Less than 72 hours after publicly declaring his belief that states should decide their own abortion laws, Donald Trump is already contradicting himself by saying that what some states have decided needs to be changed.
On Monday, Trump announced a pivot in his stance on reproductive rights, after months of floating a national ban. The former president released a video stating that he had decided to support states’ right to choose (not women’s though.) The recalibration figured to have stemmed from months of internal debate over how to balance the GOP’s continued demands for restrictions on reproductive freedoms, with the reality that voters have dealt the party a series of defeats in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade’s demise.
The day after Trump’s announcement, the Arizona Supreme Court revived an 1864 law that will place a near-total ban on abortion in the state, and level criminal penalties against abortion providers. Republicans — and Fox News — largely refrained from addressing the ban. Trump did too — until he was asked on Wednesday if he thought the court had gone too far in its decision.
“Yeah, they did, and that’ll be straightened out. As you know it’s all about states’ rights and it’ll be straightened out,” he said. “I’m sure that the governor and everybody else are going to bring it back to within reason.”
Trump added that other states were likely to see dramatic shifts in their abortion laws. “Florida is probably maybe going to change also,” he added, referencing a six-week abortion ban that will go into effect there next month. “It’s the will of the people, this is what I’ve been saying it’s a perfect system.”
The former president then bragged about ending Roe, adding that “the states are putting out what they want, it’s the will of the people. So Florida is probably going to change, Arizona is going to definitely change — everybody wants that to happen,” he said.
Everybody does not, in fact, want that to happen. Polling has found that a majority of Arizonans (60 percent) consider themselves pro-choice rather than pro-life. It’s why some vulnerable Republican lawmakers in the state opposed the ruling — despite previously having endorsed more stringent restrictions on abortion.
In Florida, the state’s six-week abortion ban is facing a competing ballot measure that would enshrine the right to an abortion in the state’s constitution. Polling in the state already shows that the measure could pass given that 62 percent of Floridians would support the proposed constitutional amendment.
On abortion, Republicans are the proverbial dog that caught the mailman. After experiencing the natural consequences — in this case voter outrage — of enforcing a wildly unpopular Supreme Court decision, the GOP is now scrambling to wash its hands of the reproductive rights disaster they’ve created throughout the country.
