made clear that, in his second term, “we wanna produce babies.” He’d spoken about making it easier for women to get IVF and flirted with the idea of a $5,000 “baby bonus”—which in most states wouldn’t even cover six months of infant care—but Saujani wanted to know: What specific piece of legislation would Trump push Congress to pass, to help hopeful American parents cover the costs?
His team, she tells me, “knew the subject matter of the questions that were going to be asked beforehand.” Still, Trump’s answer was a two-minute-long ramble in which no real ideas were put forward and which left everyone perplexed.
“I’m more baffled by his most recent thing, where he said that he can’t pay for childcare because he’s got to pay for wars,” says Saujani.
