Just about everyone knows that Donald Trump was for abortion before he was against it. But what, exactly, is the position of the formerly “very pro-choice” ex-President now that his four years in the White House resulted in what might be termed catastrophic success for the anti-abortion movement? That, it turns out, is one of the harder questions to answer so far in 2024. Trump, whose only ideology is opportunism, has been predictably all over the map on the repeal of Roe v. Wade. To right-wing audiences, he frequently and loudly brags about being the author of Roe’s destruction. Bragging is his happy place; of course he cannot resist taking credit for a historic accomplishment. “I was able to kill Roe v. Wade,” he exulted on social media in May of last year. “I did it and I am proud to have done it,” he said on a Fox News town hall earlier this year.
On Monday, in a video meant to explain his post-Roe position, Trump repeated this claim. “I was proudly the person responsible,” he said. The problem for Trump is that this is a losing position with voters—millions of whom have gone to the polls, in red states such as Kansas and in battlegrounds such as Michigan, to keep abortion legal in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, which allows individual states to set abortion policy.
Which is why, in his video, he seems like a man running for cover that simply isn’t there. Several times in the four-and-a-half-minute statement, Trump invokes the concept of states’ rights as if it’s a magic incantation, offering him free passage out of a political mess. . . . This position, however, has so far succeeded mostly in angering all sides.
Whatever the explanation for his mish-mash of a statement, there was no doubt a certain amount of Schadenfreude in watching Trump squirm after all the mayhem he’s caused. The video, which featured a jittery Trump speaking to the camera in front of the Mar-a-Lago fireplace, was marked by abrupt edits suggesting that it had required many, many takes to shoot. . . . . The whole production exuded a certain cry-for-help vibe: Perhaps Trump was panicking over the thought that his great victory in ending Roe could actually prove to be the one winning issue that Joe Biden has against him in their rematch?
Two recent court decisions, which bookended Trump’s video, underscored the former President’s bind so completely that they might as well have been ordered up by Biden’s campaign. Last Monday in Florida and this Tuesday in Arizona, state Supreme Courts ruled to allow highly restrictive abortion laws to take effect, even as voters in both states are expected to vote this fall on referendums that would reinstate reproductive rights.
Abortion in 2024 is, in fact, a real crisis affecting real people. And it’s because of him. Where’s the moderation in an abortion strategy that lets Arizona reinstate a near-total abortion ban that was passed back in 1864, before Arizona was even a state? How is this a let-the-people-decide outcome at a time when close to sixty per cent of Arizona voters believe abortion should be always or mostly legal?
Whoever told Trump that “states’ rights” was a safe way out of the abortion fight must have been hiding out in a Southern golf club since 1954, with the TV turned off.
Call it the abortion-news paradox: in the post-Roe era, every crazy court decision, every extremist vote by a Republican-controlled state legislature, may help the Democrats politically in the upcoming election, but it’s terrible in the meantime for the millions of women and girls who are affected. By the Biden campaign’s reckoning, one in three American women are already living in states where abortion is banned in some form—“with more on the way.”
Until the Arizona court decision, signs were discouraging for Biden in a battleground state that he won by less than eleven thousand votes in 2020; now Republican strategists are moaning about an “earthquake” and a “shock to the Republican body politic” so terrible for their party that it will “definitely give Biden a leg up going into the election.” “That movement you feel under your feet?” the liberal columnist Laurie Roberts wrote in the Arizona Republic. “That’s one of America’s key battleground states swinging blue.”
Soon after Trump’s confusing announcement, the Biden team rolled out a powerful new ad. It features a young couple in Texas, Josh and Amanda, recounting how, because of a restrictive state law that, post-Dobbs, prompted a hospital to refuse her necessary medical care, Amanda nearly died from sepsis after suffering a miscarriage. The one-minute spot is intimate and devastating. At the end, a simple tagline appears, as the screen fades to black over the sound of Amanda crying: “Trump did this.”
Another ad, turned around quickly after the Arizona court ruling, features Biden himself blaming Trump for taking away women’s “fundamental freedom to control their own bodies” and placing women’s lives in danger as a result. If Trump returns to the White House, Biden asks, “What freedom will you lose next?” He ends the spot—part of a seven-figure ad buy in the state focussing on abortion—by looking into the camera. “I will fight like hell to get your freedom back,” he promises.
If Biden wins in November, I have little doubt that we will look back on the events of this week in Arizona as one of the reasons why.
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