After keeping his fans and foes alike guessing for years about his views on abortion rights, past and perhaps future President Donald Trump released a video to announce his true stand.
It wasn’t that he wanted to, surely. Since cementing the conservative majority on the Supreme Court by replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg with Amy Coney Barrett just before losing the 2020 election, Trump has wrestled with the unavoidable truth that no one is more responsible than he for the end of Roe vs. Wade. Since the 2022 Dobbs decision left the country with a chaotic state-by-state patchwork of abortion rules ranging from near-total abolition to wide latitude, Trump has tried to have it every way possible when discussing the issue — pleasing his evangelical base while also criticizing GOP governors who put tough abortion restrictions into place in their states.
But following a New York Times report that Trump was in favor of setting a minimum national standard outlawing the procedure after 16 weeks of pregnancy except in very rare circumstances, he was trapped. Trump didn’t want to be pinned down like that. So he issued his statement Monday that if he returns to the White House rules on abortion will be left to the states.
Trump won his 2016 election with the help of anti-abortion movement leaders who had extracted a series of promises from him that included the overturning of Roe — an achievement for which many anti-abortion voters are grateful to Trump.
As you can see from old quotes and soundbites dating back to the beginning of Trump’s first campaign, his abortion positions have been all over the map.
In 1999, when the celebrity real estate investor was exploring a possible presidential campaign, he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “I’m very pro-choice,” yet added: “I hate the concept of abortion.” That’s called having your position and opposing it too.
Under questioning by Chris Matthews in an MSNBC town hall in 2016,Trump said women who seek abortions should be subject to “some form of punishment.” But he later walked that back following the predictable backlash, and issued a statement saying, “This issue is unclear and should be put back to the states.”
What is Trump’s true opinion about abortion? Does anyone really know? An issue that is arguably the most irresolvable one we have as a country, given that it’s a moral question at its core, simply isn’t amenable to Trump’s “let’s make a deal” approach to, well, just about everything. Perhaps then it would be more accurate to say Trump has been making things up as he goes along on abortion rather than engaging in flimflam.
Anti-abortion conservatives have always had a running negotiation with Trump. They know deep down he’s not really one of them, yet he has been a very useful ally.
That’s politics. I have long said that abortion is a politically intractable issue in a democracy because it pits two of our most cherished values against each other: Life versus choice.
But at the end of the day, it’s quite clear the majority of Americans are pro-abortion rights. We’ve seen that now as referendums returning abortion rules to what they were under Roe have succeeded in multiple states, including hard-core Republican ones such as Ohio. With its Supreme Court on Tuesday upholding an 1864 law essentially outlawing abortion, Arizona is about to go through the same process.
Trump understandably wants to have the benefits of this issue both ways, but it’s becoming obvious the divisions are too wide and commitments too deep. He’s caught in a trap of his own making. For those on the right who aren’t true believers — they’re not part of the fundamentalist anti-abortion crusade that animates tens of millions of their supporters — abortion always has been more useful as a political issue than a policy matter to be settled.
Will Trump be able to wiggle out of the trap between now and November? We’ll see. It will take more than a quickly assembled video, that’s for sure.
