Trump Announces New Abortion Position of Not Wanting to Really Take a Position on Abortion
As president, Donald Trump appointed Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Barrett then became the key fifth vote, in the Dobbs decision, to overturn Roe v. Wade and legalize abortion bans at the state level.
These laws have proved unpopular: Voters in heavily red places like Kansas and Ohio have passed referendums that instead guarantee the right to abortion within their own state lines. And a court ruling that put the legality of in vitro fertilization at risk has triggered a backlash even in Alabama, where Republicans routinely earn more than 60 percent of votes statewide.
With Trump once again the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee for the presidency, his campaign has faced questions about whether he would sign a bill banning abortion (or limiting it to a certain number of weeks into pregnancy) nationwide. On Monday, he purported to answer those questions in a statement and video on his Twitter-like social media site Truth Social.
The takeaways:
? Trump says he is “proudly the person responsible for the ending of Roe v. Wade.” (Democrats are glad he said this.)
? His position is that “the states will determine” whether abortion should be legal and “whatever they decide must be the law of the land, in this case the law of the state.”
? Democrats, Trump said, want to legalize the “execution” of babies that were already born. (They do not.)
? “At the end of the day this is all about the will of the people. You must follow your heart or, in many cases, your religion or your faith.”
? “Now it’s up to the states to do the right thing.”
? Trump supports “exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother” as well as IVF.
?Oh, and: “Our nation is in decline” and “we will make it greater than ever before.”
Other outlets are writing that Trump’s video means he believes abortion limits should only be legislated at the state level, but his actual words were more tautological than that; what he said literally was that because Roe has been overturned, states will pass their own laws, which must then be followed, because they are the law. He didn’t endorse a national limit on abortion, but he also didn’t say that he would refuse to sign one as president. And he didn’t say whether he would use the 19th-century Comstock Act to attempt to impose a nationwide ban on all abortions, or at least a criminal prohibition on medication abortion, as some of his top lawyers openly intend to do if appointed.
So, in the end, the situation as we leave Monday morning behind and prepare to blind ourselves by looking directly at a solar eclipse is the same as it was going in. Trump recognizes that abortion bans are a loser with the majority of Americans but also knows that some of his core supporters think overturning Roe was a major triumph and doesn’t want to answer the question of whether he’d sign national-level restrictions because it could endanger his chance of winning the presidency either way. Going forward, Democrats are going to be annoyed by headlines claiming that Trump set down a clear position today, and they’ll likely badger reporters into asking him straight-up whether he’d veto something like a 15-week federal ban, to which he will respond with ambiguous word salad.
As you were! Watch out for Mr. Sun!
