How Far Can Trump Push Pro-Lifers?
The ex-president’s team won’t even say whether he’d veto a bill to restore Roe v. Wade.
Some remarkable news out of Gaza just minutes ago, per the New York Times:
Israeli forces rescued an Arab citizen of Israel taken hostage in the Hamas-led attacks last Oct. 7 during an operation in the southern Gaza Strip, the Israeli military said on Tuesday, more than 10 months after he was abducted alongside roughly 250 others. . . .
Qaid Farhan al-Qadi, the hostage Israel said it freed Tuesday, is a member of Israel’s Bedouin Arab minority, an impoverished community. At least 17 Bedouins died in Hamas’s surprise Oct. 7 attacks, and many more lost their livelihoods. Read more about the community in this article.
Happy Tuesday.
Pro-Lifers Discover They Aren’t Steering the Ship
—Andrew Egger
Donald Trump’s monthslong tack toward the center on abortion has accelerated in recent days, with the former president telling CBS News last week that he would not try to restrict access to abortion pills if reelected, pledging to veto any new abortion restrictions Congress might pass, and posting over the weekend that “My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.”
How far will Trump push his abortion-agnostic messaging? Yesterday, The Bulwark asked Trump’s campaign whether, if he were elected president and a Congress run by Democrats (not entirely inconceivable!) were to pass a bill restoring Roe v. Wade, he would veto it. The campaign didn’t even offer an explicit answer.
“President Trump has long been consistent in supporting the rights of states to make decisions on abortion and has been very clear that he will NOT sign a federal ban when he is back in the White House,” Trump national press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement forwarded in response to our question, which went on to voice support for contraception and IVF and critique Kamala Harris’s abortion agenda as “radically out of touch.”
Obviously, it’s hard to imagine Trump—whose fans used to style him “the most pro-life president in history”—champing at the bit to expand abortion access at the federal level if he retakes power. But his campaign’s studied determination not to give pro-lifers in his coalition even this crumb of explicit reassurance is a remarkable bit of political cynicism—or strategery, depending on one’s vantage point.
Either way, anti-abortion activists aren’t exactly thrilled.
But they haven’t been rushing to battle stations en masse, either.
“The cause is way bigger and younger than Trump,” said SBA Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser, a titan for decades of the pro-life movement, after Trump’s “reproductive rights” comments. “Nothing will deter this movement because it is about saving lives and truly serving women. The short term urgent threat? Harris-Walz and all Senate candidates promising unlimited 6, 7, 8, 0 month abortion as the only option for women.”
This sort of hangdog wrist-slap-and-pivot response wasn’t unusual. It’s what Dannenfelser and her organization have done at every point this cycle when Trump pushes her coalition down. Last year, it was Trump attacking Ron DeSantis’s six-week abortion ban that prompted Dannenfelser to plead for “Trump and DeSantis to focus on their concrete pro-life plan for the future and contrast that with Biden.”
Among pro-life activists, by far the most critical of Trump’s pivot has been Lila Rose, president of the group Live Action. “If you don’t stand for pro-life principles, you don’t get pro-life votes,” Rose wrote yesterday. “Due to their increasingly pro-abortion position, Trump/Vance is stretching the lesser of two evils voting strategy to an untenable position. Without some indication that they will work to make our nation a safer place for preborn children, they are making it impossible for pro-life voters to support them.”
But Rose’s threat sparked a backlash online from a host of pro-Trump accounts. One tweet stating that “As a pro-life Catholic, I need to say that Lila Rose is the worst type of human being you’ll ever encounter” racked up thousands of likes. MAGA influencer Ashley St. Clair accused Rose and Live Action of scamming pro-lifers out of their money and fumed that “there is nothing more evil than calling for voter suppression in the most consequential election in US history.”
In a way, you can trace the last half-century of right-wing issue advocacy through these three women. Dannenfelser, the long-term coalition-builder, has spent a career carefully triangulating between taking a hard line on anti-abortion policy and staying in good standing with the Republicans in power. Rose, who came onto the scene in the early aughts, has always had sharper elbows. Her work hasn’t been about careful alliance-building, but shining the biggest possible online spotlight on her issue, which meant bolder stances, more eye-grabbing strategy, and a lower tolerance for glacially incremental change.
But in the Trump years, both the Dannenfelsers and the Roses of the world have been largely supplanted by a new type of figure: the free-floating political social media influencer. Posters like St. Clair aren’t tied down by any specific policy agenda or issue set, beyond a firm, vague conviction that Trump is a hero protecting the nation against evil Democrats hell-bent on destroying it. And Trump has a phalanx of them around him at all times, ready to go to war against any member of the GOP coalition gauche enough to say out loud that their support is actually about the issues and not the individual. It’s a valuable asset for a guy as conviction-free1 as Trump.
The Doom/Hype Feedback Loop
—William Kristol
DATE: Early Tuesday morning, August 27, 2024
LOCATION: A coffee shop around the corner from Bulwark HQ, Washington, D.C.
Optimus: Long time no see, man! You gotta be cheered up since we last hung out! Biden’s out, Harris is doing great, the convention was a hit . . .
Pessimus: I’m cautiously hopeful—
Optimus: [interrupting] Cautious! Come on, man. Enjoy life a bit! What a five weeks! Harris started off behind, now she’s maybe four points ahead. And the money’s flowing in, the volunteers . . .
Pessimus: God knows, she has a better chance than Biden. Still. She’s only a few points ahead, and that’s after a month where she’s been very good and Trump’s been pretty bad. Her lead is just about what Biden’s final margin was, which was too close for comfort! And that’s assuming Trump won’t do better at the ballot box than he’s doing in the polls, as he did in ‘16 and ‘20.
Optimus: Oh man! Gloom and doom city! After the convention bounce, Harris will be up a lot more than that.
Pessimus: Hope so. Let’s see. The early data I’ve seen has her picking up a point or two. Hardly a big bounce. But yeah, she could win—
Optimus: Could? Could? When we fight, we win!
Pessimus: Dunno. Sometimes we fight and lose. Maybe I’m too worried. I’m the kind of guy who loves Yeats’s “To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing”:
Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors’ eyes—
Optimus: Okay, stop! Yeats? What does he know? You need to read less Yeats and listen to more Beyoncé.
Pessimus: You could be right.
Optimus: I am right. Harris and the Coach are on a roll.
Pessimus: So far, sure. The vibes are great. But they’re untested—the most untested ticket in my lifetime. And neither’s sat for an interview in five weeks. Boy, a lot’s going to ride on that debate.
Optimus: But that convention speech! She sounded like your hero, McCain!
Pessimus: Yeah, I liked it. . . . Of course, McCain lost.
Optimus: Well, that was to my man Obama. Yes, we can! But now Kamala’s channeling Obama: We’re not going back.
Pessimus: Obama’s slogan was positive. Kamala’s is negative.
Optimus: C’mon. She and the Coach are going to win.
Pessimus: But she’s still the incumbent in a wrong-track election. And we have campuses opening back up, with all that insanity. And Putin will do his best to help Trump.
Optimus: That’s so 2016.
Pessimus: Maybe. And then there are those former Trump officials and conservative bigwigs—they all say they’re anti-Trump, but they won’t come out for Harris. They’re making it easier for some Republican voters who don’t like Trump to buy into the idea that Harris is too left-wing or something, and they don’t need to vote for her.
Optimus: Ah. There aren’t that many of them. Anyway, we’re not going back!
Pessimus: Well, I have to go back—to work.
Optimus: Knock ‘em dead, man. I’m going to sit here, chill out, have another cold brew, put in the old AirPods, listen to some Beyoncé . . .
Where are you readers at, Optimus / Pessimus-wise? Let us know in the comments.
Quick Hits
DEBATE CHICKEN 2: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO: Guess we were wrong to think this brinksmanship was over for the cycle. Teams Trump and Harris are feuding again over the particulars of the upcoming ABC News presidential debate—over a question of mic-muting.
The June debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden notably featured zero crosstalk, by design: Each candidate’s microphone was muted while the other was speaking. But this setup—originally requested by Team Biden—is now opposed by Team Harris. Team Trump, by contrast, wants to stick to the agreed-upon rules.
It’s a fascinating little insight into the different rhetorical strategies of Biden and Harris: Team Biden didn’t want their candidate to be bowled over by a belligerent Trump, while Team Harris plainly thinks Trump trying to badger Harris would backfire on him. Trump, for his part, said he’d actually prefer the open-mic concept, even as he leaves it to his team to negotiate.
AUDIENCE OF ONE: Florida may be a safely red state, and Palm Beach may be a deep-blue enclave, but regional cable will still be getting a new blast of Trump ads this week. As Sam Stein reports for the site, the Trump campaign is spending about $47,000 to advertise on cable, in and around Mar-a-Lago. “Trump’s staff is at some risk of incurring his wrath if he—and his Palm Beach pals—don’t see his ads,” he writes. It’s not the first time aides have followed this playbook: “During the 2020 campaign, the Trump operation ran $400,000 worth of television ads on D.C. cable so that then-president Trump and congressional Republicans could get a psychic boost.”
BREAK FILIBUSTER IN CASE OF EMERGENCY: Kamala Harris is leaning hard into a centrist message these days, but some Senate Democrats haven’t gotten the memo. While in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention last week, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse said at an event hosted by the Brennan Center that Democrats would be “virtually certain” to pass a “Supreme Court reform” bill if they retake the House and retain the Senate and presidency, the Dispatch reported yesterday. “We are not going to want to give the Republicans multiple stalls, multiple filibusters on this, so the bill that gets around the filibuster will be virtually certain to include permanent reproductive rights, permanent restored voting rights, getting rid of corrupting billionaire dark money, and Supreme Court reform,” Whitehouse said.
Cheap Shots
So to speak.
Stop calling these people Pro-Lifers. They just want control over people and don't care about lives after the children are in the dysfunctional world of hunger, hate, and disinformation they build for them.
“Pre-born children”
Words no longer have meaning.
As an aside, after listening to the podcast yesterday and then watching McMaster this morning plugging his book, I couldn’t help but get angry. The General said that it wasn’t his job to pass judgment on Trump or influence voters in any way. For a highly decorated soldier, I find this to be cowardly behavior. And that goes for all of the highly decorated soldiers that populated the first Trump administration.