The Week: Trump’s Cowardly Abortion Strategy

• Johnnie Cochran’s biggest challenge looms.

• Donald Trump said he thinks abortion policy should be decided state by state: a respectable position in itself, and one taken by many conservatives. But he expressed no view on how states should decide it, except that they should include exceptions for rape and incest. When various pro-lifers disagreed with him, he dug in, slamming them and saying he would veto any federal restriction on abortion. Trump is reflecting a Republican fear of the issue that is out of proportion to any of the evidence of its political impact: No pro-life senator or governor has lost an office during the past two years of a supposedly seismic pro-choice backlash. There are many things Republicans can and should do to protect unborn children in a politically sustainable way. Instead, Republicans are not so much beating a strategic retreat as deciding to call cowardice a strategy.

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• Johnnie Cochran’s biggest challenge looms.

• Donald Trump said he thinks abortion policy should be decided state by state: a respectable position in itself, and one taken by many conservatives. But he expressed no view on how states should decide it, except that they should include exceptions for rape and incest. When various pro-lifers disagreed with him, he dug in, slamming them and saying he would veto any federal restriction on abortion. Trump is reflecting a Republican fear of the issue that is out of proportion to any of the evidence of its political impact: No pro-life senator or governor has lost an office during the past two years of a supposedly seismic pro-choice backlash. There are many things Republicans can and should do to protect unborn children in a politically sustainable way. Instead, Republicans are not so much beating a strategic retreat as deciding to call cowardice a strategy.