The Truce Is Over

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, October 02, 2026

 

I’ve been toying lately with a hot take that the era of political activism driven by cultural grievances is ending.

 

The gist of it is that a politics based on culture war is a kind of luxury, the sort of thing people fight about when their country is sufficiently well off that they don’t need to prioritize fighting about money. Pitched battles over trans rights and Confederate statues make sense when inflation is low, labor-force participation is high, and interest rates are ZIRP-y.

 

When times are good, you can afford to roll the dice on a con man selling luxury nationalism as a panacea for all ills. How much harm could he do, right?

 

But when times are no longer good; when inflation is chronically high and unremediated by administrations from both parties; when America can no longer guarantee the stability of Middle Eastern oil markets; when chaotic government and a spiraling national debt are pushing rates ever upward; when politicians from the party of “fiscal responsibility” seem to think it’s bad that the dollar is the world’s reserve currency; and when a frightening new technology promises to make tens of millions of jobs obsolete—in an era like that, the fate of Confederate statues will no longer seem so important.

 

Ergo, the future of partisan political activism in America is economic, not cultural, warfare, I tell myself.

 

Then I think: That’s the stupidest idea you’ve ever had.

 

When, historically, has economic turmoil ever eased cultural divisions rather than inflamed them? If anything, privation is the great incubator of cultural radicalism. Impoverished people will make all sorts of moral compromises in politics if they’re promised relief from their financial misery in return. Joining a kulturkampf against some designated scapegoat is a small price to pay for being able to feed your family.

 

It took less than a decade after the stock market crash of 1929 for the Nazis to rampage through Poland. And it wasn’t an economic vision that they were there to impose.

 

Hard times economically in America might plausibly cause activists on both sides to escalate their cultural disputes and grow more radical in their goals. You don’t need to look hard for recent examples in the GOP: From screeching about an ad that dared to depict a Medicaid recipient as white to conversations in populist media about, and I quote, “the Indian question,” race is an increasingly prominent part of political identity for elements of the young grassroots right.

 

For 10 years their party has been led by a guy who regularly bellows about expelling undesirables. They’ve taken that worldview to its inevitable conclusion.

 

There’s an exception to my theory of privation and culture war, though. Last week I pointed out the curious “truce” on abortion that’s emerged between the two parties, a notable cultural deescalation in an era of escalating economic hardship.

 

During his debate with Joe Biden in 2024, then-candidate Donald Trump went as far as to say, “The Supreme Court just approved the abortion pill, and I agree with their decision to have done that, and I will not block it.” Wary of the backlash in 2022 to the end of Roe v. Wade, the president has ducked the issue since returning to office. Democrats, meanwhile, have had bigger fish to fry politically, flogging the cost of living and the war in Iran and generally feeling little urgency to address a status quo in which abortions have in some ways become easier to obtain than ever.

 

But the truce is ending, apparently. According to the Washington Sun, Iran isn’t the only war that the president is preparing to resume after the election.

 

Two avenues.

 

Citing a senior administration official, the Sun claims that Todd Blanche has been told by the White House to go slow on abortion litigation—until November. “Once the midterms are over and it’s truly lame-duck time, we’ve heard the gloves will be off,” one conservative source told the outlet.

 

Before we go further, I know what you’re thinking: Yes, it is remarkable that the president would be dictating law-enforcement priorities to the Justice Department based on his party’s political needs before an election. And yes, it’s extra remarkable that he would be doing so on this subject in particular. How many thousands of infant lives were lost this year because Trump and Blanche feared that impeding abortion might hurt Republicans’ midterm prospects?

 

And yes, it’s extra extra remarkable that the White House evidently intends to respond to a midterm drubbing by doubling down on initiatives which they have every reason to expect will be unpopular, like Iran and new abortion restrictions. But I wrote that piece already.

 

Anyway, the litigation that Blanche is slow-walking has to do with mifepristone, the so-called “abortion pill” taken in tandem with misoprostol that’s now responsible for more than 60 percent of terminations. Pro-lifers spent the last few years challenging the lawfulness of the FDA’s initial authorization of mifepristone decades ago but have been stymied in court so far on procedural grounds. They might eventually revive that line of attack depending on lower court rulings, but the legal strategy to halt distribution of the drug has since branched out.

 

One avenue is to have the FDA, now under Trump’s control, restrict mifepristone itself. The agency is currently conducting a safety review of it; the president’s new nominee to lead the FDA was cagey during her confirmation hearing about which way that review might go. Deauthorizing mifepristone altogether would be a bombshell, igniting ferocious political and legal battles, but the agency wouldn’t need to go that far to reduce access to it. (And might be reluctant to do so, given the drug’s other medical uses.) It could simply require women to seek prescriptions in person instead of obtaining them via virtual “telehealth” appointments with doctors in blue states and then ordering the pills by mail, as they’re currently able to do.

 

“Tens of thousands of patients in states with abortion bans” have gotten hold of mifepristone that way, the New York Times notes. A new FDA rule closing the telehealth loophole would make it considerably harder to evade state abortion bans.

 

The second avenue is for the Justice Department to start enforcing the Comstock Act, about which I’ve written a few times before. That’s an old federal law that prohibits sending material “intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion” via U.S. mail or common carriers like UPS. It was rarely enforced during the Roe era, being presumptively unconstitutional under that case’s holding, but it was also never repealed. The end of Roe made Comstock viable law again, which means the DOJ could use it to try to block interstate commerce of mifepristone even if the FDA doesn’t issue new rules restricting it.

 

And if it does, it might go further than barring women from receiving the drug directly from providers. It could “also stop pharmacies and health care providers from getting shipments,” according to experts who spoke to Axios in 2023. If that happens, even a patient who visits a doctor in person to get a prescription might find that there’s no one locally who’s able to fill it for her.

 

Presumably Trump’s post-midterm abortion strategy will draw from both approaches. The FDA will announce that it’s discovered alarming new evidence that mifepristone is unsafe and will issue some restriction on it; the president and his attorney general will then use that finding to revive Comstock, insisting that the health risk to women is a national emergency that they have a solemn duty to address.

 

How is that likely to play out politically next year?

 

Wargames.

 

The polling on this topic isn’t voluminous, but it’s safe to say that something resembling a total ban on mifepristone would be quite unpopular.

 

In 2024, an Axios poll found that 76 percent of independents and even 51 percent of Republicans believed women should be able to obtain the drug from their doctor or a clinic. Another survey taken this past June by the Kaiser Family Foundation backed that up, with 65 percent opposed to prohibiting “medication abortion” versus 33 percent in favor. If the FDA deauthorized mifepristone entirely, or the DOJ used Comstock to keep it out of pharmacies, Trump and the GOP would need a very compelling “safety” argument to avert a serious backlash.

 

Ask Americans whether the pills should also be available by mail, though, and opinion softens. The same Axios poll saw independents drop to 51 percent and Republicans to 23 percent on that question. A recent poll by the Center Square detected ambivalence as well, with 51 percent of adults somewhat in favor of abortion by mail and 37 percent somewhat opposed. When asked whether they’re more concerned about safety and verification risks in sending drugs through the mail or more concerned about women’s access to abortion if they can’t visit a clinic in person, the sample split 48-39.

 

An FDA ruling that mifepristone is unsafe might push public opinion further toward the pro-life position. And if the White House were to eventually land on a compromise in which the drug remained accessible in blue states but unavailable in red ones, I can imagine Americans broadly tolerating it on federalism grounds. What’s the point of letting states ban abortion, they might reason, if those bans can be skirted by simply dropping something in the mail?

 

On the other hand: How likely is it that Trump, having just been reduced to a lame duck, will agree to a politically feasible compromise following a humiliation at the polls that exposed just how lame he is? What will be stopping him post-drubbing from going big on abortion (and Iran, and tariffs, and everything else Americans don’t like about his agenda)? Having been rudely owned by the libs at the polls, an all-out war on mifepristone would be an obvious way to own them right back.

 

Again and again during his second term, he’s taken issues on which his party is either competitive with Democrats or enjoys an advantage over them and farked them up so badly that they’ve become liabilities. Overreaching on abortion by mail feels like the logical next step.

 

Trump isn’t the most interesting political player in this conflict, though.

 

Democrats.

 

The new Democratic Congress will see obvious opportunity in a renewed culture war over abortion, particularly given the left’s post-Roe electoral advantage on the issue. Legislation punishing the FDA for restricting mifepristone would be sketchy—defunding a scientific agency because it reached the “wrong” finding about a drug’s safety is horrendously bad precedent—but the Comstock Act is a more fruitful target.

 

A bill to repeal that law’s abortion provisions would pass a Democratic House easily.

 

It would also almost certainly die in a Democratic Senate, a casualty of a Republican filibuster. (Unless November’s blue wave is truly tidal, I suppose.) But maybe the left would prefer that for selfish electoral reasons: If the new restrictions on mifepristone are allowed to linger until 2028, they can be used as a cudgel against Republican presidential nominee J.D. Vance and his party during that cycle.

 

And while it’s true, as I said, that the public might accept restrictions on sending abortion pills through the mail to states where it’s banned, it’s hard to predict how opinion might move on that question following a pro-choice messaging onslaught. Democrats would push hard to convince Americans that mifepristone is safe no matter what Trump’s highly politicized FDA might say to the contrary, with lots of doctors on their side.

 

“If the drug were dangerous, there would have been an epidemic of side effects among the millions of women who have taken it over the years,” they’ll say. “If the evidence that it’s safe were thin, the drug wouldn’t have remained legal for years under Democratic and Republican administrations.” Those arguments will carry weight.

 

The very fact that the White House asked Todd Blanche not to make any sudden moves on abortion before November means Trump’s own team believes Republicans are likely to lose the battle for public opinion. And I don’t blame them: The KFF survey I mentioned earlier found opinion split 36-64 when Americans were asked whether it should be a crime for healthcare providers to send abortion pills to women in states where abortion is banned. That’s a bad starting point for a national abortion dragnet.

 

Probably the safest prediction about how Democrats will react to restrictions on mifepristone, though, is that it will further boost the party’s support for court-packing.

 

Whatever the administration is planning will be litigated out the wazoo, needless to say, and a Supreme Court that overturned Roe and usually defers to presidential authority over all aspects of the executive branch is unlikely to meddle with Trump’s agenda at the FDA and DOJ. If the court upholds his attempt to limit abortion in blue states by curtailing national access to mifepristone, that’s another talking point for progressive Jacobins bent on radical judicial reform.

 

2028.

 

And then there’s the vice president.

 

J.D. Vance is certainly pro-life but has been characteristically slippery about the extent to which federal power should be used to restrict abortion nationally. In 2022 he declared that a 15-week ban proposed by Senate Republicans was “totally reasonable.” The same year, in an interview, he considered the problem of pro-choicers providing transportation for pregnant women in red states to seek abortion in blue ones. “If that happens, do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening?” he wondered. “I’m pretty sympathetic to that, actually.”

 

But as the GOP’s new vice presidential nominee in 2024, he committed to not imposing a federal ban on abortion and said Trump would veto any effort by Congress to pass one. “Donald Trump wants to end this culture war over this particular topic,” he declared, and called for “letting the states figure out their own abortion policies” so that the federal government could focus on bringing down the cost of living.

 

Two years later, having failed to bring down the cost of living, the Trump-Vance administration is preparing to revive the culture war over this topic in a way that might end up affecting blue states’ ability to set their own policies on abortion. Was the “real” J.D. Vance the guy who called in 2023 for using the Comstock Act to “shut down all mail-order abortion operations” nationwide or was the real Vance the guy who said a year later that he supports keeping mifepristone accessible? I suppose we’re about to find out.

 

As with Iran, there’s no truly good outcome for him in a renewed abortion conflict, I think. If Vance were to try to distance himself from this war the way he’s tried to distance himself from that other one, it would deepen the doubts that some Reaganites have about his ideological kinship with them. Some conservatives have already begun building the case against letting the GOP continue on a nationalist trajectory post-Trump; Vance going squishy on restricting abortion by mail because he’s worried about swing voters in 2028 would add a pro-life angle to that case.

 

He does need to worry about voters outside the Republican tent, though. The VP’s infamous comment about “childless cat ladies” before he ran for Senate has done him enough damage that he felt obliged to renounce it in his latest book, an almost unheard-of example of a Trump toady expressing regret for speaking intemperately. Clearly he thinks he has work to do rehabilitating his image with women to improve his chances in 2028 (his recent appearance on The View also points that way)—yet now here he is, on the verge of his administration resuming the abortion wars with a dramatic escalation that will land squarely on younger women.

 

At some point the president’s how-low-can-he-go job approval will start to weigh on his heir apparent and a broadly unpopular abortion initiative is unlikely to lighten the load. Ultimately Vance may have little choice but to do what he’s going to end up doing on everything else for the next 27 months—defending the boss as best he can, urging socialists to “get the hell out” of the country, and hoping that what’s left of the GOP’s favorability come 2028 isn’t a smoking crater. Maybe devising a few more new welfare benefits will help him atone.