Trump Is Not Pro-Life
He’s not protecting women or babies. He’s protecting himself.
IN THE HALF-CENTURY SINCE Roe v. Wade, Americans have fought passionately over abortion. The struggle has pitted people who believe in the rights of unborn children against those who believe in the autonomy of women. But over the past two days, in a series of posts on Truth Social, Donald Trump is articulating a third position. He doesn’t care about life or choice. All he cares about is himself.
Here’s what Trump has said about the issue since Sunday night.
1. I alone fixed it.
In a video posted on Monday morning, Trump declared, “I was proudly the person responsible” for ending Roe. In a follow-up post on Monday afternoon, he claimed that two opponents of Roe—Senator Lindsey Graham and Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America—“fought for years, unsuccessfully, until I came along and got the job done. Then they were gone, never to be heard from again, until now.”
This is a preposterous lie. Dannenfelser and her colleagues worked for decades to put conservative justices on the Supreme Court, including Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who provided two of the five votes to overturn Roe in the Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision. Since then, Graham and Dannenfelser have continued to push for abortion restrictions, while Trump has sat on the sidelines, carping and accusing the movement of overreaching.
2. The fight against Roe was only about states’ rights.
In his video, Trump claimed that “all legal scholars, both sides, wanted and in fact demanded” that Roe be overruled. This, too, is a lie. Why is Trump spewing it? Apparently because he wants to recast Dobbs as an abortion-neutral affirmation of states’ rights. For pro-lifers, Dobbs was a step toward banning abortion. But for Trump, Dobbs is the end point. “We have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint,” he said.
In yet another follow-up post on Monday afternoon, Trump wrote: “People forget, fighting Roe v. Wade was, right from the beginning, all about bringing the Issue back to the States. . . . It wasn’t about anything else.” That, too, is wildly false: Overwhelmingly, people who worked to end Roe did so because they wanted to curtail or abolish abortion. Many, including Graham and Dannenfelser, advocated and continue to advocate for pro-life legislation at every level of government, including a national ban. Trump is trying to rewrite that history.
3. The will of the people should prevail.
“Whatever [states] decide must be the law of the land,” Trump argued in his video. “Many will have a different number of weeks,” he noted, but “at the end of the day, it’s all about will of the people. . . . That’s what we want: the will of the people.”
This is a philosophical distillation of Trump’s view of Dobbs. He doesn’t care whether the will of the people leads to fewer abortions or more. Once the people are free to work their will, he’s done.
4. “Do what’s right for your family.”
In a post on Sunday night, Trump wrote: “I will be putting out my statement on Abortion and Abortion Rights tomorrow morning.” No serious pro-lifer calls the issue “abortion rights,” because that phrase concedes that such rights exist and that they’re central to the discussion. At a minimum, Trump’s formulation was a gesture of neutrality.
The next morning, in his video, Trump told voters: “You must follow your heart or, in many cases, your religion or your faith. Do what’s right for your family, and do what’s right for yourself.” Again, no committed pro-lifer would talk this way. “Do what’s right for your family [or] yourself” is a fundamentally pro-choice message. It shows that Trump thinks the morality of abortion is subjective. But unlike pro-choicers, he wants people to impose their subjective morality on others by expressing it at the ballot box, not the clinic.
5. I’m against post-birth abortions.
In his video and in another post on Monday afternoon, Trump denounced the idea of killing babies after they’re delivered. “The baby is born, the baby is executed after birth,” Trump exclaimed in disgust. He called this “unacceptable, and almost everyone agrees with that.”
Why does Trump draw a line at birth, rather than at some earlier point, such as 12 or 15 weeks? Because, as he noted, nearly everyone agrees that killing children after birth is intolerable, whereas banning abortions at 12 or 15 weeks is controversial. Trump isn’t looking to draw the line that saves the most babies. He’s looking to draw the line that minimizes his political risk.
6. The goal of abortion politics is to elect Republicans.
In his video and in other posts, Trump urged pro-lifers to help the GOP by tempering their advocacy. “We have an obligation to the salvation of our Nation . . . TO WIN ELECTIONS,” he wrote on Sunday. On Monday, he added: “Many Good Republicans lost Elections because of this Issue . . . We cannot let our Country suffer any further damage by losing Elections on an issue that should always have been decided by the States.”
That isn’t the way dedicated pro-lifers think about the issue. They think winning elections is a means to restricting abortions. But for Trump, it’s the other way around: The goal is to elect Republicans, and whichever policy best serves that end—restricting abortions or leaving the issue to states—is what his followers should pursue.
7. Take the issue “out of play.”
Trump doesn’t just want pro-lifers to change the way they talk or legislate about abortion. He wants them to drop the subject altogether. Democrats “love this Issue, and they want to keep it going for as long as Republicans will allow them to do so,” he complained on Monday. By leaving the issue to states, he boasted, “we have taken the Abortion Issue largely out of play.” Later, he explained: “Republicans are now free to run for Office based on the Horrible Border, Inflation, Bad Economy, and the Death & Destruction of our Country!”
The message to pro-lifers couldn’t be clearer: Your issue is a loser. We have higher priorities. Shut up.
8. The top priority is to elect me.
In a Monday afternoon post, Trump groused that “people like Lindsey Graham, [who] are unrelenting” in their advocacy of abortion restrictions, “are handing Democrats their dream of the House, Senate, and perhaps even the Presidency.” He continued: “Be smart, Republicans, don’t be distracted, we’ve had a Great Victory, and now we’re going to have the Greatest Victory of all, the Presidential Election of 2024!”
It takes quite an ego to tell pro-lifers that your re-election is paramount and that the fate of unborn children is a distraction. But that’s the kind of guy Trump is. He’s trying to bury the abortion issue for the same reason he killed Senator James Lankford’s border security bill in February. Trump doesn’t care about conservative legislation. He’s happy to block it or torch it if he thinks doing so will slightly improve his odds of regaining power.
9. This is no longer a federal issue.
In his pitch for states’ rights, Trump claimed that the “fifty-year battle over Roe v. Wade took it out of the federal hands.” As Graham, Mike Pence, and others have pointed out, that’s not true: Dobbs constrained federal courts, but it freed Congress and the president to restrict abortion. Why does Trump pretend that the issue is out of the federal government’s hands? Because he wants to remove it from the only election that matters to him: his own.
DEMOCRATS, UNDERSTANDABLY, want to hold Trump accountable for ending Roe. They know abortion is a winning issue for them, and they’d like to portray him as a zealot. In a tweet about Trump’s video, President Joe Biden’s director of rapid response charged: “Donald Trump is endorsing every single abortion ban in the states, including abortion bans with no exceptions. And he’s bragging about his role in creating this hellscape.”
But that’s not who Trump is. He doesn’t really care about abortion. He doesn’t value babies any more than he values women. He’s a danger not just to one party or one group but to everyone, because there’s no one he won’t betray.