Hillary Clinton used a Thursday guest essay in to press Democrats to make children and parenthood central to their midterm message, arguing that Republicans have no real answer for families squeezed by rising costs. She said President Donald Trump and his allies are indifferent to the daily strain of raising children in an era of higher prices and fast-moving technology.
Clinton wrote that if Trump thinks about parents and kids at all, he treats them as if they were living in a new Golden Age. Her warning was blunt: “Our kids will pay the price for the president’s indifference.”
The op-ed lands in the middle of a broader fight over affordability, one that has become a defining political issue as families deal with inflation, child care costs and anxiety over how AI is reshaping childhood. Clinton said Democrats should answer that pressure with policy, not nostalgia, by pushing to tackle inflation and affordability, extend paid family leave, expand child care subsidies and set clear rules for quickly advancing technology like AI.
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She tied that argument to the Supreme Court’s ending of Roe v. Wade, saying Republicans have continued to oppose policies that would make parenthood more affordable and sustainable. That posture, she argued, has left national Republicans with nothing useful to offer hard-pressed parents besides “nostalgia and misogyny.”
Clinton aimed that criticism at Vice President JD Vance and right-wing think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, saying they are fixated on falling birthrates while ignoring the financial burdens that make it harder to raise children safely and in the middle class. “Their answer is too often nostalgia and misogyny,” she wrote. “This is substantively and politically brain-dead.”
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Her essay also broadened the fight beyond prices alone. Clinton said states are already moving to restrict addictive design features, require age verification, limit unsafe AI tools and adopt phone-free school policies, but she argued families still need a national baseline of protection, along with the tools and literacy to navigate new technologies safely.
The tension in Clinton’s message is that she is asking Democrats to lean into a family-centered agenda at the same moment Trump remains the party’s dominant figure. She said he is not going to wake up tomorrow and care about any of this, and added: “He thinks American parents are raising children in a new Golden Age — if he thinks about parents and kids at all.”
That leaves Democrats with a straightforward task heading into the midterms: decide whether they want to keep debating the Republican culture war on its own terms, or make the cost of raising children the issue that defines the race.
