Trump filled the Supreme Court with justices who oppose abortion. His new plan for a 15-week national ban will be difficult to implement, but it’s a campaign winner.
Donald Trump is a man without principles. That will surprise few people — but he is proving it again with his approach to abortion. As a TV celebrity in the 2000s, he supported the right to abortion. When campaigning for president in 2016 and 2020, he took the opposite position. He adopted the position of evangelical voters, hoping that they would forgive his un-Christian and immoral conduct in exchange for restrictions on abortion policy. He followed up as president. In 2022, a Supreme Court occupied by enemies of bodily autonomy struck down the right to abortion.
The court’s decision turned out to be poison at the polls. For that reason and that reason alone, Trump has now changed course. His proposal for a 15-week national abortion ban has a good chance of becoming a campaign winner. Even though it would mean restricting existing rights in most U.S. states, it sounds like a reasonable compromise, and it is getting a majority of support in opinion polls. Also, to be honest, for women in the more than a dozen states that have implemented the toughest restrictions since 2022, it really would be an improvement.
The devil is in the execution. The proposal would need a majority vote in Congress to pass. Democrats are hardly going to vote for restrictions, and it would need a large Republican majority in Congress. Even if Trump is controlling the party, that majority will be hard to find. Once elected, Trump will forget the issue again, anyway — he will already have gotten what he wants playing his unprincipled game.
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