My Washington Post column today starts with Trump’s eerie mimickry of Stephen Douglas. But I didn’t have time or space to make a related point: At every turn, Republicans — and not just Trump — have chosen the laziest possible way to respond to each change in the politics of abortion. They did essentially nothing to prepare for the possibility that Roe would be overturned.

They could, for example, have tried to get old state laws that banned all abortions updated so that they wouldn’t be stuck either defending or running away from laws that don’t fit voter sentiment — but that would have taken effort, including some painful wrangling among pro-lifers. So they did nothing and hoped for the best. They are now adopting a new strategy in which candidates for national office take no position on what legal protections unborn children should have. What it has going for it is that it is, again, the path of least resistance. If it turns out to be a smart strategy, it will be quite a coincidence.

Trump has, however, added his own twist to the strategy: attacking longtime allies who disagree with it, however mildly. These attacks do not seem designed to achieve anything, even from the point of view of his personal self-interest. Trump played a key role in getting Roe overturned; he is hardly responsible for all the political setbacks pro-lifers are facing; and there are still ways — as I relate in the column — to move forward. But the pro-life movement is now seeing some of the downsides of following a man who cares nothing about its cause and has poor impulse control.