Trump Claims Credit for All Abortion Bans
Republicans drastically underperformed in the 2022 midterm elections, only narrowly taking control of the House of Representatives while leaving the Senate in Democratic control. The overturning of Roe v. Wade was seen by many as the primary culprit. Donald Trump isn’t exactly distancing himself from the ruling — at least as he tries to fend off his far-right primary opponents.
“I was able to kill Roe v. Wade,” he crowed Wednesday morning on Truth Social. He also took credit for the wave of abortion bans that have gone into effect since the Supreme Court axed the right to reproductive health care last year. “Without me there would be no 6 weeks, 10 weeks, 15 weeks, or whatever is finally agreed to,” he added. “Without me the pro Life movement would have just kept losing. Thank you President TRUMP!!!”
Trump isn’t wrong. He was able to appoint three arch conservatives — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — to the Supreme Court in just a single presidential term, securing the conservative majority needed to strike down Roe. He bragged about it Tuesday night on Newsmax, too.
“I’m the one that got rid of Roe v. Wade, and everybody said that was an impossible thing to do,” he said.
Trump was responding to a question about how the increasingly restrictive abortion bans conservative states keep writing into law could “doom” the GOP with moderates in 2024. It’s a valid question given what happened in 2022, and a fraught one for Trump’s campaign. Rolling Stone reported after the midterms that evangelicals were cooling on the former president because of his “silence on abortion,” as Kristan Hawkins, president of Students For Life of America, put it at the time.
Rolling Stone reported last month that Trump has since been holding secret meetings with Christian leaders to assuage their concerns. The leaders haven’t been satisfied with the death of Roe, instead pressing him to take a more hardline approach to the issue. Trump has stressed the need to emphasize “exceptions” to abortion bands lest he be labeled an “extremist” by Democrats. Sources close to the former president said he has griped that the party is “getting killed on abortion.”
Trump doesn’t have to worry about Democrats for a while, though. He’s currently trying to win a GOP primary in which he stands to face off with people like Mike Pence, the evangelical darling who has called for a nationwide abortion ban, and Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who last month signed the kind of restrictive six-week ban Trump was asked about Tuesday night on Newsmax.
It’s a fair bet that, if Trump advances to the general election, he’ll go back to talking about exceptions and try to recast himself as a centrist when it comes to a woman’s right to choose. But that will be nonsense. As the self-proclaimed champion of the anti-abortion movement, he is — and always will be — the primary architect of the post-Roe world that Americans have been subjected to.