What the Trump abortion fight is really about

On Wednesday night, after two days of perplexed questions about his new abortion position, Donald Trump did what came naturally. He declared victory.

“The states are handling it,” Trump said in a short video, insisting that by opposing a federal law limiting abortion he’d defanged the Democrats. “It’s totally killed that issue.”

Almost no one in politics acted as if Trump was right; not the Biden campaign, not anti-abortion activists, and not Republican candidates scrambling for a response to new abortion bans in Florida and Arizona. His attempt to answer that question prompted more questions about what else a second Trump White House could do with the rule-making authority that President Joe Biden has used to expand reproductive rights.

That’s a source of tension between his campaign, which has not been specific about the way Trump would exercise executive power on abortion — and the people planning for his administration, who have.

“Why scare the hell out of voters over something that’s not going to happen?” asked Mike Davis, a pro-Trump attorney and legal activist, referring to the Senate supermajority it would take to pass a federal abortion law. “The rules will happen.”

Since launching his third presidential bid, Trump has offered some specifics on how he’d use executive power to attack his top priorities — expelling illegal immigrants, putting tariffs on foreign goods, cutting funds for schools that teach “critical race theory.” He’s been more vague on abortion, even though conservative activists and policy scholars have laid out a litany of actions he could take next year.

Plenty of their ideas were collected in “Mandate for Leadership,” the policy book published by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Some of its contributors, like ex-Trump DOJ Office of Civil Rights head Roger Severino, have talked and written openly about what a restored Trump administration could do.

But five months ago, Trump campaign co-managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles put out a statement distancing the campaign from the “largely unfounded” stories about a second term agenda running in unnamed outlets — often The New York Times and Politico. They were, said the Trump team, “neither appropriate nor constructive,” about what a second Trump administration would do.

“Any personnel lists, policy agendas, or government plans published anywhere are merely suggestions,” they wrote. “All 2024 campaign policy announcements will be made by President Trump or members of his campaign team.”

The list of potential anti-abortion measures Trump could enact is long but straightforward. Some items were acted on during his administration and reversed by Joe Biden; some start with the powers that Biden has used to expand abortion access, and use them to restrict it instead.

“Their creativity knows no bounds when it comes to pushing abortion on the American people,” Severino said on a Family Research Council podcast last year. “Whenever the word ‘pregnancy’ appears, they mean ‘abortion,’ which of course violates common sense.”

The Trump campaign has refused to say how a second administration would interpret the Comstock Act, a set of 1873 laws that restrict the mailing of obscene materials. After the Dobbs decision, the Biden administration issued a legal guidance that protected the mailing of the abortion drugs mifepristone and misoprostol, judging that it didn’t violate those laws. But in the Project 2025 handbook, Severino argued that a new conservative administration should “announce its intent to enforce federal law against providers and distributors of such pills.”

In the Heritage Foundation’s assessment — Project 2025 is a joint effort with dozens of conservative groups, but Heritage condensed the basics — every action Biden took to go around state abortion limits can be reversed.

“The Biden self-proclaimed whole of government approach to promoting and mandating abortion would be replaced by a whole of government commitment to life-affirming support for pregnant women and parents,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, who was critical of Trump for coming out against any kind of federal abortion limit. “Trump would roll back Biden’s funding for abortionists like Planned Parenthood at home and abroad. He would put an end to use of military and veterans’ resources for abortion and address the damage done when Biden rolled back safety standards for abortion drugs.”

Trump, according to Project 2025’s report, could “eliminate the HHS Reproductive Healthcare Access Task Force,” which Biden created on Roe’s 49th anniversary, “and install a pro-life task force to ensure that all of the department’s divisions seek to use their authority to promote the life and health of women and their unborn children.”

He could end Biden’s Gender Policy Council, created on the day he took the reins from Trump, and thereby “eliminate central promotion of abortion (‘health services’); comprehensive sexuality education (‘education’); and the new woke gender ideology.” The expansion of abortion rights in veterans’ and military health programs, which Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville tried and failed to end by blocking military nominees, could be ended by the executive branch.

Then there’s the question of judges: Trump and other Republicans have distanced themselves from the Alabama court that effectively halted IVF treatment and the Arizona court that revived an 1864 territorial law criminalizing abortion, but the decisions came from GOP appointees from the same conservative movement that informed Trump’s first term judicial overhaul. In 2016, he promised to appoint judges who would overturn Roe; he’s yet to say what legal theories he’d keep in mind when making future picks. Would nominees who’ve backed “personhood” arguments like the one that roiled Alabama get through, for example?

“They’ve seen the backlash to extreme anti-abortion policies,” said Katie O’Connor, the director of federal abortion policy at the National Women’s Law Center. “Even Trump is seeing the writing on the wall. He’s not going to tip his hand on what he would implement. We know that he’d do what Severino asked him to.”

The clarity of these ideas, and Trump’s evasiveness on specific abortion questions, has created a two-track campaign. In one of them, the Republican nominee is careful about taking potentially unpopular positions, and does most of his interviews with conservative media outlets that don’t ask about them. In the other, policy advocates have explained exactly how Trump could act, sometimes admitting outright that it would be a mistake for the candidate to talk about it.

“I hope he doesn’t know about the existence of Comstock, because I just don’t want him to shoot off his mouth,” Texas attorney Jonathan Mitchell told The New York Times, who has guided a legal strategy to ban the mailing of abortion medication. “I think the pro-life groups should keep their mouths shut as much as possible until the election.”

Okay, set aside the irony of that quote. Trump did get through the Republican primary without answering any of these questions. Biden hasn’t really faced questions, either; his actions to expand abortion access have been covered through the broader prism of abortion polling, which found most Americans unhappy with the Dobbs decision.

“We cannot allow an out-of-control Supreme Court, working in conjunction with the extremist elements of the Republican Party, to take away freedoms and our personal autonomy,” Biden said after Dobbs was handed down. Biden says all of this in public, and Trump doesn’t respond.

The larger conservative movement may be getting more careful, too. The “fourth pillar” of Project 2025 — pillars one through three cover policy and staffing — is an effort to write executive orders that Trump could implement immediately, robust enough that they couldn’t be undermined by lawsuits or delay tactics. Unlike the rest of the project, it’s not been published, and may not be before the election.

Any time the Biden-Harris ticket can talk about abortion, it does. The vice president will be in Arizona today, where she’s expected to speak in more detail about what the administration’s done on abortion rights and what Trump could undo.

“Donald Trump unleashed this chaos on women in America, he’s proud of it, and his allies are planning more,” said campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika. “His campaign isn’t answering these questions about his plans to rip away access to reproductive health care nationwide because all of the answers are desperately unpopular with the American people.”

• In The New York Times, Lisa Lerer and Elizabeth Dias look comprehensively at what the anti-abortion movement wanted from a second Trump administration’s appointees. “This is probably the first election where D.O.J., H.H.S., F.D.A. are big-ticket items,” said Students for Life strategist Kristi Hamrick.
• In Puck, Tara Palmeri reports that red state governors who’ve presided over local abortion bans (Kristi Noem, Doug Burgum, Sarah Huckabee Sanders) are tumbling down Trump’s list of potential running mates, because of the abortion issue. “If you’re his V.P., you cannot be a distraction.”
• In Jezebel, Susan Rinkunas pronounces the start of the “Comstock gaslighting era” on abortion. “Trump and his supporters will say anything about abortion if it helps them achieve their goals.”