Donald Trump’s Desire to Win Eclipses His Need to Please Pro-Lifers

By Jim Geraghty

Monday, April 08, 2024

 

Shortly before I was ready to send this newsletter, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump issued a statement about abortion, declaring that the issue should be left to the states:

 

In a video message posted to Truth Social, the former president took credit for the 2022 Dobbs decision and suggested that “everybody” is satisfied with the current state of abortion jurisprudence.

 

“My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint, the states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land. In this case, the law of the state,” Trump said in the video.

 

“Many states will be different. Many states will have a different number of weeks . . . at the end of the day it is all about the will of the people.”

 

The former president went on to stipulate that he supports exceptions for rape, incest, and to protect the life of the mother.

 

In announcing his support for a federalist approach to abortion law, Trump seems to have spurned the federal 15-week abortion ban championed by some of his most vocal supporters, including Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) and former White House aide Kellyanne Conway, though he did not explicitly say what he would do if Congress sent him federal abortion legislation in his second term as president.

 

Trump previewed it a bit on his Truth Social app, declaring:

 

I will be putting out my statement on Abortion and Abortion Rights tomorrow morning. Republicans, and all others, must follow their hearts and minds, but remember that, like Ronald Reagan before me, I, and most other Republicans, believe in EXCEPTIONS for Rape, Incest, and Life of the Mother. Great love and compassion must be shown when even thinking about the subject of LIFE, but at the same time we must use common sense in realizing that we have an obligation to the salvation of our Nation, which is currently in serious DECLINE, TO WIN ELECTIONS, without which we will have nothing other than failure, death, and destruction. We will not let that happen. We will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

 

Trump sought a middle position between pro-life absolutism, banning abortion in all circumstances at every point in the pregnancy, and the pro-taxpayer-funding-of-abortion absolutism that has become the Democratic Party’s default position.

 

Florida’s supreme court ruled last week that the state’s constitution does not affirmatively protect a right to an abortion, upholding a 15-week ban on the practice in the Sunshine State. Simultaneously, our Zach Kessel reported, the court ruled that a proposed amendment to explicitly write the right to abortion into the state’s constitution may appear on the ballot this November. The amendment, if added to the constitution, would hold that “no law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.” A 60 percent supermajority is needed to add the amendment.

 

Even with that high threshold, it is likely to be a close call; polling from the University of North Florida in November put support at 62 percent, and previous polls found slim majorities of Floridians believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

 

It’s not hard to find Democrats talking themselves into believing that because of the abortion referendum bringing out more pro-choice women, Biden could win Florida this year.

 

Last weekend, I appeared on Chris Wallace’s program, and one of the questions he asked me was whether the abortion issue could flip Florida blue. This is a taller order than it may appear at first glance. Last time around, Trump won Florida, 51.2 percent to 47.8 percent, which may seem relatively narrow, but in this high-population, high-turnout state, that 3.4 percent adds up to 371,686 votes. If Trump’s margin of votes in Florida were a city, it would rank a bit below Tampa and a bit above New Orleans in population size.

 

Meanwhile, Florida’s Democratic Party is in terrible shape. The Florida GOP holds both U.S. Senate seats, the governorship, every other statewide office, a 28-to-twelve majority in the state senate, and an 84-to-36 majority in the state house. As of February, the state of Florida has 5.2 million registered Republicans, 4.3 million registered Democrats, and 3.5 million with no party affiliation.

 

Biden would basically need everything to break his way. But before this Florida supreme court decision, it was basically unthinkable, and now it is remotely conceivable . . . no pun intended.

 

You can find seemingly right-of-center voters who argue — likely in the comments section below, among other places — that in the aftermath of overturning Roe v. Wade, the Republican Party should effectively abandon efforts to restrict abortion further. They will argue that abortion cost the Republican Party gains in the 2022 midterms — never mind the Star Wars bar scene of 2020-denying candidates like Doug Mastriano, Herschel Walker, Mehmet Oz, Blake Masters, Kari Lake, Dan Cox, J. R. Majewski, John Gibbs, etc. Meanwhile, non-insane pro-life Republicans like Ron DeSantis, Mike DeWine, Brian Kemp, Kim Reynolds, and Chris Sununu* won reelection by wide margins. The tinfoil-hat-fruitcake caucus is really eager to scapegoat pro-life positions to get themselves off the hook.

 

Last year, Ramesh made a compelling argument that the pro-life movement has won a lot of under-the-radar victories since the overturning of Roe v. Wade — and that the high-profile losses have been largely driven by laws that do not carve out exceptions for rape, incest, or even threats to the mother’s life.

 

The unpopularity of a no-exceptions stance helps to explain some of the most dramatic pro-life defeats of the past year. In Kansas and Kentucky, notwithstanding their Republican tilt, pro-lifers proposed ballot initiatives to undo state courts’ decisions to protect abortion. They lost, partly because simply removing that protected status left open the possibility of a complete ban — a point opponents emphasized. In Michigan and Wisconsin, pre-Roe state laws that included no exceptions for rape and incest remained on the books. Michigan passed a ballot initiative in November 2022 containing expansive protections for abortion in part because the alternative seemed to be a total ban. In April 2023, Republicans lost control of Wisconsin’s state supreme court in an election; the race had become, to a significant degree, a referendum on the state’s dormant law.

 

Our Henry Olsen wrote this weekend:

 

The closer an unborn child is to viability, the likelier Americans are to agree that it has a right to life.

 

This gives pro-lifers the wedge they need to defeat the Florida initiative. Like Roe, whose core ruling is largely misunderstood, it would permit abortions up until fetal viability. Since that occurs between the 20th and 24th week of pregnancy, it follows that the measure would permit abortions at a time when a strong majority of Americans don’t want them to occur.

 

Pro-lifers must therefore concentrate all of their efforts on persuading the Floridians who would approve of abortions at 15 weeks but oppose them at 24 weeks to vote no. They cannot do that if they use the traditional pro-life rhetoric that calls attention to the dignity of human life at all stages of development. Those voters already have heard that argument and disagree with pro-lifers.

 

The “no” campaign should instead focus solely on the initiative’s excesses: on the fact that it would allow unborn children with fully formed brains, hearts, and lungs to be killed. The center of American — and likely Floridian — public opinion does not want that to happen.

 

Making this the debate’s focal point would require restraint. A television ad, for example, featuring a woman who openly supports abortion rights in the first trimester but believes this amendment goes too far could be a game-changer. But that would entail pro-life forces promoting a message they like built on a premise they reject. That would be very hard to swallow.

 

Do pro-lifers want to live with partial bans that reduce the number of abortions performed each year gradually, or do they want to run, and, in many states, lose, supporting a sweeping ban with no exceptions? That is the imperfect choice before them.

 

There are those who can convince themselves that the pre-Roe v. Wade status quo was actually better for the pro-life cause than the current situation. This is how our old friend David French came up with the, er, unorthodox argument that Barack Obama was a better president for the pro-life cause than Donald Trump.

 

The most fraught issue for many conservatives considering crossing the aisle is abortion. That’s certainly the most difficult issue for me. But while Trump nominated the justices who helped reverse Roe v. Wade, he also failed on the most important metric of all: the number of abortions performed in America. Although Barack Obama was very much a pro-choice president, the abortion rate decreased by a remarkable 28 percent during his two terms, with 338,270 fewer abortions performed in 2016 than in 2008. By contrast, there were 56,080 more abortions by the end of Trump’s presidency in 2020 than there had been in 2016, and the abortion rate rose for three consecutive years, in 2018, 2019, and 2020.

 

You really must squint to convince yourself that Obama’s policy decisions were somehow designed to drive the number of abortions down, and that Trump’s policy decisions were somehow designed to drive the number of abortions up. And Joe Biden’s policy, now, is explicitly for U.S. taxpayers to cover the costs of abortions.

 

*I know Sununu’s record is debatable, but by May 2022, he was insisting he was the most pro-life governor New Hampshire had ever had. Note that one of those less pro-life predecessors in the governor’s office was . . . the governor’s father, John Sununu.