Opinion | Trump Can’t Get Himself Out of the Abortion Straitjacket

Donald Trump is stuck.

He is a brutally transactional politician who represents a coalition of ideologues. His instinct is to promise the moon, and he’ll say anything to get a vote — or just to get out of a room. He also knows, however, that he has no choice but to dance with the date that brought him. He can’t abandon the groups, interested parties and constituencies that put him in the White House to execute their agenda — to exercise their will.

The problem comes when most voters don’t want what your partners hope to do with the power they helped you get.

Such is the case for abortion.

Trump represents the movement to outlaw abortion, restrict contraception and severely limit the scope of reproductive health care. Under rules issued by his administration, employers who had a religious or moral objection could refuse to cover birth control for their employees. He appointed hard-line anti-abortion activists to help lead the Department of Health and Human Services and, of course, nominated the justices who voted — with three other Republican members of the Supreme Court — to overturn Roe v. Wade and end the constitutional right to an abortion.

All of this, especially the end of Roe, is deeply unpopular, and Trump knows it. This is why he has tried the two-step of celebrating his appointments to the court but distancing himself from the consequences, both practical and political, of his anti-abortion accomplishments. Even the most gifted rhetoricians would struggle to sell this to the public. That, obviously, is not Trump. Unsurprisingly, he has floundered.

When asked about Roe during his debate with President Biden, Trump said, falsely, that “everybody wanted to get it back to the states.” He said that he believes in “the exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother” but also said that it’s OK if “some people don’t.” He tried to tar Democrats as extreme with the deranged claim that they want to “take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month, and even after birth — after birth.”

Trump wants this to be the end of the conservation, and it might have been had Biden remained in the race. But with Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket, Democrats have placed abortion rights and reproductive health care at the center of their pitch to women. Abortion, in fact, is now the top issue for many voters in swing states. And they trust Harris, not Trump, to handle their concerns.