After kicking the can down the road for seemingly as long as his handlers deemed it politically feasible, former president, indicted insurrectionist and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has finally come out with a statement of ‘his’ position on abortion. I put ‘his’ in quotation marks, because Trump has been all over the map on abortion and only came out in favour of severe restrictions since becoming a, and then the, key figure in Republican politics.
In 1999, for example, Trump was “very pro-choice”, yet in 2016, he agreed that women who have abortions should be punished. Now, he says he’s for letting the states set their own abortion laws, though “like Ronald Reagan” he strongly supports exceptions for rape, incest, and danger to the life of the mother. If you parse that sentence, it’s a sort of roundabout admission that Trump supports draconian abortion bans, but in fairness we probably shouldn’t ever parse the words of the bumbling Donald too closely.
As I predicted it would soon after Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022, the increasingly Christian nationalist Republican Party’s successful decades-long assault on reproductive justice has cost it in subsequent elections. Trump is aware of this, and he reportedly worries in private conversations that abortion is a losing issue for the party. This attitude comes through rather hilariously in his new video statement, released on Monday morning, in which he asserts: “You must follow your heart on this issue, but remember, you must also win elections to restore our culture and, in fact, to save our country, which is currently, and very sadly, a nation in decline.”
