Arizona abortion law may have finally forced some humility from Trump and MAGA

Donald Trump’s Republican Party likes to throw punches and never apologize.

Even after three continuous cycles of defeat tied directly to Trump’s brand of all-fight-and-no-finesse, the MAGA vanguard never seems to learn their lesson.

Especially here in Arizona.

That may be changing after the Arizona Supreme Court decision on abortion awakened the party to its own defects and brought a welcome dose of humility to a movement long lacking in self-awareness.

Republicans must now face their folly

We are finally witnessing the MAGA leadership come face to face with their own folly — and that may turn out ultimately to be good for the state and nation.

MAGA politics have been cataclysmic to the Arizona Republican Party.

In a state in which the party still holds a roughly 107,000-and-shrinking registration advantage over Democrats, it has lost two U.S. Senate seats, the governor’s office, the secretary of state and the attorney general.

In the Arizona House and Senate, the margins are so close that one good blunder could send both chambers hurtling into the arms of Democrats.

That blunder may have just happened.

Trump's court threw abortion to states

It’s been two years since the tide rolled out on Donald Trump and Republican officeholders across America.

In the summer of 2022, a Trump-crafted conservative court vacated the 1973 landmark abortion ruling Roe v. Wade, and many Republicans celebrated what they believed to be a game-changing victory on abortion.

But Dobbs v. Jackson had merely moved the abortion debate to the states. It had not changed attitudes in this country, in which the vast majority of Americans want abortion to remain safe and legal.

When a majority of the Arizona Supreme Court ruled this past week that Roe’s demise had left standing an ironfisted abortion law from the Civil War era, the mist finally lifted for Republicans, and they saw themselves naked in Dobbs’ low tide.

Even Kari Lake is now trying to backpedal

There was Donald Trump scrambling for a fig leaf. And one of his most faithful acolytes, Kari Lake, was desperately trying to hide her immodesty.

Before the week would end, Lake would be lobbying the MAGA extremists in the Arizona Legislature — her fellow travelers — to erase 1864 and bring the state quickly, mercifully back to the 21st century before the party implodes.

For his part, Trump disavowed the Arizona decision and actually beseeched Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs to save the day. It sounds impossible, doesn’t it? But it’s true.

“It’s all about states’ rights,” Trump said in Atlanta, “and it needs to be straightened out. And I’m sure that the governor and everybody else will bring it back into reason and that will be taken care of.”

Democrats have been playacting all week

For their part, the Democrats had to playact all week.

They put on their most dour faces and intoned their grave warnings that the Arizona Supremes had just imperiled women’s lives, when, in fact, everyone knows the only lives imperiled are political and Republican.

Hobbs and her meddlesome rival and sometimes sidekick, Attorney General Kris Mayes, planted their flags of No Retreat on abortion rights. Both reaffirmed that Arizona will never prosecute women and doctors under this draconian Civil War era ban.

They had already made plain they would not enforce any abortion law, including the far more moderate 15-month ban that former Gov. Doug Ducey had put in place.

Hobbs and Mayes would damn the law to press their own political convictions. There is danger in that, as famously expressed by Sir Thomas Moore in “A Man for All Seasons”:

“And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned around on you — where would you hide ... the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down ... d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?” 

Jeff Flake knew Arizona was in trouble

In 2015, the Maricopa County Republican Party ignored their political elders in this state and invited the most eccentric GOP candidate for president to come to Phoenix to address a large crowd at the Phoenix Convention Center.

The candidate was Donald Trump, and the party elders — U.S. Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake and Gov. Doug Ducey — stayed far away.

Behind the GOP scheme: To rescue anti-abortion justices

At the time Flake warned that we’ve seen leaders like Trump in Arizona and they have wreaked destruction. He didn’t have to say it, but Flake had evoked the memory of impeached Arizona Gov. Evan Mecham.

Now the party was on the verge of turning back the clock, he said.

When Trump used the Arizona venue to trash his Republican challengers, Flake told The New York Times, “In Arizona, we have had such a long stretch of this kind of rhetoric and this kind of talk. We seem to be moving beyond that here, and this kind of rhetoric just pulls us back.”

The clock had turned back, alright.

A glimpse of hope that MAGA can change

Even Flake could not have known how much. The national populist movement Trump called Make America Great Again was not only about to consume the national Republican Party and seize the White House, it would very soon steamroll Flake and his Senate career.

Flake understood that within the intolerant attitudes of this Trump movement was the same poison that had stricken the Arizona body politic in the late 1980s with Evan Mecham.

Political extremism.

Now comes the important question. As Trump and his movement confront their own extremism and finally understand its self-destructive nature, are they capable of change?

I have my doubts, but as a conservative I am encouraged to see in MAGA Republicans the emotions that must necessarily precede any real change.

Humiliation and contrition.

Those are about the only two rocks to hold fast to in a week in which the Republican Party has crashed its hull into an immoveable barrier.

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com. 

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Arizona abortion law could finally force the GOP to fix itself