Donald Trump’s blaming of pro-lifers and “the ‘abortion issue’” for 2022 Republican failures is a tepid effort to shift blame away from his own poor endorsements of candidates who, as Ramesh notes, managed the issue badly. It is also not just predictable but predicted. In September, I enumerated the people and groups most likely to argue that any Republican underperformance should be blamed on pro-lifers for expecting the party to stand for the unborn. Among those I listed:
Donald Trump and his die-hard defenders. Some of these folks are quite pro-life, and some are not; but having invested heavily in picking a series of sketchy nominees in Republican primaries, if those nominees disproportionately fail in November, Trump’s defenders will have an enormous incentive to shift the blame (witness their obsession with blaming the two Senate losses in Georgia on Mitch McConnell and resistance to cutting more COVID checks, rather than on Trump’s campaign to sow mistrust of Georgia’s electoral process). Their loudest spokespeople are likely to join the Democrats in blaming Dobbs in order to deflect blame from Trump.
Leave aside the shortsightedness of this, given the centrality of pro-lifers to the loyal remnant of Trump’s base. Way back in 2015, I examined in depth how Trump’s capacity for disruption of his opponents’ plans and analyses worked as an asset to him. Today, everybody knows his moves and even his punch lines in advance. He has lost the capacity to surprise.