Don’t Worry, Mike Pence, Trump Will Sign Your Abortion Ban
Has Donald Trump betrayed the anti-abortion movement? It’s a hard case to make against the president who appointed the Supreme Court justices necessary to gut Roe’s protections once and for all, and who’s gone to some lengths to take a victory lap for doing little more than being the warm body who complied with the Federalist Society’s honey-do list. But this does seem to be the position of Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, who spent last weekend working himself into a lather over Trump’s weeks-old commentary on the matter, in which he appeared to disavow his support for a national ban on abortion.
The end product of Pence’s considerable vexation is an op-ed in The New York Times, a halting work of high dudgeon in which the former vice president meanders through eight paragraphs before eventually alighting on his complaints about his former boss. Pence says that Trump’s “recent retreat from the pro-life cause” has left him “disheartened.” “I was deeply disappointed,” he says, when the former president “stated that he considered abortion to be a states-only issue and would not sign a bill prohibiting late-term abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, even if it came to his desk.”
It’s hard to say who this op-ed is for. Pence doesn’t exactly command any kind of political constituency and he’s now well outside Trump’s circle of influence. And for all of Pence’s melodramatic talk of betrayal, he arrived rather late to this particular party, some weeks after Trump made the statement in question. All that said, I feel duty-bound to tell Pence to cheer up: If Trump is reelected, he will absolutely sign a national abortion ban. I’m really not sure why anyone even doubts this. Take it to the bank.
Perhaps we should go back and actually reflect upon what Trump actually said:
My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint, the states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land, in this case, the law of the state. Many states will be different. Many will have a different number of weeks, or some will have more conservative than others, and that’s what they will be.
If this is why Pence is so mad, the fault perhaps lies in his cognitive abilities, not Trump’s remarks. As Semafor’s Jordan Weissman noted, “If you actually listen to Trump’s statement on abortion, he doesn’t say ‘should’ be left to the states. He says ‘will’ be left to the [states]. It’s just a statement of what the law is. He leaves unsaid what would happen if a ban crosses his desk.”
Indeed, it wasn’t until days later that Trump actually offered any kind of political commitment, telling a reporter on the airport tarmac in Atlanta that he would not sign a national abortion ban into law. Here, I must offer a reminder that this promise isn’t worth much, as Trump is—and I can’t believe I have to explain this to Mike Pence—an inveterate liar. Even the reporting on Trump’s comment is careful to note that this represents a shift from Trump’s prior position on the matter and alludes to the former president’s possible motivation, to “to make one of his greatest political liabilities disappear.”
As I’ve written before, lies and prevarications are what you should expect from Trump and his fellow Republicans this year as they attempt to regain power in a world where the Dobbs decision has rebounded to their political detriment. It’s been well established that conservatives are planning further rollbacks to abortion rights behind the scenes, even as they endeavor to present themselves as more politically palatable to the public—an effort that involves “rebranding” the pro-life movement in an effort to obfuscate its plans.
Here, conservatives haven’t been doing anything different than what they’ve been doing for decades. Pence, in fact, is prevaricating in this very op-ed when he says, “I believe the time has come to adopt a minimum national standard restricting abortion after 15 weeks in order to end late-term abortions nationwide.” I’m not sure he actually believes this! In 2010, Pence told an Indiana anti-abortion group that “abortion should never be legal”—though he offered some concessions on saving the life of the mother. As recently as last May, Pence vowed his support for a national ban on abortion after six weeks. Perhaps Mike Pence should explain to the pro-life movement why he’s become such a squish on the issue before he tries to fillet his former boss.
If Trump is reelected, the last thing you should expect is this kind of wishy-washiness. As Susan Rinkunas recently reported for Jezebel, leaders on the right are “increasingly discussing the prospect” of using the Comstock Act to “ban abortion nationwide if he wins a second term.” The still-on-the-books law from 1875, which the Christian Right has been hoping to revive, is one of the linchpins of Project 2025, the de facto second-term playbook that the Heritage Foundation has created on Trump’s behalf—which states that “the Dobbs decision is just the beginning.”
As Rinkunas documents, the level of prevarication around the right’s out-in-the-open plan to use Comstock as a reproductive rights bulldozer is sky-high—and ably summed up by an anonymously quoted attorney who explained to The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey that Comstock is “obviously a political loser, so just keep your mouth shut. Say you oppose a federal [legislative] ban, and see if that works’ to get elected.” It’s not hard to see this in the subtext of Trump’s own remarks when he talks about the GOP’s “obligation to the salvation of our Nation…TO WIN ELECTIONS.” As Rinkunas notes, Trump is eyeing his own salvation from potential criminal convictions as well.
But why tell the press that you plan to lie to the press about your abortion position? Here we should consider the world-historical awfulness of American political reporting—and how badly they biffed the story when Trump made his abortion remarks. As The Present Age’s Parker Malloy reported, “NBC News, The New York Times, CNN, Axios, CBS News, NPR, ABC News, The Washington Post, The Hill, Forbes, Politico, Financial Times, the Associated Press, and The Wall Street Journal … all botched their reporting of Trump’s statement on abortion policy by inaccurately stating in headlines that he believes abortion rights should be left up to individual states to figure out.”
The media’s track record, to put it mildly, is shit! Sometimes it’s hard to know whether the political press doesn’t realize when they’re getting squid ink sprayed in their faces or if they simply look forward to being abused in that fashion.
It’s honestly hard to discern whether Pence’s op-ed isn’t meant to be more of this same dissembling. Only his near-total irrelevance to the conservative movement exculpates his involvement in their effort to paint Trump and his fellow Republicans as more moderate than they really are. Regardless, Mike Pence should calm down: He’s going to get everything he could possibly want out of a second Trump presidency—except for maybe an apology for that time Trump sent a mob to murder him. Given Pence’s voracious appetite for self-abnegation, though, maybe he doesn’t mind.