Trump's weekend of radical flip-flopping
It's hard to say you're against abortion bans when you're literally voting for them.
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Watching Donald Trump trying to have it both ways on abortion would be hilarious if the prospect of his election didn’t signal the end of democracy in America (and if the media wasn’t simultaneously trying to make a big fuss out of Kamala Harris moving to the center on some issues).
As it is, watching Trump change his mind three times in 24 hours about one of the central issues of the race is simply grim. But that’s exactly what played out last week, with Trump being unable to clearly state how he would vote on Florida’s Amendment 4, which would provide constitutional protections for abortions in the state.
Trump’s problem is the same as the one the GOP writ large faces: the party wildly miscalculated what would happen after they succeeded in their decades-long goal of reversing Roe v. Wade, destroying the constitutional right to abortion. Due to the echo chamber that is the hallmark of the modern right, they got high on their own supply and convinced themselves the nation wanted Roe gone as badly as they did.
That’s never been true. Abortion rights are resoundingly, durably popular. Pew Research has surveyed Americans on the issue since 1995, and support for abortion being legal in all or most cases has fallen below 50 percent just once, back in 2009. Pew’s most recent research shows that 63 percent of Americans — including 41 percent of Republicans — believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. The Associated Press found that in June 2021, before Roe’s demise, roughly half of Americans thought abortion should be legal for any reason. That jumped to approximately 60 percent in the last two years.
Now, heading into the home stretch of the 2024 election, abortion is becoming the top issue for more voters, especially women. A New York Times poll conducted last month found that women under 45 report that abortion is now the most critical issue to them, eclipsing even the economy.
A functioning political party led by someone with actual policy goals might consider recalibrating their stance on this issue in order to find a more electable middle ground. Or, a functioning political party could simply dig in, fully embracing the anti-choice side and hoping that the party base would turn out in ample enough numbers. But this is the GOP, and Trump is Trump, so they’ve instead settled on a mishmash of lies and backtracking and are hoping that carries the day.
Amendment 4 is a no win situation for Trump
Trump’s problem with abortion is personally acute because he lives in Florida, which is one of 10 states with an abortion question on the ballot.
Florida’s ballot measure would amend the state constitution by adding a provision stating that “no law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.” This would have the effect of invalidating the state’s current six-week abortion ban, which has been in effect since May. The amendment has strong support, with 69 percent of Florida voters surveyed in July saying they would vote for it.
Protecting abortion to the point of fetal viability — when a fetus could survive on its own outside the womb — would essentially place Florida in the same place it was before Roe was overturned. The Roe framework made attempts to ban abortion before viability unconstitutional. However, the term “viability” is suboptimal, as medical advancements can change how prematurely a baby could be born and still live. At the time of Roe, fetal viability was pegged at roughly 28 weeks, but by the time of another landmark abortion rights decision nearly 30 years later, the Supreme Court allowed abortion restrictions to begin around 23-24 weeks.
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Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which overturned Roe, was about a 15-week ban passed by Mississippi, a ban well short of fetal viability. Anti-abortion activists have long tried to substitute the vague, dubious concepts of “fetal pain” and “fetal heartbeat” for viability in an attempt to justify bans earlier in pregnancy. However, there is medical consensus that fetuses cannot feel pain until roughly the 24-25 week mark, rendering a 15-week ban based on the concept nonsensical. Florida’s current six-week ban is a fetal heartbeat law, banning abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected. But what is detected at six weeks is nothing but electrical impulses, as the valves that create a “heartbeat” don’t even exist yet.
A constitutional measure is really the only way forward in Florida, as the state Supreme Court has joined its conservative federal brethren in throwing out precedent whenever it impedes conservative goals.
The Florida Supreme Court had previously ruled, back in 1989, that the privacy clause found in the state’s constitution explicitly protected abortion. But earlier this year, in letting the six-week ban go into effect, the court decided it had been wrong all along in how it interpreted the privacy clause, and magically, it no longer protected abortion. At the same time, the state’s highest court ruled that the proposed amendment could go on the ballot, ending months of conservative attempts to stop voters from directly expressing their preference on the issue.
For Trump, who ran in 2016 on the explicit promise that he would appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe and return the decision to the states, such an amendment creates a conundrum.
An incoherent word salad topped with lies
Truly returning decisions about abortion to the states would mean respecting the right of individual states to choose to protect it equally as much as that of those states that don’t. But that’s never really been what overturning Roe was about.
The hardcore anti-choice groups who have been some of Trump’s biggest backers, including March for Life and Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, want nationwide abortion restrictions and are not backing down. Project 2025, which Trump is trying to sprint away from, proposes draconian nationwide restrictions and a dystopian surveillance state that tracks pregnant people who leave their anti-choice states to get an abortion elsewhere.
At the same time, the GOP is struggling with the fact that each time abortion has appeared on state ballots since the fall of Roe, abortion rights have prevailed. That’s why conservatives have been fighting so hard to block citizens from voting directly on the issue.
All of which brings us back to Trump’s incoherent attempts to thread the needle on this issue. When first asked by NBC last Thursday about how he would vote on the amendment, given he is a Florida resident, he confusingly declared, “I think the six week is too short, there has to be more time.” (Watch below.)
When questioned further about whether that meant he’d vote in favor of the amendment, Trump said, “I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks.” As Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo noted, it may very well be that Trump is so confused about the ballot process that he thought he could somehow just vote to add a few weeks to the existing six-week ban.
That same day, Trump’s campaign issued a “clarification” that he had not yet said how he would vote on the ballot initiative but that six weeks is too short for a ban. The next day, though, during a friendly chat with a Fox News correspondent, Trump declared that he would be voting against the measure, not for any coherent reason, but because he believes blue states kill babies after they are born: "That way you can do an abortion in the ninth month. And, you know, some of the states, like Minnesota and other states have it where you can actually execute the baby after birth, and all of that stuff is unacceptable. So I'll be voting no for that reason.”
This post-birth abortion fantasy took hold of the right years ago and has not let up, but it is fiction. No state, of course, allows doctors to “abort” babies after they have been born, because killing a fully alive baby that is outside the womb is, well, murder, but it’s a lie Trump loves to trot out. Deploying it here is absurd, given that Florida’s ballot measure would extend protections only to the point of fetal viability, which means the state could still restrict abortions later in pregnancy.
He shouldn’t be able to get away with this
Another issue here is the complicity of the media in cleaning up Trump’s fact-free flip-flops.
Imagine Kamala Harris not being able to articulate her position on abortion and reversing herself within 24 hours and having it being reported as merely a clarification or simply mixed signals, as the media did for Trump here. The elite press is also willing to uncritically report Trump’s Hail Mary moves on reproductive health, such as his recent assertion that he would make IVF free. (His campaign has no explanation as to how this would be funded.) Further, no one is pressing him on how he’d require universal coverage for IVF, a thing opposed by many religious conservatives, when his administration previously helmed an effort to allow religious employers to opt out of providing birth control.
There’s no earthly reason to give Trump the benefit of the doubt here. Besides dismantling the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate, the Trump administration also tried to undermine private insurance coverage for abortions, prohibited clinics from receiving federal funds under Title X if they even referred people elsewhere for abortion services, and slashed grants for teen pregnancy prevention programs. A second Trump administration will be comprehensively terrible for reproductive rights generally, not just abortion, and no amount of uninformed flip-flopping will change that.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading. And to our American readers, happy Labor Day.
There's a bigger picture to it: "Operation Define Kamala Harris" Version 3.7 was to portray her as "a flip-flopper" with no principles other than whatever simply gets her elected, that she's incapable of evolving on the issues... How's it going to look during the debate when Trump calls Harris out for being shaky on fracking when she can just come back with this?
Even better is that fracking is a niche interest that only matters in the election because of Pennsylvania while abortion is an issue in every state with female voters. As in all of them, and Trump's going to stand there and try to tell women fracking is more important than their health.
Frankly Trump's willingness to say he would vote for the abortion amendment gives me serious pause about his mental acuity. The Trump of 2016 had reasonable amounts of political insight - at least to informed lay-person level. The Trump of 2016 would have known that he'd never regain the trust of the pro choice movement after Dobbs and that going soft on abortion would cause the pro-life crowd to erupt...which they did. He'd have wafffled and deflected from the question when asked how he was going to vote on the amendment. Instead he made a clear statement he wouldn't obey it....I reckon this man's brain is softening!...PS Thanks for the info on the poll of 69% support for the amendment. If this support level holds up I really wonder if Florida may flip blue!