Last week, when Donald Trump started teasing a big abortion announcement, it felt similar to what he used to do with the famous “infrastructure week” — but about women’s bodies. For any of us who’ve even remotely followed Trump’s many different stances on abortion, trust me when I say none of us were holding our breath.
Perhaps Trump knows abortion is not shaping up to be the winning ticket Republicans thought it would be.
The former president, whose Supreme Court nominations while in office inarguably enabled Roe to be struck down and women’s reproductive rights rolled back, has been wildly inconsistent when it comes to taking a stand on the actual issue of abortion rights. His latest comments over the weekend, in which he suggested that abortion is a state’s rights issue, indicate that perhaps Trump knows abortion is not shaping up to be the winning ticket Republicans thought it would be.
For one, his statements contradict earlier lines from Trump, when he at times indicated that he would support a national abortion ban.
Fresh off Democrat Marilyn Lands flipping an Alabama state house seat running on abortion and IVF, Trump seems to have realized that overturning Roe might not actually help him get re-elected.
On Monday morning, after an “Apprentice”-style build up, Trump released his Truth Social video, in which he stated abortion issues should be left up to the states. Yes, the guy who installed three anti-choice justices, the guy who said “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who get illegal abortions” — that guy now says abortion should be left up to the states. Trump added in his video that he is “strongly in favor of exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother,” and that “many states will be different, many will have a different number of weeks, or some will have more conservative than others, and that’s what they will be.”
It’s clear that in his consistently unreliable stance on abortion rights, Trump is once again trying to use headlines to spin himself as a more favorable general election candidate.
And it worked, for the most part, with the major news outlets repeating Trump’s line credulously, most without the caveat that he was the person who set in motion removing abortion as a federal right in the first place.
Media critic Oliver Willis made a salient point here about Trump using mainstream media headlines to launder his destructively disparate abortion rights claims: “Laid bare here is the media’s habit of cleaning up for Trump, presenting an image of a malevolent force in America that bares [sic] little resemblance to the man and the movement behind him. Trump is no idle observer of the strife now occurring in America under Republican efforts to restrict abortion. He is the architect.”
And if one were to go deeper into what Trump actually said, it doesn’t quite match the headlines either, a point Semafor Washington editor Jordan Weissman explains well, pointing out that “Trump actually doesn’t say what these headlines are repeating.” He also says ‘whatever they decide must be the law of the land, in this case the state.’ That also is a statement of fact. At some point someone needs to ask: ‘If Republicans pass a 15 or 16 week abortion ban in Congress, will you sign it, or will you veto it?’ Likewise… But beyond that, and beyond the evasive and deceptively moderate language, we know Trump’s allies are working behind the scenes trying to ban abortion and regulate IVF. One of the major Trump supporting think tanks, the Heritage Foundation, is working on both a national abortion ban and federal regulation for IVF. In Trump’s Truth Social video, he also said he supports IVF and complimented Alabama for quickly creating a law that allowed Alabama’s IVF clinics to reopen. But what he neglected to mention is that Alabama law also doubled down on the idea of embryonic personhood; it just indemnified state fertility clinics, so that if a practitioner “killed” an embryo they wouldn’t face prosecution. According to The Associated Press, “The new law, which took effect immediately, shields providers from prosecution and civil lawsuits ‘for the damage to or death of an embryo’ during IVF services.” In the October 2016 presidential debates, Trump said, “Well, if we put another two or perhaps three justices on, that’s really what’s going to be — that will happen, And that’ll happen automatically, in my opinion, because I am putting pro-life justices on the court.” Now that it’s unpopular, it seems Trump wants voters to forget about all of that. And by repeating and amplifying the line that he wants to kick abortion back to the states, the media risks repeating the same practices that played a part in him getting elected in 2016. The lesson remains: Judge Donald Trump by what he does, not by what he says.
Molly Jong-Fast
Molly Jong-Fast is a political analyst for MSNBC, special correspondent for Vanity Fair and host of the podcast "Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast." 
