Donald Trump's only fixed position on abortion is his disdain for women
The thrice-married womaniser has veered dramatically on the issue but his supreme court pick could torpedo Roe v Wade unless women mobilise
Donald Trump really doesn’t care about a woman’s right choose. Do U?
How could he care when he’s been all over the place on this core moral question for the entirety of his time in public life?
“I am very pro-choice,” Trump told NBC’s Tim Russert back in 1999. “I hate the concept of abortion. I hate it. I hate everything it stands for. I cringe when I listen to people debating the subject. But you still – I just believe in choice.”
Back in those days, Trump was so close to the pro-choice movement that he co-sponsored a dinner for the president emeritus of the National Abortion Rights Action League at the Plaza hotel, which he owned at the time. He didn’t show up because he received death threats from anti-abortion protesters.
It was so much more comfortable for him when he tried to woo those protesters as he started running for president three years ago. He can expect nothing but their prayers as he prepares to hand them their long-desired achievement: rolling back reproductive rights for women with his next pick for the supreme court.
With Justice Kennedy’s retirement, Trump’s next nominee is likely to tip the balance against Roe v Wade, just as soon as one or other state pushes forward with an attempt to ban abortion outright.
This is not some far-fetched scaremongering from the left. Just last month Iowa’s Republican-controlled legislation passed a law designed to do just that: banning abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected, which can be as early as six weeks. That’s earlier than many women even know they are pregnant.
Where Anthony Kennedy sided with protecting Roe v Wade, his replacement is highly unlikely to follow suit
“We created an opportunity to take a run at Roe v Wade – 100%,” said one Republican state senator.
Soon, with Trump’s supreme court pick, they will get exactly what they wish for, and will probably win. Where Anthony Kennedy sided with protecting Roe v Wade, his replacement is highly unlikely to follow suit. Normally conservative judicial nominees repeat the usual legal boilerplate about respecting settled law. Those words will stand for nothing when the new supreme court considers abortion rights next time.
For the warriors of the pro-life movement, their reliance on Donald Trump underscores the hollow nature of their supposed moral principles.
Trump’s conversion to the cause is even less convincing than that of Mitt Romney, who claimed he had a change of heart after talking to stem cell researchers about human embryos. At least Romney’s fantasy revolves around a scientific meeting, even though the Harvard researcher in question flatly denied the conversation.
In Trump’s case, the conversion supposedly came after an unnamed friend considered an abortion but didn’t proceed, and the child ended up being – in Trump’s words at a presidential debate, no less – “a total superstar”.
Perhaps the shaky nature of this story left Trump with a shaky grasp of the issue, because he seemed to have no sense of where he stood on reproductive rights through the course of the presidential election.
“I am pro-choice,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper.
“You’re pro-life or pro-choice?” asked Tapper, throwing him a lifeline.
“I’m pro-life. I’m sorry,” said Trump.
Perhaps to compensate for his cluelessness, Trump later told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews that women who seek abortions should face criminal punishment. He didn’t know what that punishment should be, and obviously nor did his campaign, which released several reinterpretations of Trump’s position before the day was done. First they said the issue was “unclear” then they claimed the doctor performing the abortion should face punishment.
By the next day, Trump took yet another position, telling CBS he wanted to change the law, but maybe preferred the states to decide the whole thing.
“Do you think abortion is murder?” asked CBS’s John Dickerson.
“I have my opinions on it, but I’d rather not comment on it,” said the man who normally has no problem expressing an opinion on any subject at any time in any place.
How could it fall to Trump to tip the balance of the supreme court against abortion? Was it his strong sense of family values, developed some time between his three marriages and his several affairs with porn stars and Playboy models?
You can only assume that as the pro-life warrior he miraculously became, Trump had stern words for his friend Elliot Broidy, the former RNC deputy finance chairman.
Broidy is at the center of a literally unbelievable story that has him paying $1.6m to Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. Cohen then allegedly passed on the money to another former Playboy model who allegedly had an affair with Broidy, became pregnant, and sought – you guessed it – an abortion to end the pregnancy.
Trump is fooling nobody about his true motives. He is as much the puppet of anti-abortion groups as he is of Putin
These are the men who will help end a woman’s right to choose in as many as two dozen states within the next year or two.
At this point, Trump is fooling nobody about his true motives. He is as much the puppet of anti-abortion groups as he is the puppet of Vladimir Putin. His supposed moral strength is a masquerade hiding his amoral absence of character and values. He sold what little soul he has to a supposedly Christian movement that only cares about their generation-long campaign against women’s rights.
The only consistent part of Trump’s thinking is his disdain for women because, being a star, he naturally thinks he can “do anything” to them.
For now, there are very few people who can help women hold on to their reproductive rights. Two of them are pro-choice Republican senators: Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. They could vote against a pro-life supreme court pick, but they could also hide behind the Republican boilerplate last voiced by Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first supreme court nominee.
Against their consciences stand three Democrats who also voted for Gorsuch – Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota. All of them are up for re-election this year in states that voted heavily for Trump.
All five senators might hope they can delay the final supreme court vote until the midterm elections, when Democrats have a slim chance of taking back the Senate and blocking Trump’s nominee.
But that’s a long shot that relies on some tricky parliamentary tactics. And it ultimately relies on female voters to lead an electoral tidal wave nationwide.
There are good reasons to believe that wave is already building. From the African American women who pushed Doug Jones into the Senate late last year, to the Latina political novice who unseated a Democratic leader in the House this week, the response to Trump’s political trainwreck is breaking all the established rules.
Trump’s war on women may well be successful in a supreme court he is now shaping for the next generation. But as we saw in Alabama and in Queens, the political backlash is breathtaking.
