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President Donald Trump coined a bizarre new nickname for himself during a speech at a White House event on Wednesday to commemorate Women’s History Month: “the fertilization president.”
While touting efforts to expand in vitro fertilization, Trump said there will be “tremendous goodies in the bag for women” including what he called “the fertilization and all the other things we’re talking about.”
“Fertilization,” he said as the crowd laughed, “I’m still very proud of it, I don’t care. I’ll be known as the fertilization president and that’s OK.”
“That’s not bad,” Trump went on, adding that he had been called “much worse” than the nickname he seemed to have just made up on the spot. “Actually, I like it, right?”
Trump otherwise hit familiar notes in his speech at the event. He bragged about women’s support for him in the 2024 election, attacked transgender people and hailed his executive order to abolish the Education Department.
But his remarks about “fertilization” follow a record of awkward and patronizing remarks he has made while trying to make a case for himself to women. During the 2024 campaign, Trump dubbed himself the “father of IVF” as he tried to win over female voters by promising to have the government pay for fertility treatments — even as he admitted that he’d never heard of the procedure prior to a controversial Alabama Supreme Court decision to recognize frozen embryos as legal persons. Trump also vowed to be a “protector” of women — whom he said were abandoned, scared and in danger — “whether the women like it or not,” echoing the disturbing rhetoric of pickup artists, as my colleague Ja’han Jones pointed out at the time.