Man who ended abortion rights says he is a moderate
Donald Trump does not speak from conviction. He does not speak from belief (other than self-obsession). He certainly does not speak from anything we might recognize as reason; when he’s holding forth from a podium, even the most careful students of Trump the rhetorician will struggle to find the light of complex thought.
You should think of Trump instead as a purely instrumental speaker. It does not matter to him whether a statement is true or false. It does not matter if one statement contradicts another. What matters to Trump is whether the words serve the purpose at hand. He will say anything if it’s what he feels an audience wants to hear or if it moves him one step closer to a goal.
Trump’s fundamental disinterest in the truth value of his words is the only context that matters for his comments on abortion Monday morning. In a direct-to-camera statement on Truth Social, the former president told his audience he does not support a national ban on abortion. “My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint,” Trump said. “The states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land. In this case, the law of the state.”
It should be said that this position is itself a strikingly conservative departure from mainstream thinking. Nearly two-thirds of Americans support legal abortion in most or all cases — the constitutional status quo under Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. To leave abortion rights up to the states is, as we’ve seen since the Supreme Court’s decision two years ago in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, to give state legislatures broad discretion to restrict and limit the bodily autonomy of anyone in their borders.
Compared with the mounting push from anti-abortion activists to ban the procedure nationwide, however, Trump’s stance is designed to look moderate. If he can persuade skeptical voters he’s not a Mike Pence or a Ron DeSantis, then he’s a step closer to a second term.
But there’s no reason to take Trump at face value. Trump is aware that Republicans are dangerously vulnerable on abortion rights. The Biden campaign has already begun airing ads that blame Trump directly for abortion bans. He knows that he needs to neutralize this issue as much as possible, without alienating his anti-abortion followers.
It does not require any particular powers of political analysis to see that Monday’s statement is a ploy — and an obvious one at that. What does Trump say immediately before giving his states’ rights position on abortion? He praises himself for ending Roe: “Many people have asked me what my position is on abortion and abortion rights, especially since I was proudly the person responsible for the ending of something that all legal scholars, both sides, wanted and, in fact, demanded be ended: Roe v. Wade.” This claim, that all sides wanted an end to Roe, is a total fabrication, but it gives Trump cover.
The truth of the matter is that given a second term in office, Trump and his allies will do everything in their power to ban abortion nationwide, with or without a Republican majority in Congress. Recall that in his 2016 campaign, Trump said that there had to be “some form” of punishment for women who had abortions. Later, as president, he backed a House bill that would have banned abortion after 20 weeks. Anti-abortion strategists have not been shy about their plan to use the 1873 Comstock Act, an anti-obscenity law, as legal authority for executive actions to limit abortions throughout the country, in blue states as well as red ones.
If you’re not inclined to put Trump’s abortion comments in the context of his habitual disregard for the truth, then you should at least put them in the context of his political coalition, which is dominated by forces that want nothing less than the criminalization of abortion.
Trump embraced this movement and its demands as president, and there’s every reason to believe he’ll do the same with another term in office.
Trump landed a major blow against legal abortion during his first term. If given a second, he will land another.