Donald Trump's Abortion Plan
He's going to take credit for pro-choice wins
I know, I know. I don’t want to talk about Donald Trump, either. But as the country speeds towards 2024, it’s vital that we’re five steps ahead of what the disgraced former president has in store for abortion rights. And I’ve gotta tell you, I’m worried.
There’s no doubt that if re-elected, Trump—who appointed the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe—would continue to decimate abortion rights. But Trump, obsessed with winning above all else, knows that bans are incredibly unpopular. And so he’s adjusted his messaging accordingly, working to position himself as an abortion moderate.
Over the last few months, Trump has criticized Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ 6-week abortion ban as “a terrible mistake,” blamed the GOP’s midterm losses on anti-abortion extremism, and spent time on the campaign trail calling other Republicans too extreme. At an Iowa rally in September, for example, Trump told the audience that he supports exceptions for abortion bans:
“Without the exceptions, it is very difficult to win the elections. We would probably lose the majorities in 2024 without the exceptions, and perhaps the presidency itself.”
He even went on “Meet the Press” to claim he’d “make both sides happy.”
It makes sense: Trump can see the writing on the wall right along with all the polls. And with Republicans still stinging over last week’s pro-choice victories, it’s never been clearer that abortion rights wins elections.
As we all know, Trump really likes winning.
That’s why I think the former president is about to add a new abortion talking point to the mix—a prediction that came to me after listening to his new radio ad running in Iowa. In the ad, launched after last week’s election, a female voice says, “Trump nominated conservative judges, leading to Roe v. Wade being overturned and returned to the states.”
It was the focus on ‘returned to the states’ that did it for me. After all, the states just sent a very clear message on abortion: they want it to be legal. Yes, talking about returning abortion to the states is a common Republican refrain. But something about its inclusion in an ad launched right after these state-level GOP losses felt interesting.
That’s when it hit me: He’s going to take credit for Ohio. Or any other pro-choice wins.
Hear me out.
Trump loves nothing more than taking credit for wins—any wins. I can very easily imagine him at a campaign rally or in a Fox News interview, saying that the only reason Ohio voters were able to get abortion in their state constitution was because of him. He gave the decision back to the states! Wasn’t that generous?!
In the same way that Trump has never stopped taking credit for the end of Roe, he will take credit for anything that happens after it.
What better way to appease Republican women who have been horrified by all the post-Roe horror stories they’ve been reading? By focusing on returning abortion to the states—applauding whatever outcome once that happens—Trump is giving those female voters a gift: The illusion that that they still have a choice.
Those are the votes he needs most. Republican strategists report that Trump is trying to woo the suburban women who voted for him in 2016, but not in 2020. What about the anti-abortion voters he might anger along the way? As one strategist told The Hill, they’ll come back in the general election: “They’re not going to vote for Joe Biden.”
The truth is that Trump’s criticism of the GOP’s anti-abortion extremism hasn’t hurt him in the primaries, anyway. A USA Today poll of New Hampshire Republicans, for example, showed that attacks from other candidates on Trump’s abortion comments didn’t make a dent: Sixty-three percent of respondents reported that abortion wasn’t that important to them, and 35% said protecting abortion rights was very important or the most important issue to them.
Other polling from Navigator Research showed that Republicans see Trump as less extreme on abortion than other candidates, with a fifth of them believing the former president wants abortion to be legal!
I’ve been warning about this tightrope walk for months: Because Trump gave conservatives the Supreme Court justices that ended Roe, he thinks his ‘pro-life’ bonafides provide him the standing (and wiggle room) to criticize the party’s extremism and paint himself as just anti-abortion enough to win elections.
And while taking credit for both pro- and anti-choice wins may come across as noncommittal on abortion, that apathy could actually be advantageous. In September, for example, I wrote that for the Republican women looking for a reason to vote for Trump, believing he doesn’t really give a shit about the issue could be compelling. It gives those voters the impression he won’t work hard to implement abortion bans and restrictions. Lo and behold: In The New York Times this week, a Pennsylvania woman told reporters, “I haven’t seen Trump say something either way on abortion; he doesn’t seem to care either way and that’s fine with me.” She plans to vote for him.
Again, we know that if elected, Trump will continue to strip away abortion rights. Top conservative and anti-abortion leaders who have spoken privately with Trump are confident he’ll come through and push for a national ban. And given that a Republican president could try to use the Comstock Act to ban most abortions, however afraid we are of a Trump presidency—we’re not nearly afraid enough.
Here’s the good and bad news: Trump’s ability to successfully sell this lie of being an abortion moderate is going to come down largely to mainstream media coverage. Will newspapers and cable television shows report his feigned softening on abortion as fact or the ruse that it is? So far, they’re falling for it.
When Trump went on “Meet the Press” in September, he insisted that abortion providers “kill the baby after birth” seven different times. Yet NBC News’s takeaway—and headline—was that Trump wants to “bring the country together” on abortion. (A CNN fact check of the interview found that of all the topics that Trump lied about, abortion was the issue on which “he was most dishonest.”)
And as Popular Information points out today, Trump’s media manipulation seems to be working across the board; outlet after outlet is giving him the framing he wants around abortion. That has got to stop.
The other hurdle, of course, is President Joe Biden. The Biden administration is worried about Trump’s abortion messaging; after his “Meet the Press” interview, POLITICO reported that the Biden campaign was concerned Trump would be able to successfully “weasel himself into a more moderate position on an issue proven to be a vulnerability for the Republican Party.” And as The Atlantic pointed out in September, “Democrats will have a harder time tarring Trump as an extremist if he’s talking mostly about compromise and accusing his own party of extremism.”
The big issue, though, is Biden’s own squeamishness about abortion. Since Roe was overturned, the president has not risen to the occasion—not even close. He barely even uses the word ‘abortion’. If Trump is the only candidate talking about abortion directly—no matter what he says—we have a big problem.
This is not the time for Biden to respond with half measures and the rhetoric of ‘safe, legal and rare.’ He needs to talk about abortion openly and enthusiastically. Anything less and, frankly, we’re fucked.
Over the next few months, it’s vital that we’re holding both Biden and the mainstream media to account. Abortion rights has the votes and the popular support it needs. Now we just need everyone else to do their jobs.
All Biden has to do is to play video of trump saying he killed Roe, play it non-stop. It is ridiculous that they can't get around to what he did to negate whatever moderate lies on the issue he will spread. I am afraid Democrats will settle for a 15 week ban with exceptions because they are wimps. We want Roe back, nothing less.
“Trump nominated conservative judges, leading to Roe v. Wade being overturned and returned to the states.”
The interesting catch about "return to the states," implying a return to the PEOPLE, is that those "people" are actually gerrymandered republican legislators creating dystopian laws against the rights of women under the color of representation.