Why Trump balked on an abortion ban: Pure politics

Former President Donald Trump was facing pressure from anti-abortion activists on the right to embrace a national ban. Kellyanne Conway, his 2016 campaign manager who later became his White House counselor, was arguing for a 15-week ban. So was South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, Trump's longtime ally.

Trump himself even toyed with the idea in public, musing that a 15-week cutoff might achieve political consensus.

In the end, Trump couldn’t get past the feeling that it was a loser with voters. It is a lesson he learned through hard political experience — most importantly in the 2022 elections.

For years, at a gut level, the former president has feared the backlash he might face for taking a hard-line position on abortion. And despite his attempt to fog up the issue with his new, state-based stance, Trump is still likely to pay a price with voters for appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. And his decision not to endorse a ban has exposed deep fissures within his own party. After Graham released a statement Monday in which he said he “respectfully disagree[s]” with Trump’s position, Trump did not let it go, instead accusing Graham and Republicans like him of sinking the GOP.

“Senator Lindsey Graham is doing a great disservice to the Republican Party, and to our Country,” Trump wrote in response to Graham on Truth Social. “People like Lindsey Graham, that are unrelenting, are handing Democrats their dream of the House, Senate, and perhaps even the Presidency.”

The most ominous evidence, for Trump, was in the 2022 midterms, when an array of Republican candidates he endorsed lost in part because of backlash against the party’s abortion policies.

Two years before his announcement Monday that he was not endorsing a national abortion ban, Trump told his hand-picked candidate for governor of Michigan, Tudor Dixon, that it wasn’t too late to “talk differently about abortion.”

The conservative radio host did not publicly support exceptions in the case of rape, incest or life of the mother — a position the former president believed was a fatal error for her campaign.

And it was. Not only for Dixon, who lost her race to Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, but for Republicans across the country who endorsed tight restrictions on the procedure. Their candidates fell short in key Senate races, and the party barely won back the House.

The experience of the midterms has remained seared into Trump’s political mindset.

For two years, Trump had attempted to avoid giving a direct answer on where he stood. And even his statement on Monday was sufficiently vague to afford him maximum political flexibility, allowing him to take any number of future positions on abortion while also exposing him to criticism from the left.

While Trump took credit for appointing the Supreme Court justices necessary to overturn Roe, he waited until after he secured the nomination before articulating a position. His team knew he would have to give a statement on abortion at some point soon, as President Joe Biden and his campaign moved to make it a central issue in the election. But Trump’s reluctance to dive into the matter was so evident that he surprised his own team last week in Michigan when he told reporters he would be putting out a statement on the issue in the next week, according to an adviser.

His video message posted to Truth Social Monday followed months of publicly and privately debating whether he would support a federal ban, with some allies pushing him to embrace one.

“Many states will be different, many will have a different number of weeks or some will have more conservative than others, and that’s what they will be,” Trump said. “At the end of the day, it’s all about will of the people. That’s where we are right now and that’s what we want — the will of the people.”

Many of Trump’s closest allies agreed with Trump’s instincts that the issue was a political loser, according to several people familiar with the deliberations and granted anonymity to speak freely. They saw little advantage in coming out for a national ban, arguing that it would give Biden an issue with which to batter Trump. And they worried that adopting a 15-week ban would put him in opposition with Republican leaders in individual states who had passed laws restricting abortion, like Gov. Kristi Noem in South Dakota, where abortion is completely banned with the exception if the mother’s life is in danger and with no exceptions for rape or incest.

And there was another dimension to Trump’s opposition to a national ban, too. The former president is courting some of the party’s biggest donors, many of whom are more liberal-minded on social issues. After Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a restrictive six-week ban during last year’s Republican primary, some of DeSantis’ major donors said at the time that their enthusiasm for him had dampened.

Following Trump’s decision on Monday, his former vice president, Mike Pence, called it a “slap in the face to the millions of pro-life Americans who voted for him in 2016 and 2020.” The prominent anti-abortion rights group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America said it was “deeply disappointed.”

In a flurry of social media posts on Monday, Trump went after Graham and SBA’s president, Marjorie Dannenfelser, by name.

“Senator Lindsey Graham and Marjorie Dannenfelser should study the 10th Amendment and States’ Rights,” he wrote. “When they do, they should proudly get on with helping Republicans to WIN ELECTIONS, rather than making it impossible for them to do so!”

He wrote, “I blame myself for Lindsey Graham, because the only reason he won in the Great State of South Carolina is because I Endorsed him!”

Not all conservatives took issue with Trump’s position. On Monday, the Faith & Freedom Coalition, an organization overseen by Republican operative Ralph Reed, praised Trump as “the most pro-life president in American history.” The organization also reaffirmed its plans to spend aggressively in the 2024 election.

Jim Bopp, Jr., the National Right to Life Committee’s general counsel and an Indiana lawyer who authored the model legislation in advance of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe, said his group largely agreed with Trump's statement, saying he was "perplexed" at SBA's pushback.

"There is no national consensus that would justify the federal government taking a position, and that's what we argued in the Supreme Court: that it should be returned to the states. And that's what they have done,” Bopp said.

Bopp said his only qualms with Trump's statement weren't policy-focused, but with the tenor of the statement itself.

On Monday, Trump released a video in which he stated abortion rights should be left up to the states, reiterated his support for exceptions and supported in vitro fertilization procedures that have become the latest flashpoint in the debate around abortion..

“You must follow your heart on this issue,” Trump said. “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.”

Heidi Przybyla contributed to this report.