When Headlines Fail: Trump's Empty IVF Promise and the Woman Who Believed It

The Washington Post profiled a woman who lost her job to Project 2025 after voting for Trump because he promised free fertility treatments. The real failure here belongs to the press.

Yesterday, the Washington Post published a story about Ryleigh Cooper, a 24-year-old Forest Service employee who voted for Donald Trump in part because he promised to make IVF treatments free — a campaign pledge he made last August. Now, she's been fired due to the administration's federal workforce purge (part of that Project 2025 plan Trump claimed wasn't his), and her dream of starting a family through IVF seems further away than ever.

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The reaction online has largely centered on criticizing Cooper for believing such an obvious lie. But I'd argue that this kind of mockery misses a crucial point: our media ecosystem utterly failed her and millions of other Americans by dutifully reporting Trump's campaign promises without the necessary context or scrutiny.

Let's look at how major outlets covered Trump's IVF promise last summer:

Notice something? These headlines simply repeat what Trump said without any indication that the promise was dubious, unrealistic, or contradicted by his own party's actions. While some of the articles eventually mentioned Republicans' complicated relationship with IVF, the damage was already done in the headlines — which, as we know, is often all people read.

In 2019, I wrote for Media Matters about this exact problem: "Everyone knows headlines are broken. Here's how news organizations can start fixing them." The piece explored how "there's a longstanding journalistic tradition of treating presidential utterances as inherently newsworthy — so newsworthy, in fact, that the 'president says' construct is a staple of headline writing."

But when dealing with a politician who has made thousands of false or misleading claims, this approach becomes journalistic malpractice.

As George Lakoff told me for that piece, Trump "knows the press has a strong instinct to repeat his most outrageous claims, and this allows him to put the press to work as a marketing agency for his ideas. His lies reach millions of people through constant repetition in the press and social media. This poses an existential threat to democracy."

The Cooper story shows the real human cost of this failure. She made a decision in the voting booth based partly on a promise that any serious political reporter knew was empty. Trump had no detailed plan for free IVF. His party has been actively hostile to reproductive medicine. The cost would be enormous. Republicans oppose expanding government healthcare programs. Yet none of these contradictions made it into the headlines that shaped public perception.

The same pattern played out with Project 2025. Trump repeatedly insisted it wasn't his plan, and headlines dutifully reported his denials. The Post article notes Cooper "believed him when he said that Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for the next Republican administration that suggested mass cuts to the federal workforce, was not his plan."

Again, the press failed to provide the necessary context in headlines and social media posts that this denial ran counter to everything we knew about Trump's alliance with the Heritage Foundation and his previous statements about shrinking the federal workforce.

Now Cooper's life has been upended twice over: first by the firing that Project 2025 promised (the one Trump said wasn't his plan), and second by the realization that the "free IVF" promise that helped sway her vote was just as empty as critics said it was.

To borrow from my 2019 Media Matters piece, the issue isn't just about Cooper. A 2014 study by the American Press Institute found that 60% of Americans read only headlines in the week before they were surveyed. And in 2016, Columbia University and French National Institute researchers found that 59% of articles retweeted on Twitter hadn't actually been read by the people sharing them.

This means most Americans likely formed their impression of Trump's IVF promise solely from headlines that presented his claim without skepticism.

As I wrote in 2019, "When a statement is blatantly false, the headline should say as much." Imagine how different the public understanding might have been with headlines like:

• "Trump Makes Unrealistic Promise About Free IVF Despite Long Republican Opposition"

• "Trump's Free IVF Pledge Contradicts GOP Platform and His Own Healthcare Cuts"

• "Experts Skeptical of Trump's Unfunded Promise to Make IVF Free"

The Post article about Cooper is a powerful reminder that journalistic choices have real consequences. When news outlets uncritically transmit false promises in headlines, they're not just failing at their jobs — they're actively helping politicians mislead voters like Ryleigh Cooper.

This isn't about liberal vs. conservative or pro-Trump vs. anti-Trump. It's about whether journalism's primary responsibility is to the truth or to neutrally repeating what powerful people say, regardless of its veracity.

For Cooper, who's now out of a job, health insurance, and possibly her chance at parenthood through IVF, the stakes of this media failure couldn't be more personal or devastating.

The media needs to stop treating Trump's outlandish promises as straightforward policy announcements. Lives are literally being shaped by these decisions. Just ask Ryleigh Cooper.