Even in announcing his new position on the issue, Trump made no effort to present it as anything other than a cynical political calculation.
Even in announcing his new position on the issue, Trump made no effort to present it as anything other than a cynical political calculation.
N ational Review’s editorial evaluating Donald Trump’s positioning statement on abortion concedes that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs did, in fact, contribute to some of the Republican Party’s electoral disappointments in the 2022 midterms. And yet, it’s empirically demonstrable that the former president’s “various manias” correspond more directly to the GOP’s losses, if only because so many of the candidates who lost competitive races share them. If the party suffers similar defeats in 2024, the editorial concludes, “we can be sure he will blame it on pro-lifers.” In the immediate aftermath of his abortion comments, the former president set himself to the task of proving that proposition correct.
Even in announcing his new position on abortion, Trump made no effort to present the maneuver as anything other than a cynical political calculation. “Don’t be distracted,” he admonished his fellow Republicans. “We’ve had a Great Victory.” Now, having sloughed off the dead weight pro-life maximalists affixed to the GOP’s ankles, the party can enjoy “the Greatest Victory of all, the Presidential Election of 2024.” But it wasn’t until the president threw himself with rare vigor into the work of savaging Senator Lindsey Graham for the sin of gently criticizing the president’s accommodationist approach that Trump really read the stage directions aloud.
“The idea of the Republican Party abandoning the opposition to late-term abortion, I think, would be a mistake,” Graham said. This affront led Trump to unleash a Category Five typhoon of attacks on the South Carolina senator designed to remind him, and any other would-be upstarts in the GOP fold, who sets the terms of intra-Republican debate.
“Senator Lindsey Graham is doing a great disservice to the Republican Party, and to our Country,” Trump wrote. The longtime Palmetto State lawmaker “constantly favors and promotes” “never-ending Wars” abroad. He and Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America president Marjorie Dannenfelser have been “absolutely no help” to the GOP. Indeed, they enjoyed no meaningful successes “until I came along and got the job done.” They are as ignorant of political realities as they are of the Constitution — at least, insofar as they fail to comprehend the Tenth Amendment’s protection of state’s rights. “I blame myself for Lindsey Graham,” Trump concluded, “because the only reason he won in the Great State of South Carolina is because I Endorsed him!”
And yet, the most relevant portions of the struggle session to which Trump treated Graham were the areas in which the former president seemed to divulge the bullet points in the strategy memo that convinced him to adopt the position on abortion he now espouses. “People like Lindsey Graham, that are unrelenting, are handing Democrats their dream of the House, Senate, and perhaps even the Presidency,” Trump wrote. Indeed, the former president appeared to skip all the way to the bottom of the flowchart, at which point Republicans enjoy all the political fruits of their conciliatory posture on federal abortion restrictions.
“Republicans are now free to run for Office based on the Horrible Border, Inflation, Bad Economy, and the Death & Destruction of our Country!” Trump said of his own beneficence. Indeed, if Democrats even dare reference the fluid post-Dobbs status quo, they will be conceding their own political weaknesses: “I guess this means that we’ve WON because [Democrats] are so bad on everything else that this is the only Issue they are focused on!”
The rightful sequence of events is already fixed in Trump’s imagination. We can deduce what the rough contours of his ideal election cycle would look like: The GOP follows his lead, remands abortion to state-level lawmakers (who, for some reason, have no relation to the national party or GOP candidates running for federal office), and wipes its hands of one of the most contentious issues in American political life. Thus abortion suddenly loses its national salience, and Democrats who continue to harp on the matter appear to most voters myopic and opportunistic. Ultimately, the GOP is swept into office by an adoring public, whose only qualms with the Trump-dominated party are rooted in one Supreme Court decision. The only people who could derail this bullet-proof strategy are the blinkered Republicans who hold fast to principle even at the expense of more tangible political benefits.
It’s a tidy narrative — one Trump and his allies have retailed since the underwhelming performance Republican candidates produced in 2022. But as I and others have pointed out, “Republicans didn’t start losing big at the ballot box until the summer of 2022.” Indeed, even in the post-Dobbs environment, the factor that correlates most reliably with GOP candidates losing winnable races isn’t their stance on abortion but their willingness to legitimize Trump’s preferred narratives about the 2020 election. Trump wouldn’t dream of putting his commitment to that fable up for negotiation. Rather, it’s the GOP writ large that must now sacrifice its convictions.
The GOP will never meet the standard Trump has set for it. The party will not rid itself of pro-lifers, nor should it. And even if their advocacy is limited to the state level, the notion that Republicans can wall off states and contain the fallout from abortion-related controversies to their respective borders is absurd. Trump’s positioning statement is sound politics only in a vacuum in which the Republican Party’s disparate coalitional politics are subordinated to the one thing that really matters: Trump’s electoral fate. If he loses again, his fate will not be of his own making. He will have been let down.
Trump’s approach to navigating the abortion issue might be sound politics, but it’s also self-serving politics. If the Republican Party still behaved like a political party, with interests that extend beyond the next election cycle and one man’s ambition, that would matter more.