Trump once again puts Republicans in a bind on abortion

On Tuesday, former president Donald Trump signaled in an interview with WABC that he might support a 15-week abortion ban. Trump said that restricting abortion after 15 weeks “seems to be a number that people are agreeing at.”

For the last month, Republicans have scrambled to craft a message to signal that they support IVF after Alabama’s supreme court ruled that frozen embryos are legally protected children. This, of course, could not have come at a worse time, since Republicans are already trying to distance themselves from the Dobbs v Jackson decision that overturned Roe v Wade.

Democrats are hoping to hit Republicans over the head on this subject after they made significant wins in efforts to codify abortion rights in swing states like Michigan. Likewise, Republican states like Ohio and Democrats staved off a cataclysmic midterm election in 2022 on the back of anger about the end of Roe.

But the former president finds himself in a bind now that he is the presumptive Republican nominee for president. Trump has never been fluent in speaking the language of social conservatives as a libertine New Yorker who once graced the cover of Playboy magazine. At the same time, he nominated the three Supreme Court justices who delivered Dobbs.

During the primary, he needled some conservatives when he said that, except in certain right-wing areas of the country, “you can’t — you’re not going to win on this issue” and called Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s six-week abortion ban a mistake. Indeed, his former vice president Mike Pence cited Trump’s beginning to “shy away from a commitment to the sancity of human life” as a reason he would not endorse Trump again.

As a result, Trump has said he wants to find a some magical number