Cleanup on Aisle MAGA: Trump Bends to Conservative Abortion Critics
The ex-president had tried to keep it vague. But he finally announced he’d oppose Florida’s abortion rights initiative.
IN THE END, DONALD TRUMP, a master of evasion, could only obfuscate for so long.
After hemming, hawing, avoiding, and rambling, the ex-president finally admitted Friday night that he opposes his home state’s abortion-rights ballot initiative.
Insiders had expected him to end up there. But Trump had shown a remarkable ability to just say nothing at all. For months, he was coy about the Florida initiative, which would overrule the state’s current six-week ban by creating a right to abortion in the state constitution. He said he’d let his position be known at some point and then offered vague responses that didn’t address the fundamental, binary choice of which way he’d vote.
But pressure and anger mounted from social conservatives after he made muddled remarks to NBC that led to a conservative backlash. And a day later, Friday, he finally made his position clear in a safe-space interview with Fox News. He started by saying that while he would prefer to extend Florida’s cutoff so that abortions are permitted beyond six weeks—“you need more time than six weeks”—he has ultimately decided to vote against Amendment 4 because it would allow for later-term abortions, all the way through birth: “The nine months is just a ridiculous situation, where you can do an abortion in the ninth month.”
“I’ll be voting no for that reason,” Trump said.
He then falsely claimed that in “some of the states, like Minnesota, and other states, have it where you could actually execute the baby after birth.”
It was a major relief for evangelicals.
“Mission accomplished,” said an evangelical Trump confidant, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
But while evangelicals may have been left happy with the final result, the process by which Trump got to that point was hardly damage-free.
For weeks, Trump has offered a mixture of public appearances and policy proposals that has simultaneously mollified and angered social conservatives. He has touted himself as a champion of reproductive rights, pledged to veto any restrictions on abortion, and promised to mandate that insurers pay for in vitro fertilization, a proposal designed to stop Democrats from accusing him of being against IVF. On Saturday, he appeared to voice his support for Florida’s marijuana legalization, Amendment 3, though without explicitly saying he would vote for the measure.
At the same time, he has placed a renewed focus on other social issues, dusting off an anti-trans policy agenda he first laid out early in the Republican primary back in January 2023. On a Friday press call, campaign officials told reporters that Trump planned to limit transgender therapies, crack down hard on sex-reassignment surgeries in hospitals, and punish schools that allow students to identify as a gender that does not match their sex at birth.
Speaking to the conservative group Moms for Liberty later in the evening, Trump cycled through a number of scattered anti-trans critiques. “The transgender thing is incredible,” Trump said as he discussed school policy. “Think of it. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child and you know many of these childs [sic] fifteen years later say, ‘What the hell happened? Who did this to me?’ They say, ‘Who did this to me?’ It’s incredible.”
There are no known cases of schools performing such “operations” on children.
THE MULTIPLE MESSAGES FROM TRUMP on abortion, IVF, and transgender policy have had a dizzying effect on fellow Republicans. Several major voices on Thursday and early Friday expressed despondence over what they view as a philosophical betrayal by the ex-president. Some warned that Trump risked dampening the enthusiasm of his base, if he hasn’t done so already. Others resorted to mockery.
Still others rationalized Trump’s moves as exhibitions of political pragmatism. In particular, they said they understood the needle that the ex-president was trying to thread when it came to Florida’s abortion measures.
For months, Trump has expressed concern with his adopted state’s six-week abortion ban, which was signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis in April 2023 as he prepared to take on Trump and tried to outflank the former president with social conservatives.
That DeSantis-signed law, which took effect this year, was so strict that it led Planned Parenthood and other groups to propose Amendment 4, which was placed on the ballot in April. That ultimately left Republicans like Trump in an awkward spot: support the six-week ban or support the Florida amendment that was more permissive than many would want. Trump generally favors a twelve- to fifteen-week abortion ban, according to those familiar with his thinking, and he regularly says on the campaign trail that he supports “the three exceptions”: rape, incest, or danger to the life of the mother. Last September, he called the six-week ban a “terrible mistake.”
But as a presidential candidate this cycle, Trump has refused to entertain a federal role for abortion policy, saying he intended to leave abortion limits up to individual states.
For weeks, Trump tried to avoid getting nailed down on Amendment 4. But on Thursday, the calculus changed when, in an interview with NBC, he suggested he would vote against the six-week ban, leading many conservative evangelicals to believe he would back the Planned Parenthood amendment. That response led to a flurry of public statements and private calls to Trump and his advisers from evangelical conservatives who demanded he clarify his position.
The campaign put out a statement Thursday insisting Trump had not yet taken a formal position. But by Friday evening, Trump had ended the suspense.
Trump has had a complicated relationship with social conservatives throughout his political career. A cosmopolitan, thrice-married New Yorker with a history of comfort in abortion-rights circles, he strategically courted the support of evangelicals in his initial White House run and eventually picked Mike Pence as his running mate to lock that support in. But throughout his career, he has also been innately attuned to his standing with this base; recognizing that his political power largely extends from his command of it.
By Friday evening, many social conservatives were back to being happy with him.
Frank Pavone, a laicized priest who serves as national director of Priests for Life and was a Trump presidential campaign adviser in 2016 and 2020, said Trump did not have to take a position on Florida’s abortion amendment, but he was happy with the final result. Pavone also expressed a measure of support for Trump’s position on IVF, which concerns some abortion-rights activists because it can involve the destruction of embryos.
“As for the IVF mandate, he thinks Americans needs more babies, and that is a pro-life sentiment,” Pavone told The Bulwark in a text message. “I don’t expect him to know all the moral ins and outs of IVF, and I look forward to talking with the administration about that once they are in office.”