I endorse Jim’s and Dan’s takes on the position that former president Trump’s finger-in-the-wind got him to on abortion. The wind can change, of course, but I imagine Trump will hold to this stance through the 2024 election — not because he’s constant but because it’s the easiest position from which a candidate for high federal office can avoid taking a firm position while carping (however inconsistently) at those who do.
In early 2023, I wrote a post called “Trump Committed to a Political Opportunity, Not to the Pro-Life Cause.” I haven’t changed my mind: Trump had no enduring commitment to either (a) constitutional originalism, which was the driving legal theory for reversing Roe v. Wade (atrocious law that happened to be atrocious policy), or (b) the pro-life movement (which mobilized for decades against atrocious policy that happened to be atrocious law). Trump is shrewd, though: He knew he needed conservative and (what were then) mainstream Republican support to have any chance against Hillary Clinton; the late, great Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, and the political Right’s alarm at the prospect that Clinton would fill the resulting vacancy not with Obama’s desperation nominee, Merrick Garland, but with a young progressive firebrand caused conservative and Republican skeptics to rally to Trump.
Credit Trump for recognizing the power of the issue and working with the Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation to highlight the importance — to the pro-life movement and conservative constitutionalists — of stocking the federal bench with originalists rather than progressives. Still, if Trump’s now–bête noire, Mitch McConnell, who was then the Senate majority leader, did not have the fortitude and foresight to hold the vacancy open and, in essence, let the voters decide the direction of the Supreme Court, Trump would not have been elected, period.
The politics are different now, so Trump is different. But he’s still shrewd. Most of us who believe (as conservatives argued throughout the Roe era) that abortion is a state issue, not one fit for a federal mandate, have been maddened by the seeming unpreparedness of Republicans for post-Dobbs state-level (and even federal-level) politics. As Dan illustrates, Trump’s “meat-axe” rhetoric seeking to turn the debate tables by spotlighting the Democrats’ barbarism on abortion is welcome — even if it actually “understates the radicalism.”
Just as, throughout the Roe era, Democrats and the media defrauded the public into believing that reversing Roe would make abortion illegal, the same forces now defraud the public into believing Democrats just want abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare” — rather than that they will condemn no abortion, no matter how late in a pregnancy, and in some instances even to the point of infanticide. I don’t know if Trump will stay on this case. My sense is he just wants to downplay the issue, avoid being identified with abortion bans or significant restrictions, and move on to the border, crime, economic anxiety, and green lunacy. But I’m glad he said what he said, and I wish more Republicans would fearlessly make that case rather than hide under their desks.