The Alabama Supreme Court’s shocking decision recognizing fetal personhood and threatening IVF treatments would have been impossible if Donald Trump hadn’t reshaped the U.S. Supreme Court with the explicit goal of overturning Roe v. Wade. It was a 2016 campaign promise he made and kept, and all the nightmares that pregnant women and their families have experienced since the Supreme Court ended the federal right to an abortion in 2022 are very much his doing. So there’s something characteristically cynical about his effort to pose as the savior of IVF against the judges he empowered.
On Friday afternoon Trump posted on Truth Social:
Triangulating against the unpopular consequences of his own actions, however, is familiar territory for Trump when it comes to abortion policy. Dating back to the period just prior to his announcement of a comeback presidential campaign, Trump laid the groundwork for disassociating himself with anti-abortion extremism. He notably blamed the meh 2022 midterm results for Republicans on too much talk about restricting abortions, and before long made it clear he did not support the kind of national abortion bans his friends in the anti-abortion movement were trying to make a litmus test for GOP politicians, particularly those running for president. As my colleague Jonathan Chait observed in September 2023, Trump is quick to jettison traditional Republican positions (e.g., free trade and “entitlement reform”) when they are unpopular. But even more importantly, Trump knew he had built up enough political capital with rank-and-file anti-abortion voters that he could abandon the right-to-life movement line with impunity.
This became abundantly apparent when his deadliest rival, Ron DeSantis, staked his entire campaign on convincing Iowa conservatives that the former president had betrayed them, not least by abandoning the holy cause of forced birth. The Floridian hastened to enact a six-week abortion ban (quickly denounced by Trump as a “terrible mistake”) and snuggled up to Evangelical leaders avid for more abortion restrictions. He did everything but run around the state carrying fetus posters and outspent Trump handily. And yet the former president trounced DeSantis among “very conservative” caucusgoers; among white Evangelicals; and among those who favored a national abortion ban. In the state whose Republicans were most attuned to the anti-abortion movement, Trump was assured he had the freedom to maneuver strategically on abortion policy without paying a price for it among the true believers.
If that was true when the Republican race was still a contest, it will of course be true from now until November. Aside from the evidence trust in which anti-abortion voters (and now that he’s the certain nominee, their leaders) place in him, the competition isn’t other Republicans happy to chatter about how many embryos can fit on the head of a pin; it’s Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the uniformly pro-choice Democratic Party. There’s very little downside now in Trump posing as the reasonable broker of compromises between warring factions on abortion policy, much less as the friend of IVF patients past, present, and future that would be left out in the cold by the fanatics of the fetal-personhood movement.
On this and other issues, the 45th president has the freedom of a man with shallow roots in any sort of principle, and no loyalty to any cause that will compromise his own pursuit of power. Those of his followers who are nonetheless disappointed by his waywardness should understand by now the deal with the devil they have signed.
