Trump’s abortion strategy blew up worse than he could have imagined — within a day

On Monday, former president Donald Trump tried to triangulate on the subject of abortion, saying that “now that we have abortion where everybody wanted from a legal standpoint”. What he meant by that, he added, was that “the states will determine” whether and when abortion is allowed, and “whatever they decide must be the law of the land.”

Trump likely thought this would be a way to not explicitly endorse a national abortion ban but at the same time praise states that have restricted it. Indeed, just last week, Florida’s Supreme Court upheld a 15-week ban on the procedure, which subsequently triggered a six-week abortion ban. Confusingly, the same court said at the same time that an amendment to protect abortion rights could appear on the ballot in Florida in November.

Then, on Tuesday, Arizona’s Supreme Court upheld the state’s abortion ban from 1864, a previously ignored piece of legislation that comes from before Arizona was even a state.

The news — similar to Alabama’s IVF ruling in February — could not have come at a worse time. Joe Biden became the first Democrat to win Arizona in 2020 since Bill Clinton did in 1996, and Republicans desperately want to win it back.

The GOP wants to keep the focus on the economy and inflation. Indeed, the day after the announcement, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that inflation rose 0.4 per cent in March and 3.5 per cent in the last 12 months. Potentially good news for Republican campaigners — but people will instead focus on how Arizona effectively criminalized abortion.

This is in many ways the perfect culmination of the collapse of the Arizona Republican Party. Long seen as a Western state with a strong frontier libertarian streak, it has in the past elected ardent