Trump continues to disappoint his old friends in the anti-abortion movement.
Photo: Leah Millis/Reuters
Donald Trump very clearly understands that his greatest single vulnerability in the 2024 election is his reactionary record on reproductive rights and his responsibility for the reversal of Roe v. Wade and the subsequent imposition of abortion bans nearly everywhere the GOP is in power. This is why, even before he nailed down the 2024 GOP nomination, he risked the wrath of the anti-abortion movement by refusing to sign on to any specific national abortion-ban proposal. Later, when that nomination was in hand, he clarified his position to insist that states should always determine abortion policy (though he never clearly addressed secondary issues like potential federal regulation of abortion pills). To the even greater annoyance of the forced-birth activists who viewed him as the greatest president of them all for his fulfilled pledge to create a Supreme Court majority willing to overturn Roe, Trump began talking as though he personally had no particular views on the matter (other than insisting on exceptions for rape and incest in abortion bans) as he sought to take the issue off the table for 2024.
But the popular clamor for the restoration of abortion rights won’t go away, and Kamala Harris has made it a signature issue in her competitive campaign. So Trump keeps moving the goalposts on his own position, reckoning that the anti-abortion “base” will stick with him grudgingly through Election Day no matter what he says or does. His latest flips, however, are strange enough that they may turn out to be flops. Here are the latest policies he has floated.
Like a lot of Republicans, Trump understands that opposition to IVF treatments is absolutely catastrophic politically, particularly given the GOP’s recent focus on childbearing as the most important thing one can do for one’s country. So nearly all Republicans — even in Alabama where the state supreme court made this a national controversy by ruling that IVF treatments destroy human life just like abortion — have raced to proclaim they support this therapy, even if it makes their “pro-life” allies grumble and groan. Trump recently went further than anyone, making this pledge at a town-hall meeting:
I’ve been looking at it, and what we’re going to do is for people that are using IVF, which is fertilization … the government is going to pay for it, or we’re going to get — we’ll mandate your insurance company to pay for it, which is going to be great.
Finally, after all these years, Trump has a health-care plan! But its real purpose is to heal the wound caused by fears that Republicans ultimately want to ban both IVF and contraception.
Trump’s attempts to suggest that the reversal of Roe left nothing to say at the federal level about abortion policy run into one immediate and glaring problem: States may be able to ban or not to ban abortion, but the District of Columbia’s self-governance on topics like this is totally at the sufferance of Congress. And as it happens, Republicans generally and Trump specifically love to boss D.C. around. This has left the Trump campaign with a contradiction, as Politico explained:
Though Republican lawmakers spent years targeting abortion in D.C., and though Trump recently vowed to strip power from the deep-blue city’s elected government, his campaign told me — amazingly — that the District has the right to make its own rules about abortion.
“Democrats want to gaslight Americans and sow fear, but President Trump has long been consistent in supporting the rights of states, and the District of Columbia, to make decisions on abortion,” Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.
The “and the District of Columbia” part of that sentence marks a jaw-dropping departure from decades of GOP orthodoxy.
That’s how far Trump is willing to go to avoid taking a clear position on abortion: giving up the chance to tell the hated denizens of the Swamp what to do.
The biggest problem Trump may face in dodging the abortion issue in 2024 is that his very own state of residence will vote on a ballot measure to amend the Florida constitution to restore the rights once protected at the federal level by Roe v. Wade. Unsurprisingly, when asked how he will vote on this, Trump has been very cagey. But in the past few days, he has come close to a startling shift into territory far from the anti-abortion movement, as NPR reported:
Former President Donald Trump indicated he would vote in favor of abortion rights in his home state of Florida, where it is on the ballot. Saying he thinks the “six week [ban] is too short,” he said he favored “more time.”
When asked explicitly, “So you’ll vote in favor of the amendment?,” Trump seemed to affirm that he would.
“I’m going to be voting that we need more than six weeks,” he told NBC News in an interview, before saying he favored exceptions in abortion law for the life of the mother, rape and incest.
His campaign hastened to slap down what looked like a potential bombshell:
“President Trump has not yet said how he will vote on the ballot initiative in Florida; he simply reiterated that he believes six weeks is too short.” Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s press secretary said in a statement to NPR.
The trouble, of course, is that Trump won’t have a chance in November to vote for “more time” for abortion access but for whether he wants to permanently preempt pre-viability abortion bans of any length. Because Florida has imposed a supermajority requirement for citizen-initiated constitutional amendments, the vote could be pretty close, and it will get a lot of attention. So the former president’s earlier promise to hold a press conference to announce his position won’t be forgotten.
Just to be sure, Harris should bring it up a time or two during their September 10 debate.
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