Trump Is Haunted by Abortion—He Should Be
The issue defined the 2022 midterms, and with Republicans targeting mifepristone and IVF, Trump is looking for an out.
LAST WEEK DONALD TRUMP came to Capitol Hill to meet with congressional Republicans about the GOP’s policy agenda for next year when, they all confidently assume, Republicans will control the Congress and the presidency.
But instead of a discussion of tax rates, or the urgent need to pass new immigration restrictions, Republicans listened to Trump’s trademark “rambling” shtick—a performance one participant likened to “talking to your drunk uncle at the family reunion.”
Trump did make clear his one policy priority, however: Tucked in somewhere among lying about Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, speculating about Taylor Swift’s support for Biden, crapping on Milwaukee, and assailing “dirty, no-good bastards’’ at the Department of Justice came a stern message on abortion. Republicans should not avoid the subject as Democrats emphasize the issue, Trump warned. Republicans must support exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother. They need to “be smart.”
When Democrats mark the second anniversary of the Dobbs ruling overturning Roe v. Wade next week, Trump will be hating it. His three Supreme Court appointments made that ruling possible. And he has no doubt seen new polling that shows the backlash to Dobbs—the backlash that contributed to Democrats’ strong showing in the 2022 midterms—is not diminished.
A Gallup survey conducted last month showed a record high 32 percent of voters would only support a candidate for major office who shared their views on the issue, and the importance of it is “markedly higher among pro-choice voters than it was during the 2020 presidential election cycle,” up 4 percentage points since last May. Of that 32 percent, three quarters are pro-choice and one quarter is pro-life. While the number of pro-choice voters who will decide only on abortion has grown since the 2022 midterms, the increase has come only from Democrats, which means Biden and his party must turn out those voters to leverage this new intensity. A majority of respondents—54 percent—says abortion is morally acceptable.
Meanwhile, a Fox News poll, also from last month, showed abortion leading the list of deal-breaker issues for voters, at 15 percent. The economy and the border were each at 14 percent.
As President Biden campaigns to “restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again,” Trump nervously reiterates that this is now all up to the states, where there will be a range of policies across the country. But that is unpopular—in fourteen states that ban the procedure or otherwise restrict it more tightly than Roe did, the lives of women with ectopic pregnancies, miscarriages, and other complications, as well as those unable to travel out of state and are turning to unsafe abortions, are at risk.
AND THAT’S NOT ALL: Medication abortion, which six in ten Americans support keeping legal and is used in more than 60 percent of abortions, is also now at risk. Trump is likely hoping voters weren’t paying attention to the ruling on mifepristone last week from the Supreme Court, and that they believe the matter has been settled.
Far from it.
The high court’s ruling, handed down last Thursday, was made on process. Because it didn’t address the actual question of restricting the drug, it leaves open the possibility of a new case regarding mifepristone coming to the Supreme Court. Democrats will ensure that voters hear about additional cases moving to a Texas court, where a Trump-appointed judge who once worked for a Christian legal advocacy organization, and whose courtroom has become the venue of choice for Republicans seeking to challenge laws they don’t like, will be deciding whether or not to take them up.
Democrats are also working to educate voters about the Comstock Act, which could allow Trump to ban the pills in a second term. They are planning legislation to modify the Comstock Act so that it could not be used to stop the distribution of abortion medication.
When asked about Republican plans—spelled out by Project 2025—to enforce the Comstock Act to potentially ban mifepristone, Trump told Time magazine in April that a statement was coming in fourteen days, and said “I feel very strongly about it.”
It never came.
As it stands now, an interpretation of enforcement of the Comstock Act would belong only to the officials Trump staffs the Department of Justice with, and agreement from a Supreme Court majority. Governors of Washington, Oregon, New York, California, and Massachusetts are stockpiling the drug in case Trump wins a second term.
AS ELIZABETH DIAS AND LISA LERER show in their deeply reported new book The Fall of Roe, the shrewd legal machinations that resulted in the Dobbs ruling were the work of a passionate Christian movement that makes clear the undoing of Roe is only a beginning.
Since Roe was overturned, Democrats have warned the GOP intends to restrict birth control and in vitro fertilization and end all abortion. Republicans have insisted that isn’t true. Yet this last month, Senate Republicans have swallowed the Democrats’ bait—voting against protecting access to birth control and against a national right to IVF.
Gallup found 82 percent of Americans believe IVF is morally acceptable, so last week when the Southern Baptist Convention voted to oppose it many Republicans rushed out statements in support of the procedure. Those GOP candidates who have claimed life begins at conception but tout their support for IVF have not clarified how that belief could conflict with the practice of discarding, donating for medical research, or freezing indefinitely those embryos that aren’t implanted.
Trump said he supports IVF also, but he isn’t likely to support national protections for it, which is another opening for Democrats. Left to the states, they can argue, IVF is not safe.
As Democrats spend more time and money late in the campaign on their reproductive freedom agenda Trump will struggle with what is a political liability by blaming his own side.
While frequently boasting that he delivered for the pro-life movement by creating the court that overturned Roe, Trump is also fond of criticizing Republicans publicly for their rhetoric around what is simply now unpopular policy with more than six in ten voters. He began doing this after the midterm elections.
Then after he reversed himself on a federal ban he once supported in a video in early April, Trump lashed out at Sen. Lindsey Graham for doing a “great disservice” to the GOP and the country when Graham said that he “respectfully disagreed” with Trump and would continue to advocate for a federal ban at fifteen weeks.
In a Truth Social post Trump wrote that “Many good Republicans lost elections because of this Issue, and people like Lindsey Graham, that are unrelenting, are handing Democrats their dream of the House, Senate, and perhaps even the presidency.”
Despite his flip-flop, movement leaders are warning Trump not to alter the GOP platform before the July convention that currently calls for a ban at twenty weeks and an amendment to the Constitution to provide a fetus with legal protections. Since Ralph Reed and others have issued public messages, the Trump campaign has not affirmed they will support the platform.
Would Trump risk a fight with pro-life leaders before the convention ? Absolutely. Will he win? No question.
But after all of the scandals, outrages, and many crimes that haven’t sunk Trump, he now faces the possibility of losing his comeback quest, and potentially prison after serious criminal trials in 2025 or 2026, because of a political promise he made for power in 2016 on actual policy—a transaction unmoored from principle, and to achieve a policy aim that in truth he most likely disagreed with.
For a demagogue who built his cult of personality on grievance far more than any substantive issue—that would be fitting.