Trump's deeply misogynist lie about moms killing babies
It reveals a fear of women's empowerment he shares with the Christian right.
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On Monday, Donald Trump released a video announcing his much heralded abortion “policy.” The statement was typically garbled, deliberately vague, and chock full of absurd assertions.
For example, Trump bizarrely asserted that that “both sides wanted and, in fact, demanded” that Roe v. Wade be “ended.” His suggestion is that the entire nation was clamoring for the end of reproductive rights that he engineered with his Supreme Court nominations, when in fact national polling shows that a solid majority supports legal abortion. (If you can stomach it, you can watch Trump’s entire video statement below.)
As has long been typical, many in the press misreported the gist of the statement. A New York Times headline declared that Trump had said “Abortion Restrictions Should Be Left to the States.” This is incorrect, and gives Trump undeserved credit for his typical, and deliberate, ambiguity.
Trump did not say he would refuse to sign a federal abortion ban into law, and his record is to the contrary. He supported a federal 20-week ban when he was in the White House and said was “disappoint[ed]” when it was filibustered in the Senate.
But the headlines not only misstated what Trump said, they also omitted the most repugnant and revealing portion of his presentation — his repulsive lie that women have been “execut[ing]” their own children “after birth,” with the assistance of doctors.
Trump said:
“It must be remembered that the Democrats are the radical ones on this position because they support abortion up to and even beyond the ninth month. The concept of having an abortion in the later months and even execution after birth. And that’s exactly what it is. The baby is born, the baby is executed after birth is unacceptable. And almost everyone agrees with that.”
The claim is a grotesque derivation of the “partial birth” abortion smear GOP politicians have employed for years as a cover for their agenda to wholly, or near wholly, ban abortion care, which they have succeeded in doing in large swaths of the nation since SCOTUS ended federal abortion rights in June 2022.
Trump’s version of this familiar lie is not only over the top, but it reveals his deep affinity with the Christian right. It’s an affinity rooted not in a shared faith with right-wing Christians, but rather in a deeply shared fear of women’s empowerment, with the policy goal of taking it away.
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“The answer is there has to be some form of punishment”
Although he’s now hawking bibles, Trump is hardly a religious person. Furthermore, for most of his life, Trump was, as he declared in 1999, “very pro-choice” and indeed once stated that he opposed a ban on so-called “partial birth” abortions in the third trimester.
Trump, however, had remarkably little difficulty reversing his position on this issue in 2011 for the sake of political expediency. The reversal, of course, reflected Trump’s characteristic lack of principles; he declared himself to be “pro-life” as part of an effort to rebrand himself as a “conservative” in anticipation of a potential 2012 presidential run that didn’t materialize. But when Trump actually ran for the White House in 2016, he revealed a personal interest in criminalizing abortion that went too far even for most long-time anti-choice extremists.
During a now infamous exchange during a 2016 interview with Chris Matthews, Trump offhandedly announced that “there must be some form of punishment” for “the woman” who obtains abortion care.
But that was not the end of Trump’s remarks on the subject. Matthews went on to ask him, "What about the guy that gets her pregnant? ... is he responsible under the law for these abortions?” After some hemming and hawing, Trump declared: "I would say no."
While Trump later tried to walk back his “indict the woman but not the man” proposal, it was hardly inconsistent with his own longstanding views about women and personal treatment of them. This only became clearer over subsequent years, during which, only by way of example, a jury adjudicated him liable for sexual abuse, and Stormy Daniels accused him of having an affair with her soon after his wife Melania had given birth, and then paying to cover it up.
Many have questioned why right-wing Christian extremists have been so willing to overlook not only Trump’s irreligiousness, but his outright contempt for so many putative principles of Christianity. But the question ignores the deep opposition to, and indeed palpable fear of, women’s autonomy and civil rights that Trump and right-wing Christian fundamentalists share.
As demonstrated perhaps most clearly in his 2016 remarks to Matthews, Trump has an interest in “punishing” women, and returning them to their rightfully subservient place, that could hardly be more in sync with commitments of such religious extremists.
That brings us to Trump’s grotesque claim that women are instructing doctors to kill their children in the delivery room, after they are born. The falsity of the claim is so obvious that it requires no fact checking. But the fact that Trump is making the claim, and being applauded by the religious extremists for doing do, is deeply revealing.
Trump’s fictional claim that women are a danger to their own offspring and need to be prevented from murdering their children is of a piece with the most chilling forms of misogyny, a fear of women’s autonomy, and control of their own bodies, that is pointedly similar to that which permeates much of right-wing Christianity.
Accordingly, while Trump is devoid of any of the piety that fundamentalist Christians claim to adhere to, his foundational values are curiously quite similar to theirs. Therefore, far from a simple alliance of convenience, as some have described it, Trump’s connection to the Christian right is actually a connection grounded on deeply shared, and deeply repugnant, values.
It’s those shared values that give Christian extremist leaders reason to have comfort that Trump will make good on his promises to impose their agenda on the nation if he is returned to the White House. That should give the rest of the nation strong reason to fear that result.
That’s it for today
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We’ll be back tomorrow with more tomorrow. Until then, have a good one and thanks for reading.
This repulsive man brought us this repulsive Supreme Court. We need to reject him overwhelmingly in November. It’s shameful that this disgusting man will be on the ballot.
I have been thinking about those of us women who are beyond childbearing age. It seems to me that we have a great deal of power and now is the time to use it on behalf of those who are vulnerable.