Donald Trump is trying to pull his greatest con on America yet
Everyone paying attention knows a vote for Trump is a vote for an abortion ban in all 50 states, except the press.
If you want to know how we’ve sunk so far that an Arizona law from 1864, almost 50 years before Arizona became a state, will soon ban just about every abortion in the Grand Canyon State, we can’t dismiss Republicans’ ability to cloak their intentions.
earlyworms and news junkies, like us, who live for political news often scoff at the idea of “dog whistles” or coded messages meant to sell strategic racism while maintaining plausible deniability. We look at a political party that is at least 90 percent white that has lost women’s votes in every election since 1980, and what’s going on seems quite obvious.
“States rights!” clearly means “roll back all the victories of the Civil Rights Movement.” Attacks that target “abortion on demand” plainly mean to suggest that women are murderous shrews who think abortion is a handy way to deal with their promiscuity.
Some scholars think that even the Religious Right’s central organizing principle of opposing abortion is a masquerade. Because there is overwhelming evidence that the fervor in which the right now opposes bodily autonomy just didn’t exist in mainstream Republicanism until around 1980. That's when Ronald Reagan, who ran against “welfare queens” in 1976, adopted a much more muted form of Nixon’s Southern Strategy.
Randall Balmer wrote in 2022, just after the Dobbs decision was issued:
White evangelicals in the 1970s did not mobilize against Roe v. Wade, which they considered a Catholic issue. They organized instead to defend racial segregation in evangelical institutions, including Bob Jones University.
To suggest otherwise is to perpetrate what I call the abortion myth, the fiction that the genesis of the Religious Right — the powerful evangelical political movement that has reshaped American politics over the past four decades — lay in opposition to abortion.
Others have argued that white evangelical leaders were late to embrace overturning Roe, they were just catching up to their base.
Whatever you believe, white fundamentalists’ rhetoric and policies around race softened up considerably in the Reagan era. The former B-movie actor not only gave in and signed a law creating a holiday around Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday and renewed the Voting Rights Act. Efforts instead focused on ending Affirmative Action, largely by trumpeting one like from one Dr. King speech, and unwinding civil rights through the courts, which is conveniently how they planned to end Roe, which even at the height of the popularity of the label “pro-life,” has always been supported by a majority of Americans.
Donald Trump – the man who single handedly ended Roe, as he vowed to do in his 2016 campaign – is like the con who caught the car when it comes to abortion rights these days.
So he's trying to do an inverse of "the abortion myth." He wants to neutralize the issue and focus on the strategic racism of screaming about the border, promising pretty much the exact policies of the Senate bill that he personally killed.
That's why we got this week's abortion video that, as Jessica Valenti explained, didn't "mean shit."
His vaunted “stance” on abortion was to take no stance at all. Because that’s what he’s been instructed to do by the same guys who helped him overturn Roe and now want to use a law almost as old as Arizona’s abortion ban, the Comstock Act, to end abortion in all 50 states, and possibly birth control, too. A plan that has already been endorsed by a majority of Republicans in Congress.
“I hope he doesn’t know about the existence of Comstock, because I just don’t want him to shoot off his mouth,” Jonathan F. Mitchell, the guy behind the 2021 Texas abortion bounty law, told The New York Times. “I think the pro-life groups should keep their mouths shut as much as possible until the election.”
Some scoff at the idea that Trump can be strategic and maintain control of his mouth, much as the scoff at the idea of coded messages. This is all so f^^$&^$ obvious. Trump is just going to bleat it out at a rally or on a podcast with some guy freebasing creatine.
Who even needs this explanation?
White fundamentalists don’t. They totally got that Trump was winking at them, pretending not to want a national ban while aiming for bureaucratic ban that comes from just appointing anti-abortion rights activists to run the Department of Justice and the Food and Drug Administration.
But, obviously, the press does need this explanation.
If you followed the coverage of Trump’s abortion announcement, you’d see that pretty much every major news organization fell for it.
After major news outlets spent Monday falsely claiming that Trump said abortion “should” be left to the states in a video announcement, news broadcasts on ABC, NBC, and CBS repeated the claim.
Trump was simply describing how Dobbs works. He wasn’t taking a stand. He was doing the opposite of that. He did take responsibility for killing Roe, which he has figured out is his dog whistle to his base that they can trust him to do what they want to ban abortion, again. But even that was sandwiched with lies.
He wanted the story to be “left up to the states” because that’s not him endorsing any ban yet also, as noted above, a racist dog whistle. And he got it.
I get the need to present a positive view of the future when it comes to controlling our bodies, our decisions and our lives. And Democrats have that in Michigan where our new Democratic trifecta not only enshrined abortion rights, we’ve repealed bad laws and expanded abortion access.
But people need to understand how useful Trump’s con man image has been in making him the single most important figure in the history of white fundamentalism in America by ending a constitutional right to abortion.
Many simply refuse to believe he actually cares about abortion and will do anything further to end it, despite REALITY. Again and again voters in focus groups refuse to believe that he actually opposes abortion and they’re certain he’s paid for some. You regularly hear people say, “Ah, he’ll just forget about it when he’s in office and doesn’t need the GOP any more,” despite the fact that his Supreme Court appointments and the ending of Roe are the only enduring accomplishments of his presidency, besides the world’s worst response to the worst pandemic in a century.
Trump’s plausible deniability and the press’ pliability have been his greatest assets.
This is why talking about Project 2025 is so important. The people who surround Trump, the people who will be doing the actual governing should he sneak back into the White House, are deadly serious about ending not just abortion but also birth control. Their plans exist to hold Trump to them.
And Trump needs them, so badly. He needs their money. And he will need the GOP base pleased with him for the rest of his life to consolidate his power and prevent the legal consequences circling him from ever actually affecting his life or his one child he likes.
Project 2025 is the MAGA minimum and you don’t need an imagination to see what that nightmare will look like. It’s already happening in the south. And soon it will be real in Arizona, thanks to Donald Trump.
No one on the right is confused about this. Yet somehow, the press still manages to be.