Donald Trump’s Cynical Abortion Feint Carries Important Lessons
It can only work if the media fails, which is why he’s taking it for a spin
Late last week, Donald Trump and/or his surrogates used the New York Times political desk to launch a trial balloon: When the primary is over—but only then—he’ll run a general-election campaign on a plan to ban abortion after 16 weeks gestation.
For today’s purposes I’ll assume nobody reading needs me to explain why Trump’s word is worthless, whether it’s direct from him or laundered through anonymous sources. I’ll also assume everyone knows that his administration, like any Republican administration, will teem with anti-abortion zealots who’ll erect obstacles to abortion wherever they can. They’ll likewise make no effort to prevent red-state policies, like the Alabama supreme court’s effective criminalization of IVF, from spreading to other states, or being imposed by the Supreme Court on the entire nation.
All of that stuff should go without saying.
Nevertheless, the whole sordid exercise, and the way the political system reacted to it, provide some insights worth pondering, if you share the goals of a more robust liberalism and defeating Donald Trump.
1. TRUMP IS MORE SCARED THAN SAVVY
Trump understands better than most Republicans that their theft of the Supreme Court, his appointment of three right-wing Supreme Court justices, the resulting Dobbs opinion, and ensuing GOP abortion crackdowns have been politically ruinous. The criminalization of abortion and insurrection are the GOP’s two biggest substantive liabilities, but where Trump is too unwell to admit he lost the 2020 election, he’ll happily lie and obfuscate about abortion to reduce the salience of that issue.
But through some combination of deceit and ignorance, he’s floated a settlement that he believes sounds moderate, and may actually sound moderate to many people, but is actually a big lurch to the right. In a parallel America, John Roberts won the day in the Dobbs deliberations, leaving Roe battered but intact, allowing red states to ban abortion after 15 weeks. From the perspective of today that would be a compromise—an unsatisfying one, most progressives would say, but a huge improvement over the status quo where abortion isn’t just unavailable in half the country, the people who seek and provide abortions place their freedom at risk.
Trump may think that’s what he’s proposing, or he may just be trying to trick people, but establishing a 15 week (or 16 week) ban on top of Dobbs isn’t a compromise—abortion would remain a crime in much of the country, and Trump would intrude into free states to impose new 16 week bans where none currently exist.
That’s why Democrats—wisely, in my view—didn’t respond to Trump’s trial balloon by accusing him of lying. They went on the offensive against his proposal for a nationwide abortion ban.
2. TRUMP IS ALSO PRETTY SAVVY
He knows that, to many voters, banning abortion after 15 weeks or 16 weeks seems reasonable.
Democrats need to do what Democrats need to do. They should want voters to hear “ban” more than they hear “16 weeks,” and Trump’s gonna repeat the words “16 weeks” over and over again. “Know what I like about 16?” Trump reportedly told a confidant who happens to talk exactly like Trump, according to the New York Times. “It’s even. It’s four months.”
Reminding voters that a ban is a ban even if the proponent doesn’t say the word “ban” is important. But liberal commentators were also quite right to home in on Trump’s bullshit artistry, and the irresponsible role the Times played echoing his “position” uncritically.
Does anyone really believe Trump would veto a stricter ban if Republicans in Congress sent him one? Does anyone think his administration will seek a middle ground on this issue rather than pulling the country much further to the right on abortion than Dobbs and state Republicans already have?
It falls to pundits to raise these obvious questions, because the Times only published Trump’s self-serving leaks. And the impulse to set the record straight comes from an important, instinctive awareness among progressives that, on issues of very high salience like abortion, positioning matters. If Republicans were to move the center on abortion in earnest, or even just create a false impression of moderation in some voters’ minds, it would benefit them politically at the margin.
But if we accept that, we should extend the logic further. We recoiled at Trump’s feint and the Times’s stenography because we don’t want him to successfully mislead anyone, because we want as many people as possible to vote against him. But that means we recognize at some instinctive level that moderation, even false moderation, can be politically shrewd.
That’s not to say a 16-week national ban would be popular outright—Glenn Youngkin proposed basically this for Virginia last year and lost control of the state legislature. But he didn’t get trounced! If Republicans perform nationally in 2024 as “poorly” as Virginia Republicans did in 2023, Donald Trump will probably become president again.
Progressives who prioritize defeating Trump should keep this in mind. They may be morally offended by Biden’s decision to make big border-security concessions to Republicans, they may bristle when he plays up his personal, Catholicism-based misgivings about abortion. But their political case that these gestures can only further demobilize his base while buying him no good will in the center is probably incorrect. And to the extent that they worry Trump’s abortion hand-waving will pay off politically, they already kind of get this at a subconscious level.
Trump’s abortion and border-bill machinations in some sense reflect equal-and-opposite strategies based on this single insight. He had John Barron call the New York Times because he wants to reclaim a chunk of the center on abortion before the election; he killed the border bill at least in part because he wanted to block Biden from reclaiming a chunk of the center on immigration issues before the election.
3. THE MEDIA’S FORGOTTEN HOW TO COVER A PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN RESPONSIBLY
And so there’s value in making sure voters know both that Trump has proposed a national abortion ban and that he’s probably lying to conceal a much more extreme agenda.
But voters won’t get both messages if the media continues to abandon its old standards.
There’s no such thing as an abortion agenda that you leak through anonymous sources to the New York Times. At least, there’s not supposed to be. Agendas are written down on paper, published online, and picked over by journalists who grill candidates about them.
With rare exception, Trump has always treated this like a game he can opt out of, and many of the journalists who cover him have responded not by warning the public that his supposed commitments are therefore untrustworthy, but by marveling at how savvy he is for breaking the rules.
“Donald Trump is acting like a normal politician,” Mara Liasson marveled on Meet the Press, literally normalizing Trump. “He usually doesn’t do that, but he’s moving, trying, if this story is true, to move to the center on abortion for the general election.”
Bravo Mister Trump! Remarkable parry!
Trump is counting on the media to repeat his “policy” uncritically, and to elide the difference between a floor of 16 weeks and his actual “plan” of setting 16 weeks as a ceiling for the nation. So far that looks like a safe bet. Which means it’s still a good time for Democrats to up their media ref-working game.
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