Trump’s Abortion Dodge Won’t Work in 2024
After veering this way and that and flirting with support for a national 15-week abortion ban (and before that, a 16-week ban), presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump returned to the politically safer ground of contending that the law in this area should be left up to the states to determine “by vote or by legislation.”
In a long and intermittently incoherent video posted to Truth Social, Trump contradicted his own position by suggesting absolute support for protection of IVF treatments threatened by “fetal personhood” laws like those that led to an insanely controversial Alabama Supreme Court decision. He also called for exceptions from the abortion bans he would neither support nor oppose — for rape, incest, or threats to the life of the mother — and attacked an invented “Democrat” position favoring abortion “up to and even beyond the ninth month,” the latter meaning “execution after birth” (a smear that has become a Republican urban legend). But on every other topic, it appears, Trump is willing to be agnostic, at least until he can re-occupy the White House.
Watch Video hereIn the video, Trump boasted of his personal responsibility for the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade. But in keeping with his effort to cast himself as somehow being in the reasonable middle ground on this issue, he told the very strange lie that “everybody on both sides” had favored that ruling. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course, which is why there is an ongoing national backlash to the abolition of federal constitutional abortion rights — the backlash he is trying to divert away from presidential politics right now.
Trump’s retreat from the brink of endorsing a national ban that would overturn protections for abortion rights in the states predictably upset his fierce allies in the anti-abortion movement, who are already complaining:
Trump indirectly addressed these protests in his video, repeatedly reminding anti-abortion activists that “you must also win elections to restore our culture and, in fact, to save our country, which is currently and very sadly a nation in decline.” In other words, making abortion a litmus-test issue in the 2024 presidential race would be counterproductive for the Republican ticket, and without control of the White House and Congress, where would the forced-birth lobby be? He didn’t go so far as to explicitly point out that the enemies of reproductive rights have nowhere else to go in November, but that literally goes without saying.
While this statement sets up Trump to henceforth dodge any further comments about abortion policy, there is one glaring problem for him: his own state of Florida is holding a vote in November on a proposed constitutional amendment restoring abortion rights as they existed before the reversal of Roe. How does Citizen Trump plan to vote, and what is his excuse for not divulging his position insofar as he thinks states and their voters are and should continue to be the only authorities on abortion policy? Will he support anti-abortion activists in his own state who are battling to keep a six-week abortion ban that he’s criticized in the past even as they fight to restore Trump to the White House? Or will he wink and smirk and implicitly promise them deliverance once he’s safely back in power?
The breathtaking cynicism of Trump’s “new” position was perhaps best revealed near the end of his video statement when he praised by name the six Supreme Court justices (three of whom he placed on the Court) who reversed Roe “for having the courage to allow this long-term, hard-fought battle to finally end.” As he knows full well, the battle is only beginning, not only in the states, but in the courts (where SCOTUS is even now considering restrictions of abortion pills and their distribution across state lines) and eventually in executive orders and in Congress. And try as he might, the 45th president will not be able to keep women whose fundamental rights have been violated by his Supreme Court and his political allies from letting him know in November that he’s fooling no one by pretending it’s not his business.