Donald Trump has an abortion problem.
The presumptive GOP nominee boasts an advantage over President Joe Biden on most of today’s most salient issues. In a recent ABC News/Ipsos poll, voters said that they trusted Trump over the president on the economy, inflation, crime, and immigration. Biden, meanwhile, enjoyed a double-digit advantage on only one issue: by 47 points to 35 points, voters said they trusted the president over Trump to handle abortion policy.
It is not hard to see why.
Trump’s presidency left relatively few lasting marks on American public policy. But as he has repeatedly boasted since the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, it was his judicial appointments that enabled the overturning of Roe v. Wade — and thus, the avalanche of abortion restrictions that followed its demise.
When Texas forces a woman pregnant with a fatally ill fetus to carry it to term — even at the risk of suffering uterine rupture and infertility — that is a consequence of the Trump presidency. When a 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio must travel across state lines to have an abortion, that is a testament to Trump’s legacy. When Alabama disrupts fertility services by declaring that embryos have the same rights as people, those frozen bunches of cells have Trump to thank.
Trump understands that all this is a major political liability. And on Monday, he tried to address it, releasing a video in which he details his vague — yet ostensibly moderate — new stance on abortion policy. If voters want to know what a second Trump administration would actually mean for abortion rights, however, they’d be better off looking to Trump’s past actions and current alliances, rather than his cheap words.
The mogul avoided taking a clear stance on abortion throughout the 2024 GOP primary. Behind closed doors, he told his advisers that he liked the idea of a 16-week national abortion ban with exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother. But in front of the…
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