Donald Trump is stuck.
He is a brutally transactional politician who represents a coalition of ideologues. His instinct is to promise the moon, and he’ll say anything to get a vote — or just to get out of a room. He also knows, however, that he has no choice but to dance with the date who brought him. He can’t abandon the groups, interested parties and constituencies that put him in the White House to execute their agenda — to exercise their will.
The problem comes when most voters don’t want what your partners hope to do with the power they helped you get.
Such is the case for abortion.
Trump represents the movement to outlaw abortion, restrict contraception and severely limit the scope of reproductive health care. Under rules issued by his administration, employers who had a religious or moral objection could refuse to cover birth control for their employees. He appointed hard-line anti-abortion activists to help lead the Department of Health and Human Services and, of course, nominated the justices who voted — with three other Republican members of the Supreme Court — to overturn Roe v. Wade and end the constitutional right to an abortion.
All of this, especially the end of Roe, is deeply unpopular, and Trump knows it. This is why he has tried the two-step of celebrating his appointments to the court but distancing himself from the consequences, both practical and political, of his anti-abortion accomplishments. Even the most gifted rhetoricians would struggle to sell this to the public. That, obviously, is not Trump. Unsurprisingly, he has floundered.
When asked about Roe during his debate with President Joe Biden, Trump said, falsely, that “everybody wanted to get it back to the states.” He said that he believes in “the exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother” but also said that it’s OK if “some people don’t.” He tried to tar Democrats as extreme with the deranged claim that they want to “take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month, and even after birth — after birth.”
Trump wants this to be the end of the conversation, and it might have been had Biden remained in the race. But with Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket, Democrats have placed abortion rights and reproductive health care at the center of their pitch to women. Abortion, in fact, is now the top issue for many voters in swing states. And they trust Harris, not Trump, to handle their concerns.
The pressure from this development in the campaign has forced Trump, in turn, to respond with his own appeals. He promised, on Truth Social, to “be great for women and their reproductive rights.” Despite his efforts, as president, to cut Medicaid and repeal the Affordable Care Act, he pledged support for in vitro fertilization and told voters that his administration would either pay for fertility treatments or require insurers to provide them at reduced cost (lawmakers in his own party, it should be noted, defeated a bill to do just that this summer). And when asked if he would support the Florida referendum to codify abortion rights in the state constitution, he hemmed and hawed before sort of saying he would vote to loosen the state’s six-week “heartbeat” ban.
Trump even had his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, tell reporters that he would veto a national abortion ban if it came to his desk. “I can absolutely commit to that,” said Vance, who then gave his spin on the former president’s position. “Donald Trump’s view is that we want the individual states and their individual cultures and their unique political sensibilities to make these decisions because we don’t want to have a nonstop federal conflict over this issue.”
It should be said that this position is nonsense. Giving states full authority over the scope of bodily autonomy is a recipe for 50 nonstop conflicts over the issue. Imagine a state that makes abortion care illegal with criminal sanctions for those who obtain the procedure. What happens when a resident of that state travels to another to have an abortion? Can the state that banned abortion hold her criminally liable even if she obtained the procedure outside its borders? What if authorities in the pro-abortion rights state refuse to cooperate with an investigation? To tie basic rights to state borders is to seed the landscape with potentially unresolvable disputes over the very nature of being an American.
While Trump can try to run away from Dobbs, he can’t actually escape the anti-abortion movement that helped him carry the White House in 2016 and almost kept him there in 2020. His clumsy effort to distance himself from his own record has led to real anger among voters and activists who expect a second-term President Trump to do everything he could to ban abortion. “Pro-lifers are being screwed,” declared Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life, on the social platform X, commenting on Trump’s refusal to commit to opposing the Florida amendment. “We need to demand Trump reconsider.”
Unable to withstand the torrent of criticism from anti-abortion activists and fearful of demobilizing anti-abortion voters, Trump did just that, reversing his position on the Florida referendum the next day. “I’ll be voting no,” he told Fox News, providing fuel to the Harris campaign’s argument that Trump would, with a second term, lead a federal assault on women’s rights.
Trump has spent a lifetime evading responsibility for his actions, whether that’s defrauding customers or leading an effort to overturn constitutional government in the United States. He almost certainly believes that he can do the same when it comes to his actions as president, avoiding any penalty for his most unpopular decisions. Aware from the moment of the decision that Dobbs would be “bad for Republicans,” Trump has tried to pull this trick with abortion. But what he is learning, with just a few weeks left before the election, is that on this issue, it isn’t so easy.
So far in this campaign, the former president has not had to answer for his corruption in office, his two impeachments or his disastrous handling of most aspects of the pandemic. But he has had to answer for Dobbs, and it is clear that he has no idea how to deal with a problem he can’t solve by talking out of both sides of his mouth.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.