Trump’s abortion talk con job
In a video address yesterday, former President Donald Trump reiterated the reality that states are currently in charge of determining abortion restrictions, a statement that was widely misinterpreted as his support for a state-based approach. That’s just how he wanted it, winking to his anti-choice supporters while muddying the waters on whether he will seek nationwide abortion restrictions that he knows are hugely unpopular.
Trump wants to appear an outlier outside his own MAGA movement’s appetite for government-mandated abortion restrictions, which might in turn make him more palatable to voters who have overwhelmingly demonstrated that they’ll draw a line at prohibitions on abortion. That ploy, though, only works in a narrow vacuum.
But zoom out a little further, and you’ll hear Trump boasting about overturning Roe v. Wade, undeniably one of if not the most important objective of the stacking of the Supreme Court with right-wing jurists handpicked for the task.
Whatever hedging Trump tries to do now, he will remain the person most responsible for the outcome of a nationwide abortion ban being on the table at all, the hatchet man who culminated the religious right-wing’s decades-long project to wrest a fundamental right away from American women.
He’s trying to have it both ways, bragging to the radical conservative base that he made this happen while simultaneously backing away from the consequences. But just the same as we don’t let an arsonist off the hook for merely pouring the gasoline and lighting the match before walking away, we shouldn’t let Trump detach himself from the results of his very targeted set of decisions.
By this point, it should also be clear that Trump’s promises and assurances aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. He’s a man without real convictions beyond an absolute drive for his own personal power, profit and public adoration, which makes him malleable and always insincere.
Trump himself likely doesn’t feel very strongly about abortion either way, but his administration will be staffed by and he will be surrounded by hardliners who see him as a vehicle for their anti-choice ends.
His own disinterest will leave him open to being pushed into accepting widespread restrictions, including a near total abortion ban, the second he feels it is politically feasible or he can trade such a restriction for something else. If you doubt that, just look at his completely erratic trajectory on abortion so far, from his days of talking about being very pro-choice to his talk of favoring a ban with some form of punishment for any woman who seeks an abortion to his more recent attempts at a conciliatory middle ground.
At every stage, his rhetoric was motivated entirely by what he thought he stood to gain by holding each position, and it would be no different if he were back in the White House.
Critics will point out that President Biden’s positions have also shifted over time, but they’ve shifted in the way typical of a personal evolution inflected by changing social attitudes and shifting life experiences, from relative anti-choice stances decades ago to relatively pro-choice, if somewhat moderate, stances today. It is not the spur-of-themoment calculation that Trump seems to make every time abortion comes up, and which he’ll continue making if he wins.