Greg Gutfeld responded to reports that a Secret Service agent at Donald Trump’s campaign event in Asheville, North Carolina, left her post on Wednesday to breastfeed. He delivered a strikingly sexist argument on his Fox News show “Gutfeld,” criticizing the agent and quipping about his own assassination plans: “If I wanted to be an assassin, all I’d have to do is get all the female agents pregnant.”
Gutfeld’s implication appeared to be that it would result in numerous breastfeeding women working campaign events, and all those women would then simultaneously leave their posts to breastfeed their infants, creating a prime opportunity to assassinate a political figure.
His remark was met with an also sexist response from cohost and former pro wrestler Tyrus, who warned, “Greg, when you make a decision to make all the women pregnant, you realize you have to raise the children. So just take it from me. Rethink that one.” Tyrus is a father to five children.
The story was first reported by conservative journalist Susan Crabtree via X on Thursday. Crabtree wrote that the agent in question was found by a site agent five minutes before Trump arrived at the campaign event. “The site agent went to do one final sweep of the walking route and found the agent breast-feeding her child in a room that is supposed to be set aside for important Secret Service official work, i.e. a potential emergency related to the president.”
“A working agent on duty cannot bring a child to a protective assignment. The woman was out of the Atlanta Field Office,” Crabtree added. “The woman agent was in the room with two other family members. The agent and her family members bypassed the Uniformed Division checkpoint and were escorted by an unpinned event staff into the room to breastfeed, the sources said. Unpinned means they have not been cleared by the Secret Service to be there.”
U.S. Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi issued the following statement when reached by TheWrap: “All employees of the U.S. Secret Service are held to the highest standards. While there was no impact to the North Carolina event, the specifics of this incident are being examined. Given this is a personnel matter, we are not in a position to comment further.”
It is unclear what the Secret Service’s policy for breastfeeding mothers is, but federal laws “require employers to provide ‘reasonable break time’ for nursing mothers with private, non-bathroom areas, shielded from view and free from intrusion of coworkers and the public to express breast milk during the workday.”
The show’s Kat Timpf also weighed in. “I mean, once again, once again, this is unimaginable at any job,” she claimed. “Imagine again a cashier abandoning their post at a Chipotle to go breastfeed their baby. Would heads roll at that Chipotle? Yes.”
“I want whoever’s in charge of this to take this from me, the Chipotle test. Yes. If you’re investigating and examining the behavior of our Secret Service agents, say, ‘Would you do a one-star Yelp review if you saw this at your local Chipotle?’ If the answers is yes, then they’re fired,” she concluded.
In 2020 a class action lawsuit was filed against managers at an Arizona Chipotle after they refused to allow an employee to breastfeed during her shifts. The plaintiff claimed that this refusal meant her “breasts began to visibly leak through her shirt, and she was required to continue serving customers. Upon seeing that she was leaking, the plaintiff’s managers informed her that she would be permitted to take a break in fifteen minutes.”
“During this time, the plaintiff claimed she was still required to interact with customers with a soaked-through shirt,” the claim continued. The case was ultimately dismissed after a settlement agreement was reached. Also in 2020, Chipotle announced plans to better support new parents – these plans included paid leave and paying for breastfeeding mothers to use breastfeeding shipping services while they travel.
To meet Timpf’s point, Gutfeld interjected, “Like, if you were an air traffic controller, you know, you can’t step away to breastfeed your kid. How is this somehow less important?”
The Air Line Pilots Association, International, has noted that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) “has not issued rules governing pilots who express milk in flight.” Presumably, air traffic controllers who are also breastfeeding mothers are afforded the time and space necessary to breastfeed and/or pump breastmilk per federal regulations.
Gutfeld also theorized that perhaps the incident was the result of management that was afraid to tell the breastfeeding mother “no” because “maybe they’ll end up in HR for discriminating against a woman feeding her baby.”
This prompted cohost Dagen McDowell to yell, “They need a barren b–ch like me storming in going, ‘Why’s Barb got her baby on the job site?’ But this is the Secret Service. This is the nature of government now that everybody was probably afraid to say, ‘Why is the baby here? Why is she breastfeeding?’ And by the way, since it is government, do we know it was a female breastfeeding?”
Breastfeeding is not a one-size-fits-all experience. Several mothers who work outside of the home opt to continue to breastfeed after their allotted maternity leave ends, with many women breastfeeding their children for the first year of their child’s life (and beyond). The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that mothers exclusively breastfeed for the first 6 months of their baby’s life — much longer than the standard 8-12 weeks of leave many women are afforded by their employers.
There are a multitude of reasons why a mother might choose to – or need to — breastfeed directly instead of pumping milk before, during and after her work shift. Medical conditions and a baby’s individual temperament could also make bottle feeding more difficult.
You can watch the “Gutfeld” exchange in the video above.
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