As president, Donald Trump appointed the three justices who proved pivotal to the outcome in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade.
Trump has made it very clear that he is proud of this. He said so at the time. Dobbs, he pointed out in a statement, was “the biggest WIN for LIFE in a generation” and was “only made possible because I delivered everything as promised, including nominating and getting three highly respected and strong Constitutionalists confirmed to the United States Supreme Court.”
It was, he continued, “my great honor to do so!”
If the ruling was Trump’s, then so are the results. Since the Supreme Court freed Republican-led states to outlaw abortion and impose harsh penalties for women and doctors who either seek or perform the procedure, there has been diminished access to reproductive and maternal care, as well as a rise in premature births. In a national poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 68% of OB-GYNs surveyed said that Dobbs has “worsened their ability to manage pregnancy-related emergencies.” Sixty-four percent also said that the ruling has “worsened pregnancy-related mortality.”
It is not hard to find stories of women forced to risk death and carry dangerous pregnancies because of the court’s decision, delivered by Trump, to revoke a constitutional right to abortion. And it’s the sheer horror of the post-Roe world that has pushed voters, in red and blue states, to codify abortion rights into state constitutions whenever possible.
But despite the clear provenance of the attack on reproductive rights — despite the fact that Trump openly bragged about his pivotal role in overturning Roe v. Wade — many Americans don’t seem to blame the former president for the actions of the Supreme Court majority he assembled during his term.
According to a December poll conducted by Data for Progress, a left-leaning think tank, 24% of likely voters hold Trump responsible for new bans or restrictions on abortions in states across the country. Somewhat more, around one-third, blame Republicans in state office and Republicans in Congress. Half blame the court.
It is true that the Supreme Court made the ultimate decision on Roe. It is a political problem for the Democratic Party however, that voters — including many independents and rank-and-file Democrats — do not connect the actions of the court to those of the president who shaped and cemented its right-wing majority. And it’s this identification gap between Trump and the court that gives him the space to position himself against the Republican Party on abortion rights, which he’s trying to do right now.
There is an even larger problem here, for Democrats. We’ll call it the Trump mulligan. Trump was president for four years, during which time he flailed and fumbled through domestic and world affairs, creating new problems and exacerbating old ones at home and abroad. Trump’s fundamental inability to lead — his narcissism, his solipsism, his absorption in petty grievances and conspiratorial thinking — culminated in the government’s chaotic early response to the coronavirus pandemic, which paralyzed the nation amid a mounting death toll. If the main measure of a president is how he responds to crisis, then Trump was a failure.
These facts would almost certainly weigh down any other defeated president who tried to run for a second term. Imagine, for instance, if Jimmy Carter had run for the Democratic nomination in 1984 — he would have struggled to win a vote, much less a primary.
Trump, somehow, gets a mulligan. Voters — and to some extent the political media — have allowed him to set the signature events of his administration aside as if they don’t count, as if they don’t define his past performance and weigh on what he might do with a second term. The Trump mulligan allows him to promise the moon as if we don’t already know he can’t reach it. It allows him to stand for a return to normalcy when the only thing he can deliver is disarray.
Why does Trump get this mulligan on his presidency? I think it owes a lot to his celebrity persona. Although Trump has not been on a major screen in Hollywood since 2015, when he was fired from NBC’s “The Apprentice,” he still retains the celebrity status he cultivated over decades in film and television. He is a politician — he was, again, president of the United States — but he’s not perceived as a politician. He is seen, even now, as outside of or somehow transcending traditional politics.
The result is that many Americans don’t seem to hold Trump responsible for the political and policy consequences of his actions as president. The challenge for Democrats, which is to say the challenge for Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, is to tie Trump to his own four years in power. The Supreme Court’s attack on abortion rights, backed by three Trump-appointed justices, should be understood, politically, as Trump’s attack on abortion rights. The economic pain of the pandemic should be understood, in the same way, as a product of Trump’s decisions in office.
The key to making this stick, I think, is for Democrats to resist the urge to treat Trump as exceptional. The more his opponents hold him up to the public as a dangerous gamble or a threatening aberration, the more they reinforce the outsider persona that makes him an electoral threat. It is not a coincidence that Trump was at his least popular, during his term and before Jan. 6, when he was most associated with traditional Republican causes such as the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act or the push to cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans.
For the past two years of elections — from the 2022 midterms to the 2023 elections in Virginia and Kentucky to this week’s special elections in New York and Pennsylvania — voters have held Republicans responsible for unpopular Republican policies. What Democrats have to do is hold Trump responsible for unpopular Republican policies.
It may sound simple, even obvious, but the challenge of this election is to remind the voting public that Donald Trump is, in fact, a conservative Republican who, if elected again, will act in the manner of conservative Republicans.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.