On Abortion， Trump Did This

In today’s newsletter, leaving it up to the states, and then:
•Why we need to see Trump’s speeches
•Declaring war on trash
•Will dumbphones save us?

Just about everyoneknows that Donald Trump was for abortion before he was against it. But what, exactly, is the position of the formerly “very pro-choice” ex-President now that his four years in the White House resulted in what might be termed catastrophic success for the anti-abortion movement? That, it turns out, is one of the harder questions to answer so far in 2024. Trump, whose only ideology is opportunism, has been predictably all over the map on the repeal of Roe v. Wade. To right-wing audiences, he frequently and loudly brags about being the author of Roe’s destruction. Bragging is his happy place; of course he cannot resist taking credit for a historic accomplishment. “I was able to kill Roe v. Wade,” he exulted on social media in May of last year. “I did it and I am proud to have done it,” he said on a Fox News town hall earlier this year. “Nobody else was going to get that done but me.”

On Monday, in a video meant to explain his post-Roe position, Trump repeated this claim. “I was proudly the person responsible,” he said. The problem for Trump is that this is a losing position with voters—millions of whom have gone to the polls, in red states such as Kansas and in battlegrounds such as Michigan, to keep abortion legal in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, which allows individual states to set abortion policy. Since Dobbs, surveys have shown support for reproductive rights at record highs, and Trump himself blamed “the abortion issue” for Republicans’ failure to win back the Senate in the 2022 midterm elections.

In the years since January 6, 2021, may news networks have been reluctant to give airtime to former President Trump, following the logic that airing his statements allows him to spread lies unchallenged to a wide audience. But, as Jay Caspian Kang argues in a recent column, this decision has had the effect of making Trump’s threat to democracy far less tangible. Networks, he writes, “should let the former President speak for himself in his unhinged, and, yes, often violent way. I imagine he will have no problem reminding us of who he is.”Read more »

P.S. The murder trial of O. J. Simpson,who died on Wednesday, at the age of seventy-six, exposed numerous rifts in American culture and the national experience. But it also, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,wrote after the verdict was issued, provided “a fitting rejoinder to those who claim that we live in an utterly fragmented culture, bereft of the common narratives that bind a people together.”