Trump’s Abortion Gambit Proves He’s Bad at Politics

It’s been pathetic over these recent years to watch people impute certain skills to Donald Trump. Oh, he’s very smart politically. He’s charismatic. It’s all nonsense. It’s political commentators trying to assess him in normal political terms, which only ends up presenting him as a normal politician, which he decidedly is not.

He isn’t smart. In fact, about politics, he’s quite dumb. He has precisely one skill: He knows how to sniff out people’s worst qualities—weakness, envy, anger—and bring them to the fore. That’s it. I’ll grant that this skill got him elected president once and may again. But that doesn’t make it admirable, and it doesn’t mean we should ascribe to him qualities he doesn’t remotely have.

He proved again this week how dumb he is about politics with his new abortion rights position. Earlier this week, I published a column based on the assumption that he was going to back a national 15-week ban. I wrote it on Sunday. It posted Monday at 6 a.m. Then, at around 7:20 a.m., he released his video that made my column moot: no 15-week ban from Trump, but an announcement that it should be up to the states.

Backing a 15-week ban would have been smart politics. He could have sold that as a “moderate” position, even though it isn’t. But fifteen weeks polls well. A February survey showed 48 percent of people backing a 16-week ban, with only 36 percent opposed. And more generally, of course, about two-thirds of Americans in poll after poll say abortion should be generally available with some restrictions.

The embrace of a 15- or 16-week ban would have left plenty of space between Trump and his party’s anti-abortion extremists. It would have enabled him to say, when some deep-red state passed some draconian ban, “No, I don’t agree with that at all; here’s my position, 15 weeks.”

But now? I remember thinking Monday morning that hypothetically, his new “states’ rights” position meant that any extremist position adopted by any state could now be hung around his neck.

The gods sure have a sense of drama because barely 24 hours passed before we went from hypothetical to all too real, when the Arizona state Supreme Court turned the clock back to General Sherman’s march to Atlanta. The decision, reinstating a near-total abortion ban passed in 1864, nearly a half-century before Arizona became a state, was politically shocking and morally repulsive to millions of Americans and Arizonans.

A Trump who’d come out for a 15-week ban could have credibly distanced himself from the decision. Everyone would have bought it. But a Trump who says, as he did on Monday, let’s let the states decide it, owns what the Arizona court did. He later tried to insist, in speaking to reporters Wednesday on the Atlanta tarmac, that he found the position too extreme. But he had just said two days before that states should set their own laws.

So he’s going to get absolutely pounded on this, and deservedly so. Vice President Kamala Harris is headed to Arizona today for a campaign event. According to Playbook, here’s what she is expected to say: “We all must understand who is to blame. It is the former president, Donald Trump. It is Donald Trump who, during his campaign in 2016, said women should be punished for seeking an abortion.”

Boom. Trump just made a huge target of himself—especially with that part of the video where he bragged about putting the justices on the Supreme Court who overturned Roe.

With his position, Trump has tacitly endorsed every severe anti-abortion law in the country. Fourteen states have made abortion illegal since the Dobbs decision. Trump owns every one of those laws. Suppose between now and November, a doctor in Texas is prosecuted for having performed an abortion—a felony punishable by up to life in prison. That will be Trump’s creation every bit as much as the prosecutor who brought the case.

And paradoxically, Trump also owns the positions of the 10 or so states that have liberalized their positions since Dobbs. Some states have enshrined reproductive freedom in their state constitutions. Trump owns that now too.

His pathetic tarmac performance this week showed that he barely knows what he’s talking about. My guess is that the position he took came from two imperatives. One, he heard from abortion rights foes in the GOP and the evangelical world that a 15-week ban was squishy and RINO-ish. Two, someone told him to say “states’ rights” because the phrase lands gently on the conservative ear, and a substanceless person like Trump just thinks that saying a phrase takes care of everything.

He is going to get slaughtered on this issue because of this new position. He says he won’t sign a federal ban. Fine. But that’s not much comfort to the large majorities who want reasonable abortion laws. And there are all those film clips of him bragging about ending Roe. And he’s a liar, so his word is as dependable as a share of Truth Social stock. He has spent his life contradicting himself, saying one thing Tuesday and the other thing Wednesday, and denying he ever said things he said a hundred times. But he’ll learn this year that people have memories.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.