Trump Contorts Himself on Abortion in Search of Political Gain

At the age of 53, in a 1999 interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Donald J. Trump described himself as “very pro-choice.”

In 2011, without any explanation about the change, he informed a packed room at a conservative conference that he was now “pro-life.”

In 2016, as a Republican candidate for president, he told the MSNBC host Chris Matthews that he had become so ardently opposed to abortion rights that he would even support punishments for women who got abortions. He did not realize that this position went too far even for the social conservatives to whom he was trying to pander, and he quickly reversed himself.

The 2024 version of Mr. Trump is once again tying himself in knots — but this time the stakes could not be higher.

The latest example came on Friday, when Mr. Trump — nearly a full day after his campaign had to clean up his suggestion that he might support a Florida ballot measure allowing abortion up to 24 weeks following backlash from social conservatives — told Fox News that he would vote against it.

Back in 2022, the former president had told allies — as the Supreme Court was preparing to overturn Roe v. Wade — that the move would hurt his party. Since that year, when Republicans underperformed expectations in the midterm elections, Mr. Trump has been privately emphatic with advisers that in his view the abortion issue alone could kill their chances of victory in November. And he is willing to make as many rhetorical and policy contortions as he deems necessary to win.