Trump Becomes a Pro-Choice Champion… for Florida’s Abortion Rights Movement
The ex-president is popping up on mailers and in digital ads, sponsored by the group looking to enshrine abortion rights into Florida’s constitution.
MOVE OVER, MARGARET SANGER. The new face of abortion rights in Florida is . . . Donald Trump?
One of the groups backing Florida’s abortion-rights initiative is trying to attract Trump voters with mailers and a soon-to-be-released digital ad that highlights the former president’s opposition to the state’s existing six-week abortion ban.
“I think the six-week ban is too short,” Trump told NBC News in August when he was asked about the ballot initiative, called Amendment 4, which would allow abortion before fetal viability. “There has to be more time . . . I want more weeks.”
Those Trump comments, along with other remarks he made in opposition to the ban last year, are splashed in large, white type on the 250,000 black mailers sent earlier this month by the Florida Women’s Freedom Coalition to Republican and conservative-leaning independent voters.
But the flyers don’t tell the whole story.
Though Trump constantly trashed Florida’s six-week abortion ban for more than a year, he ultimately said he would vote against the initiative to enshrine abortion rights into the state’s constitution. Absent the passage of Amendment 4, the state’s six-week ban remains in place.
Trump made his opposition to Amendment 4 clear after social conservatives criticized his remarks in August, saying that they were undermining their campaign to defeat the initiative. But the decision to use Trump’s likeness and words in favor of the initiative illustrates the degree to which the ex-president’s muddled messaging on abortion could make him palatable to people on both sides of the issue.
It also underscores how eager the Amendment 4 advocates are to attract Republican support in Florida, where it takes 60 percent of voters to approve a ballot initiative.
In all, ten states have abortion-related initiatives on the ballot in November, but none has the national political significance of Florida’s.
Amendment 4 is the only abortion initiative on which Trump, a Florida man, can vote. Florida is also the only state where abortion-rights advocates feature Trump as a “pro-choice” validator. That’s a far cry from Vice President Kamala Harris’s messaging, which excoriates Trump as an opponent of women’s reproductive freedom, especially after the three Supreme Court justices he appointed helped overturn Roe v. Wade.
Trump has struggled mightily with women voters and, one confidant said, he might secretly appreciate being cast as an abortion-rights supporter in the mailer.
“He probably doesn’t hate it,” said the source, who has discussed the issue with Trump and spoke on condition of anonymity. “He might vote for the amendment privately. I don’t care what other people say. Six weeks is just bad.”
Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt disputed this characterization.
“President Trump has made his position on abortion and Amendment 4 clear,” she said. “Anyone saying anything different clearly has a different agenda of their own.”
In a departure from past practice, however, the Trump campaign didn’t call on the Florida Women’s Freedom Coalition to stop using the mailer or object to the use of his likeness, a frequent complaint of his.
Recent public polling indicates Amendment 4 garners majority or plurality support but is falling short of the 60 percent threshold to guarantee passage, making the backing of Trump voters all the more crucial. Advocates on both sides say they expect the initiative to barely pass or barely fail.
Anna Hochkammer, executive director of the Florida Women’s Freedom Coalition, said her group’s internal data helped them identify pro-Trump voters who would support the amendment. She pointed to public and private polling that shows about 25 percent of Trump voters support the amendment, even though nearly 60 percent oppose Florida’s six-week abortion ban.
“The reality of Trump voter support for Amendment 4 is probably in between those two numbers,” Hochkammer said. “What Florida voters will have before them is a binary choice: stick with a six-week ban or vote yes on Amendment 4. It’s not a vague à la carte menu of options. That’s the stark choice in front of voters.”
Amendment 4 opponents do not want the debate to be about the six-week ban and instead want the choice to revolve around late-term abortions, parental rights, physician licensing and even taxpayer financing of the procedure. (Media fact checks on the issues can be found here and here.)
“This latest mailer on Amendment 4 is just another attempt to mislead voters, following a pattern of deception that’s become all too familiar. Yes on 4 has been lying from the start, hoping to deceive rather than tell the truth,” said Taryn Fenske, spokeswoman for the opposition campaign, led by DeSantis.
DeSantis has used government power in an unprecedented way to defeat a citizens’ initiative in Florida. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement launched an investigation into petition gathering for the amendment. The state’s Agency for Health Care Administration created a web page to push back against the amendment. And the DeSantis administration then used opposition ads, paid for by taxpayers, to amplify their messaging (opponents sued unsuccessfully to stop it).
Last week, the Florida Department of Health threatened TV stations with criminal prosecution for allegedly creating a health hazard by airing what the agency says is a false ad attacking the six-week abortion ban. The stations have refused to back down and the Federal Communications Commission chair accused the DeSantis administration of threatening to violate free speech rights. That ad is being run by the group Floridians for Protecting Freedom, which is allied with the Florida Women’s Freedom Coalition.
Abortion-rights advocates, who are overwhelmingly Democratic, acknowledged that the coalition’s use of Trump’s likeness puts them in an awkward spot because they’re otherwise opposed to his candidacy and believe he’s heavily to blame for abortion restrictions like the one in Florida. But it’s hard to get to 60 percent support in Florida without Trump voters.
“This isn’t the messaging we would want because it’s Trump,” said one top Democratic official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “But if it takes using a Trump to beat a DeSantis and preserve the right to choose, then we’ve gotta face the facts that this is what it takes.”