The mere suggestion of slapping down the pro-life dream of a six-week abortion ban would be a campaign-ending stance for just about any candidate in a GOP presidential primary.

But not for former President Donald Trump, who has made a habit of trampling on Washington’s conservative orthodoxy and emerging not just unscathed, but often stronger.

From free trade to defense policy, Mr. Trump has blazed new directions for Republicans, and party voters have followed.

“It’s certainly the case that people are willing to treat him differently when it comes to holding him accountable for what he says and what he does,” said Christopher Budzisz, a political science professor at Loras College in Dubuque. “If you start from the premise that he’s not a normal candidate, when he does things that for a normal candidate would kill their candidacy, it wouldn’t kill his because he’s starting from a different starting point.”

Abortion, though, could be his biggest test.

While many fellow presidential candidates call on the GOP to fight for strict limits — an option in the wake of the Supreme Court last year ruling overturning Roe v. Wade — the former president has been a dissonant voice.

“Terrible” is how he described the bill Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed into law barring abortion once the unborn child has a detectible heartbeat, usually five to six weeks of pregnancy.

Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa and fellow Republicans across the country have enacted similar laws, and have been held in high esteem by religious and social conservatives for doing so.

Mr. Trump also refused to endorse a more flexible 15-week ban, while vowing to negotiate an agreement that would work for both sides.

To some pro-life voters who for decades have constituted the shock troops of the Republican Party, the stance is worrying.

“Trump is criticizing a law and lawmaker that acted, following the will of the people, on what he made possible through the Dobbs decision,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of SBA Pro-Life America, said, referring to the Supreme Court case that overturned Roe.

The former president says he’s not shying away from abortion politics. He takes credit for installing three of the justices who were part of the 5-4 ruling that erased Roe.

But he also says the party must confront political realities, and that includes the sense that right now the pro-life position is losing at the ballot box. Indeed, where others blame his complaints about the 2020 election for the GOP’s electoral struggles in last year’s congressional elections, Mr. Trump says it was abortion politics.

He said Republicans need to at least embrace exceptions to abortion bans, such as cases of rape, incest or when the mother’s life is at stake.

“We would probably lose the majorities in 2024 without the exceptions and perhaps the presidency itself,” Mr. Trump said at a recent campaign stop in Dubuque, Iowa. “In order to win in 2024, Republicans must learn how to properly talk about abortion.”

He told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that his approach would be to negotiate a peace between the pro-life and pro-choice sides. That kind of conciliatory line has doomed previous GOP hopefuls.

Since 1980, no Republican has won the party’s presidential nomination running as a pro-choice candidate.

In 2000, Texas Gov. George W. Bush had to harden his pro-life stance to beat back criticism that he was squishy on that core conservative value. He succeeded and went on to win the Iowa caucus and, of course, the presidency.

Mitt Romney, when he was governor of Massachusetts, also underwent a conversion, ditching his longtime pro-choice stance to prepare for a 2008 campaign, which he lost, and a later 2012 run, where he captured the party’s nomination but lost to President Obama.

New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in 2008 attempted to prove that a pro-choice candidate could win the party’s nomination. He went from front-runner to afterthought, failing to win a single delegate to the nominating convention.

Mr. Trump’s abortion politics have been tricky to pin down over the years. In the 1990s he proclaimed himself “very pro-choice,” but by 2016 he presented himself to social conservatives as a believer in the pro-life cause.

His new tone has social conservatives fretting.

“Donald Trump is as pro-choice now as he was in 1994,” Bob Vander Plaats, head of the conservative Christian Iowa Family Leader, said on social media. “Just because he appointed three Supreme Court justices, they overturned Roe v. Wade — that was a transactional deal. It wasn’t a transformational belief.”

The former president’s other challenges to GOP orthodoxy are many.

Where the party’s leaders in Washington are unabashed free-traders, Mr. Trump has long held protectionist views, blasting the “globalists” and freely wielded tariffs as a policy tool during his four years in office.

His break with the GOP’s war-hawk wing has ignited a major conversation within the party, particularly over U.S. support for Ukraine in the war against Russia.

Mr. Trump also has reset the party’s agenda on immigration. He reversed the Republican National Committee’s post-mortem on its 2012 presidential election loss — which blamed a too-harsh stance on illegal immigration — and ushered in the most aggressive anti-illegal immigration policy in history.

The payoff has been an unshakeable lead in early state polling and a growing sense that Mr. Trump’s rivals in the 2024 GOP presidential race are operating on borrowed time.

Mr. Budzisz said much of it seems driven by political calculations.

“I guess not having hardcore convictions is actually kind of liberating for him because he can say these things without any sort of, you know, second thought or shame or anything else, right?” he said. “So he has a certain there’s a certain freedom associated with the fact that at his core, he’s a pretty fungible character.”

• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.