I wholeheartedly agree with Phil that former president Trump’s latest take on, er, “reproductive rights” is a moral abomination. What it’s not is a surprise.

To reiterate what I posted back in April:

In early 2023, I wrote a post called “Trump Committed to a Political Opportunity, Not to the Pro-Life Cause.” I haven’t changed my mind: Trump had no enduring commitment to either (a) constitutional originalism, which was the driving legal theory for reversing Roe v. Wade (atrocious law that happened to be atrocious policy), or (b) the pro-life movement (which mobilized for decades against atrocious policy that happened to be atrocious law). Trump is shrewd, though: He knew he needed conservative and (what was then) mainstream Republican support to have any chance against Hillary Clinton [in 2016]. The late, great Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, and the political Right’s alarm at the prospect that Clinton would fill the resulting vacancy not with Obama’s desperation nominee, Merrick Garland, but with a young progressive firebrand, caused conservative and Republican skeptics to rally to Trump.

Credit Trump for recognizing the power of the issue and working with the Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation to highlight the importance — to the pro-life movement and conservative constitutionalists — of stocking the federal bench with originalists rather than progressives. Still, if Trump’s now-bête noire, Mitch McConnell, who was then the Senate majority leader, did not have the fortitude and foresight to hold the Scalia vacancy open and, in essence, let the voters decide the direction of the Supreme Court, Trump would not have been elected, period.

The politics are different now, so Trump is different. But he’s still shrewd. Most of us who believe (as conservatives argued throughout the Roe era) that abortion is a state issue, not one fit for a federal mandate, have been maddened by the seeming unpreparedness of Republicans for post-Dobbs state-level (and even federal-level) politics. As Dan illustrates, Trump’s “meat-axe” rhetoric seeking to turn the debate tables by spotlighting the Democrats’ barbarism on abortion is welcome — even if it actually “understates the radicalism.” [My April post was an endorsement of posts by brothers McLaughlin and Geraghty.]

Just as, throughout the Roe era, Democrats and the media defrauded the public into believing that reversing Roe would make abortion illegal, the same forces now defraud the public into believing Democrats just want abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare” — rather than that they will condemn no abortion, no matter how late in a pregnancy, and in some instances even to the point of infanticide. I don’t know if Trump will stay on this case. My sense is he just wants to downplay the issue, avoid being identified with abortion bans or significant restrictions, and move on to the border, crime, economic anxiety, and green lunacy. But I’m glad he said what he said, and I wish more Republicans would fearlessly make that case rather than hide under their desks. [Emphasis added.]

That was April, this is late August with the general election just a bit over two months away. Trump hasn’t stayed on the case because the political winds have shifted yet again — or at least the former president, who is not anyone’s idea of a solid political strategist, has decided they’ve shifted. Hence, Trump is going back to his default setting: limousine-liberal pro-abortion New Yorker, who on entering presidential politics opined that his pro-abortion sister (Third Circuit Judge Maryanne Trump Barry) would make an excellent Supreme Court justice. (See Ramesh’s excellent 2016 post.)

As Phil points out, it is one thing to believe that abortion regulation is a state-law issue and therefore to oppose a federal ban, but a real pro-lifer would never criticize a state restriction ban as “too harsh.” (To be clear, I am not speaking about poorly drafted abortion legislation that can put risk-averse medical providers in fear of providing vital medical treatments that women need and that are not elective abortions.) If you believe abortion is the taking of human life, then no restriction on elective abortion can be “too harsh.”

This is of a piece with Trump’s distancing himself from the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 project, which is nothing more than a think-tank’s doing what think-tanks do. Trump is not a conservative. He has some conservative impulses — and lots of not-conservative ones, too — but he is not moored in conservative ideas. Issues are not his thing — transactions are. And, like China, he doesn’t have allies, only interests — and, again, only interests as he perceives them, which is frequently not an accurate reflection of what his interests are.

For now, he thinks his interests are to distance himself from principled conservatives, especially conservative pro-lifers and their “harsh” ideas about, you know, “reproductive rights.” But as usual, he is simply demonstrating that he lacks the discipline to see a strategy through.

Foolishly but utterly predictably, he has decided to make 2024 a base election after having spent nine years making the Republican base smaller. He doubled down on this approach by choosing J. D. Vance as his running mate, rather than a mainstream conservative who might have helped him win over conservatives (especially in the suburbs) who don’t want Harris but think Trump is unfit and unreliable. Well, okay . . . but if you’re a Republican with a hard ceiling of 46 percent, good luck winning a two-person election by throwing under the proverbial bus a significant part of the GOP base — pro-lifers who turn out to vote. (Trump’s ceiling and penchant for erratic, self-destructive behavior is why I’ve long argued that he can’t win.)

And what does Trump get for angering pro-lifers in the campaign stretch-run? Democrats and moderates for whom abortion access is a crucial issue are not voting for the guy who put half the Dobbs majority on the Supreme Court; they’re voting for Harris (who may have been AWOL as “border czar” but enthusiastically assumed the mantle of Biden-Harris administration abortion advocate).

Last point. Trump keeps claiming that everyone agreed that Roe had to go. That’s wrong, but I don’t think he’s lying — I think he just doesn’t understand what he’s talking about. It is true that many legal scholars, including honest progressive legal scholars, agreed that Roe was bad law (or as liberal scholar John Hart Ely famously refined the point, the problem was that Roe “is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be”). To finish where I started, that was not a critique of abortion as a policy (Ely was pro-abortion); it was a critique of Roe as law — as a bad precedent that would breed other bad precedents and undermine the legitimacy of the Supreme Court as a judicial, not political, institution.

Even with that qualification, not “everyone” wanted to get rid of Roe, as Trump keeps claiming. Many legal scholars and activists, even those willing to concede Roe’s deep flaws, wanted Roe maintained — on grounds of stare decisis (i.e., the concept of respect for precedent), but mainly because they support abortion and Roe maximized the availability of abortion in a way states were powerless to oppose.

But no matter what people thought of Roe, no matter how much consensus there may have been that it was a bad constitutional-law decision (and we shouldn’t overstate that), it has never been close to true that everyone wanted to get rid of abortion. On some level, Trump must grasp this because he is obviously willing to burn his pro-life supporters to get to what he calculates is a more popular position — or, at least, a less vulnerable one.