The many, many abortion positions of Donald Trump

It’s the most perilous circus act of all time: An overweight wacko is trying to keep his balance by waddling on a high wire.

That’s Donald Trump doing battle with the abortion issue. What a spectacle it continues to be.

At last count, he has taken four or five or six different positions. This is not a surprise, because he’s stuck between his MAGA base (where forced-birth zealots want to ban abortion entirely) and the American mainstream (where there’s landslide support for reproductive freedom). And it’s not a surprise that Trump keeps wobbling hither and yon, because, lest we forget, his only core conviction is saying whatever he thinks will help him win and keep him out of jail.

Granted, all candidates “evolve” from time to time – Kamala Harris no longer endorses a few positions that she took five years ago – but, on the issue that’s galvanizing women in 2024, Trump is the runaway winner of the Flip Flop Follies.

Position 1: Way back in 1999, when he was first exploring a presidential bid,he told NBC News, “I just believe in choice…I am strongly pro-choice…I am pro-choice in every respect in as far as it goes.”

Position 2: In 2011, at a conservative conference, he did a 180 and announced that he was “pro-life.”

Position 2(a): In a 2016 town hall, he said he was a pro-life extremist. Anyone who seeks an abortion should suffer consequences: “There has to be some form of punishment.” He was then asked, “For the woman?” And he replied, “Yes.”

Position 2(b): He reversed himself shortly after that event, saying that women should not be punished (“The woman is a victim”), but that the doctor should be punished.

Position 3: In 2016 he promised to appoint Supreme Court judges who’d overturn Roe v. Wade, and thus cancel nationwide reproductive freedom. He kept his promise, Roe was overturned two years ago, and now says he’s “proudly the person responsible.” (He also has said that “all legal scholars” on the left and right applaud the death of Roe, which is a blatant lie.)

Position 4: In 2018, while he was president, he signaled his support for a national abortion ban – which he’d sign if Congress brought it to his desk. But during a CNN event in 2023, when he was asked (five separate times) whether he’d sign such a ban during a new term, he refused to answer (five separate times): “What I’ll do is negotiate, so that people are happy…I want to do what’s right and we’re looking…It’s what I do in life, I negotiate…I’m looking at a solution…I’ll look at all the different ideas.”

Position 5: Last week, freaked out by his slide in the national polls – one of which says that reproductive rights is the number one issue among women under age 45 – Trump suddenly posted this on social media: “My administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.”

Position 5(b): To demonstrate how great he’d be for reproductive rights, Trump suggested the other day that, as a Floridian, he might vote for a November ballot measure that would protect abortions up to 24 weeks – because, as he explained, Florida’s new draconian law banning abortions after six weeks is unacceptable. In his words, a six-week cutoff is “too short.”

Position 5(c): Cleanup in the MAGA aisle! His handlers showed up with mops nearly a day later, canceling position 5-b, insisting that he would not vote for Florida’s abortion protection measure even though he still thinks the six-week cutoff is too restrictive. (He always brags that overturning Roe is great because it returns the issue to the states. Then he criticizes the most zealous states.)

You still with me?

This is what The New York Times calls his “strategic ambiguity” – yet another media euphemism – but we can call it what it is: flop-sweat desperation, flip-flopping on a high wire without a net.

Is it really possible that a guy like this can win a national election in a year when 62 percent of Americans oppose the overturning of Roe (recent Washington Post-ABC News poll), when 67 percent of independents favor federally-guaranteed abortion rights (recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll), when 65 percent of Republicans agree that abortion issues “should be managed between a woman and her doctor, not the government” (recent Axios/Ipsos poll)?

In August, Trump actually claimed that “we have taken the abortion issue largely out of play.” Good luck with that. Denial is his last refuge, a thin shield against the impending storm.

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Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at [email protected]