To many people of a pro-life persuasion, Donald Trump will forever be owed a debt because he nominated three of the five Supreme Court judges who reversed the Roe versus Wade decision, and ended the court-enforced right to an abortion across all 50 US states. The other three Judges in that majority decision were nominated by the two Presidents Bush, who for some reason get less credit/blame, but since the decision came shortly after Trump’s watch, he gets the credit for it in the eyes of many.
In the aftermath of that decision, the issue of abortion has returned to state governors and state legislatures, though there is no technical impediment to a federal law either restricting, or expanding, abortion rights across the US in full. The most restrictive laws have come in states like Florida, Georgia, and other deep “red” states with Republican majorities. In most such states, abortion has been restricted till the first six weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions in some cases for instances of rape or incest. Notably, Republican Governors who passed such laws were handsomely re-elected in 2022.
You might think, then, that Trump’s abortion record would be something he would be proudly running on, in the Republican Primary. And you’d be wrong:
NEW: Trump says he will compromise with Democrats on abortion so that they’re nice to him: “Both sides are going to like me.”
Then he says it’s “a terrible thing” babies with heartbeats are protected in Iowa, Florida, and South Carolina.@RonDeSantis will NEVER sell out… pic.twitter.com/8c5zpGhVjW
— DeSantis War Room 🐊 (@DeSantisWarRoom) September 17, 2023
“DeSantis was willing to sign a five week, a six week ban”, sayeth Trump. “I think what he did was a terrible thing, and a terrible mistake”.
So, there you have it, from the horse’s mouth: The long term goal of pro lifers, says Trump, is a terrible thing, and a terrible mistake. He would, he says, “compromise” with the Democrats instead.
Will this hurt Trump in a Republican Primary? The depressing thing, if you are a pro-lifer, is “probably not”. The simple reason for this is that there’s little evidence, at this stage, that anything can hurt Donald Trump in a Republican Primary: Getting indicted didn’t do it, various affairs didn’t do it, being unsure about whether a man can become a woman hasn’t done it either.
Trump’s genius, if it might be called that, is that he has formed an emotional bond with his supporters based almost entirely on what he is not, rather than on what he is. It doesn’t so much matter if he is all those things his enemies say he is, so long as he is not them. That’s a potent dynamic, at least in a primary.
But it comes with a long-term cost. Forever, now, the idea of a five or six week ban on abortion – something most pro-lifers aspire to as a minimum – can be truthfully declared “an idea so extreme even Donald Trump wouldn’t support it”. He has, with one casual aside, tossed some of his most devoted and loyal supporters under the bus.
And for what? The assumption made by his defenders is that he is doing so to make himself more electable in a general election by moving towards the Democrats on a major issue of concern to Democratic supporters. But what’s the point in that? What’s the point in beating a Democrat, if the price is promising to govern exactly like one on the issues that matter to your supporters?
And besides: There isn’t a jot of evidence that it might work. If anything, the idea that pro-choice voters might take a second look at the guy who brags that he overturned Roe versus Wade is so absurd as to be laughable, especially when they have Joe Biden on the ballot opposite him. In the meantime, will there be some single issue pro-life voters who’ll sit at home rather than vote for this kind of rhetoric? Of course there will.
Trump’s motivation here seems to be as simple and reductive as it always is: His main threat at the moment is Ron DeSantis, therefore everything that DeSantis does or did must be called “so bad” and “a terrible thing”. You can project seventeen dimensional chess onto Trump from morning to night, and pretend that this is some great strategy, but it never is, and never has been, anything more than “my opponent is bad, therefore everything he does is bad”.
This comes with immense costs, not only to Trump – who will eventually die, after all – but to all those who purport to believe in the things Trump occasionally purports to believe in. A good leader will put the people he leads first, and defend them. Trump will throw any part of his coalition under the bus if the mood takes him.
C’est la vie. Some portion of the right – both in Ireland and the USA – has long since decided that watching their enemies crying on television on election night is much more important than actually implementing any meaningful change. It’s just a pity for the pro-life movement that they are the ones to pay the price this time. Any other segment of Trump’s base could be next. And probably will be.