One of Donald Trump’s singular talents has always been to invent fake, alternative realities to inoculate himself from the consequences of his corruption and pathological acts of malfeasance. That is the approach he took in obfuscating his own, his aides’, and his son’s eager acceptance of assistance from the Russian federation and its intelligence apparatus to tip the scales his way in the runup to the 2016 election. It’s also how he attempted to evade and deflect responsibility for his disastrous mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, facing the prospect a reelection campaign, he intends to employ a similar tactic on abortion, an issue that is certain to stalk his 2024 campaign.
A new report from Rolling Stone confirms that the same man who in May 2023 gleefully bragged about ending Roe v. Wade intends to portray himself as a “moderate” on the issue. Yes, this is the same man who took credit for all of the state-sponsored bans and restrictions on reproductive rights that followed, and who touted his achievement of putting the so-called “pro life movement” in its “strongest” position over the last 50 years. Evidently that means he intends to register his opposition to a nationwide ban on abortion, a position that in itself displays just how meaningless the word “moderate” is to forced-birth advocates.
Leaving aside the sheer disregard and contempt for the lives of those impacted by Roe’s demise, this is a strategy perfectly consistent with Trump’s trademark insouciance because it depends entirely on the credulity afforded to him by an American public that he considers easy to mislead. Trump has always relied on duping others to achieve his ends; up until his recent legal travails, that reflexive strategy of bluster and bald-faced lying has always worked well for him. The only question is whether Americans are willing to countenance it this time around.
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As reported by Tessa Stuart and Asawin Suebsaeng for Rolling Stone, Trump believes that now that he’s achieved the forced birth lobby’s most cherished goal of ripping away the constitutional right that women and those who become pregnant had counted on for five decades, that lobby no longer exerts any “leverage” over him. As they report:
Despite their very public pressure campaign for that abortion ban, the former president insists that they will all fall in line and back him soon enough — with or without specific policy promises — in large part because they have nowhere else to turn.
In this belief he’s almost certainly correct. The forced birth, largely white evangelical Christian base that helped put Trump into office knows full well the importance of Roe’s reversal and understands how Trump engineered it with his Supreme Court nominations. They will eagerly vote for him again, and they will not take his supposed “moderation” on the issue as signifying anything beyond excusable political expediency. Since they’ve internalized and winked at his sordid personal behavior to achieve their ends for so long, they won’t think twice about supporting him again, despite—as Stuart and Suebsaeng report—professing “outrage” at his criticisms of other Republican candidates’ (such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis) harsher and more punitive stances. On abortion, morality has always been a fig leaf for forced birthers, a bludgeon to be cynically wielded when it’s convenient for them and disregarded when it conflicts with their ultimate goals. Their ultimate goal here has always been control, particularly control over women, and Trump has given them a previously unimaginable opportunity to exert that control.
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But Trump needs more than the radical white Christian evangelical vote to regain office. He’s well aware that what he set in motion by engineering the overturn of Roe has turned into absolute political poison for the Republican Party. So the salience of the abortion issue really rests on how many potential voters Trump can dupe with his planned shapeshifting. He plans to oppose a national ban in public, confident that his forced birther base—doubtlessly soothed by private assurances communicated by Trump campaign aides—will understand and accept the deception he’s perpetrating.
As the authors note, the depths of Trump' cynicism in floating this strategy could scarcely be more obvious: He is currently running ads in Iowa touting his role in wiping out reproductive rights nationwide. As reported by the Catholic News Agency:
The Facebook ads, which ran between Oct. 10 and Oct. 13, suggested that Trump succeeded where decades of other Republican presidents failed. “For over 50 years, Republicans have promised to protect the sanctity of life,” the spot declared. “And while we waited, innocent unborn children fell victim.”
“One Republican president didn’t just make promises — he delivered,” it intoned.
The ad touted the historic overturning of Roe v. Wade as a Trump pro-life victory, referencing his appointment of three justices to the Supreme Court, arguably the contributing factor in the overturning of Roe.
As Stuart and Suebsaeng observe:
Trump’s strategy appears to be to promise to remain pro-life if reelected, but to avoid endorsing policies like a national ban in 2024 — and hoping just enough voters don’t notice the cynical triangulation.
For its part, as the Rolling Stone authors note, the Biden campaign has heaped scorn on Trump’s duplicity.
“It defies reality that Donald Trump and his advisers are greenlighting ads touting Trump’s role in killing Roe v Wade while millions of women in 21 states live every single day under laws severely restricting abortion access — and somehow simultaneously they have a strategy to moderate his position on the same issue?” Biden campaign spokesperson Seth Schuster said in a statement to Rolling Stone. “No one is buying that, and it obviously won’t work. Donald Trump spent his first term laser focused on ripping away a fundamental freedom from millions of women and he did it — and now he will live with the consequences next November.”
However, as pointed out by Eric Lutz, writing for Vanity Fair, “With a close race expected in 2024, Democrats shouldn’t take their advantage with pro-choice voters for granted.” For Democrats, the challenge is how to best meet Trump’s campaign of lying in a way that keeps his own responsibility at the forefront.
One time-tested way to do that, as has been argued by Lutz’s colleague, Molly Jong-Fast, is to put pro-choice referenda and initiatives on as many state ballots as possible, essentially ensuring that the pro-choice vote is maximized and voters are talking about abortion, as Jong-Fast bluntly puts it, "every damn day." As Jong-Fast observed this month, also in Vanity Fair:
Most Democrats probably wouldn’t hold Karl Rove up as a role model, but in the case of the 2004 elections, they may want to take a page from his playbook. He may deny it now, but Rove aggressively used ballot initiatives to get George W. Bush reelected. As Bush’s 2004 campaign manager Ken Mehlman, told The Atlantic, Rove “had been working with Republicans to make sure that antigay initiatives and referenda would appear on November ballots in 2004 and 2006 to help Republicans.” ...
“We should put the right to choose on every ballot across the country in 2024,” argued Illinois Democratic governor J.B. Pritzker. “Not just with the candidates we choose, but with referendum efforts to enshrine reproductive rights in states where right-wing politicians are stripping those rights away.”
As of this month, 21 states have enacted total or near-total abortion bans, or restricted the procedure beyond that permitted before Donald Trump deliberately engineered the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Those states cover an area that comprises roughly half the contiguous land mass of the United States.
There is one person ultimately responsible for this unprecedented assault on reproductive rights, and his name is Donald Trump. He’s proud of it, he’s campaigned on it, and there’s no doubt he would go even further if it served his own interests. Those are the facts that should continue to bedevil and haunt him despite whatever fantastical lies come out of his mouth over the next 11 months.
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