Americana

What the Trump abortion fight is really about

THE SCENE

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.”

KNOW MORE

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.”

DAVID’S VIEW

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.

THE VIEW FROM THE BIDEN CAMPAIGN

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.”

NOTABLE

• 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.”

Nebraska. Gov. Jim Pillen floated the idea of a special legislative session to change how his state awards electoral votes, after the state GOP and Turning Point Action rallied in Omaha for that change. If a majority of legislators endorsed the idea — Pillen’s condition for calling the session — it could end the state’s 33-year practice of splitting its vote by congressional district, which in 2008 and 2020 allowed Democratic presidential candidates to win an electoral vote by carrying the state’s biggest city. Rep. Don Bacon, the Republican who represents Omaha and the 2nd Congressional District, told CNN that he endorsed the change: “I think it undermines the influence of Nebraska. I think it should be standardized.” Bacon faces a conservative challenger, Dan Frei, in the upcoming May 14 primary.

Wisconsin. State Supreme Court Justice Ann Walsh Bradley will retire next year, creating another battle for the majority after liberals secured a 4-3 advantage in 2023. That year’s victory for Judge Janet Protasiewicz was the most expensive for any judicial candidate in American history, and conservatives already had a relatively well-known candidate running for the 2025 opening — Brad Schimel, the former state attorney general who served a single term before losing in a 2018 Democratic sweep. Two liberal judges, Chris Taylor and Susan Crawford, said they were considering running after Walsh Bradley’s announcement.

Clear Choice PAC, “Spoiler.” Formed last month by Biden allies, Clear Choice PAC’s mission is wrecking Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s image with liberal and progressive voters. Its first attempt — 60 seconds of attacks on Kennedy’s “racist” vaccine skepticism, his (now lonely) endorsement of a federal abortion limit, and his hypothetical willingness to serve in a Trump cabinet. The strategy: Fixing Kennedy in swing voters’ minds as a Trump puppet with an ironic last name.

Rick Scott for Florida, “Values.” Former Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, the Democrat running against Scott, launched her campaign with an attack on the state’s six-week abortion ban. She spent the last week attacking the state supreme court for upholding the ban, and endorsing the constitutional amendment that would replace it with a 24-week ban if 60% of voters support it in November. Scott has started to run his own ads on other themes, which worked for him six years ago, like fighting “socialism.” Here, he visits a memorial with Floridians who escaped communist countries, ruminating on what was lost: “In Florida, we understand how socialism suffocates the human spirit.”

Friends of Sherrod Brown, “Right Here.” In February, Intel admitted that it wouldn’t finish building its new $20 billion chip factory in Ohio until 2026. But it’s coming, and Brown, in one of the many Democratic ads about bills passed from 2021 through 2022, celebrates it by holding a chip in front of the New Albany construction site: “I worked with Republicans to jump-start American chip manufacturing.”

Moments after Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson won the March gubernatorial primary, Democrats were firing off the opposition research they’d compiled on him. A HuffPost story about a particularly esoteric Robinson speech, in which he pined for “the America where women couldn’t vote,” circulated for days. One month later, Robinson’s image has been badly bruised; 31% of all voters say they don’t like him “as a person,” and 40% say they don’t like his issue positions. Right now, he runs weaker with women and independents than Trump.

Minnesota is one of the easier states for third party ballot access, which hurt Hillary Clinton in 2016 and could hurt Biden this year. Since 2020, he’s lost little support in Minneapolis and its suburbs, and Trump has lost nothing in Greater Minnesota. But Biden won independents by 15 points in 2020, and he barely leads with them now, partly because one in four self-identified independents say they’re supporting someone else. No alternatives are named, but they have until Aug. 20 to make the ballot.

We’ve got some exciting additions to the list of speakers at the World Economy Summit, including Jeremy Hunt, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer; Gina Raimondo, U.S. Secretary of Commerce and Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Join us in Washington, D.C. next week, on April 17-18, to hear from some of the world’s most influential economic and business decision-makers on the future of global economic growth, the rising middle class, digital infrastructure, AI, and much more.

White House. Republican secretaries of State in Ohio and Alabama both warned Democrats that the official nomination of the Biden-Harris ticket might come too late for them to make the ballot. The Democratic National Convention begins right after both states’ ballot deadlines — a problem that both states quickly resolved in 2020, when the Republican National Convention had the same problem. Ohio Republicans passed a one-time bill to extend their grace period, while Alabama’s Secretary of State accepted a provisional letter from the RNC, affirming that Trump would be its nominee. Democrats are weighing their options for ballot access, and could hold a virtual vote to nominate Biden and Harris in late June, before the convention, after all of its delegates are selected.

Independent candidate Cornel West named his running mate, California activist Melina Abdullah, who founded the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter and built a distracting history of posts on Twitter. Critics emphasized her comments after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, endorsing rallies that day that were condemned by many Democrats.

“I think it’s really important to understand where uprisings come from, even when we may disagree with tactics that are used,” Abdullah told CNN in a joint interview with West. “I find it really troubling that we are constantly asked to condemn Hamas. I’m not a member of Hamas, I find it even more troubling that an entire state has been built on the genocide of a people.”

At The Washington Post, Isaac Arnsdorf covers Donald Trump and the MAGA movement from the grassroots up. Ideas that sound odd or unworkable to elite Republicans — a “precinct committeeman” strategy? Purging Ronna McDaniel? — make sense to the activists he talks to. And for the last three years, they’ve kept Trump in control of the GOP, replacing the ex-president’s enemies and signing up for every kind of electoral work. In “Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy,” Arnsdorf tells this story from the moment Trump left office to the week that Steve Bannon’s “War Room” army helped replace the Speaker of the House. This is an edited transcript of our conversation about it.

Americana: Can you define what you mean by “ending democracy?” If this movement is successful, what changes about our democracy?

Isaac Arnsdorf: That language is very much a part of the movement. Sometimes, you hear it in terms like “this is not really a democracy, it’s a republic.” But you also have people who don’t think of themselves as being anti-democratic, and believe democracy actually failed when the election was stolen from Trump. And Trump himself is trying to turn this around by accusing Biden of being a threat to democracy.

We’ve never heard Trump say that he will accept the outcome of an election if it doesn’t go his way. That goes all the way back to 2016. And we’ve never heard Trump disavow violence. The way that [political scientist] Adam Przeworski put it is that democracy is a system where parties lose elections. What does that mean? Lots of countries have elections that are not free and fair, and the party in power can’t lose. If Trump does win in November — and he absolutely could win a free and fair election — he and the people around him, who’d return to the administration with him, would be much more determined to consolidate power. They would make it harder for them to ever be dislodged.

Americana: Steve Bannon talks about re-making the Republican Party into a populist party that will win for 100 years. Is he talking about some situation, like in Japan, where elections are fair but one party is so dominant that it almost always wins? Or something else?

Isaac Arnsdorf: There’s some ambiguity there, which I think is intentional. Bannon is saying that if you kind of unleash the power of MAGA nationalism, you could have a majority coalition forever. But at the same time, he’s saying Trump didn’t lose when he really did lose — the voting machines are corrupt, and we have to have paper ballots with no early voting. Tactically, a lot of what’s driving that movement is being focused on changing the rules to make sure that the other side can’t win.

Americana: So what would that mean in practice? How does democracy change if Trump wins and implements these ideas?

Isaac Arnsdorf: This was sort of the Chekhov’s gun of 2020, taken off the wall and put down on the table. The post-election legal process exposed all the soft spots in the electoral system. Trump and his campaign and his lawyers were not able to successfully exploit them, because they got there too late, or they didn’t have their act together, and a handful of Republicans didn’t go along with it. And the book covers this effort of purging and purifying the party to make sure that there wouldn’t be uncooperative Republicans like that in the future. But it also looks at ways that activists got involved earlier in the process, when the ballots are actually being cast and counted, not just when they’re being certified. Right now, you have a lot more Republican investment in scrutinizing voter rolls and deploying poll observers, with the stated purpose of collecting evidence that can be used to challenge the results.

Americana: How does the experience of 2022 affect this movement? There’s a lot of success, in the run-up to the midterms, of winning precinct committee jobs and changing election laws. And then Republicans do pretty poorly under those rules, in those conditions.

Isaac Arnsdorf: It doesn’t change things as much as you might expect. It’s funny, both the MAGA Republicans and the non-MAGA traditional Republicans agree that Republicans underperformed in the midterms for the same reason: The non-MAGA Republicans rejected the MAGA candidates. They just disagree about who’s wrong and who needs to cave. It did cause an acknowledgment on the MAGA side that only voting in person, on Election Day, is not great tactically, because you’re going up against Democrats who are using early and mail voting that’s much more convenient. So, Republicans are now in this awkward position of trying to message, “Hey, we hate early voting and mail voting, and we want to get rid of it, and we don’t trust it, and we need to use it where it exists so that we can beat the Democrats.”

Americana: That was Ronna McDaniel’s message, and the movement got rid of her. Do the people you covered see that as a win?

Isaac Arnsdorf: They consider that a total victory. It’s not a stretch to say that a coordinated nationwide campaign to start at the bottom of the party ladder and work your way up to get new leadership resulted in new leadership, in just a few years. You’ve got to give some credit where credit is due.

The MAGA alternative-media ecosystem has also really matured in the past several years. Actually, being de-platformed by the major social networks, and being kind of shunned by major media organizations for a time, kind of helped it grow. Bannon became the sun of that solar system, especially in early 2021 when Trump was laying low. And you see this at Trump rallies. People will jeer at the TV cameras and the press pen until they see Right Side Broadcasting, and then they want to come over and get a picture with [RSB host] Brian Glenn. You see a development of alternative information sources that are considered valid within the movement, plus an overall mistrust in everything else.

Americana: Bannon talks a lot about “Bowling Alone,” and social cohesion, and how we’ve lost it. What meaning do these activists find in their lives from being involved?

Isaac Arnsdorf: Being active in the MAGA movement has taken the place of those more old-fashioned community bonds, like the Rotary Club. I’ve talked to people at Trump rallies who describe it as their church, as a religious experience. I’ve talked to a few activists who became part of this post-2020 wave of joining the party, who say how they never made so many friends so quickly in their lives. Coming out of the isolation of the pandemic, that formation of community becomes a formation of identity. And that’s an extremely powerful force in politics that Bannon is very intentional about using to motivate people.

Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans have picked up on that, too. The messaging that they developed, tested, and had a lot of success with in the midterms was built around authentic messengers: Republicans, people who consider themselves Republicans, for whom it’s important to think of themselves as Republicans, who just couldn’t stand the Republicans on the ballot in 2022. That’s going to be a big part of the strategy to defeat Trump in 2024.

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• 207 days until the 2024 presidential election