It was a group Trump never really understood in the first place.
At the risk of sounding redundant in the media, Donald Trump is done.
His political career is finally over. He has reached the end of his outsize influence in the Republican Party. The day progressives and members of the press have been dreaming of for six years has finally arrived.
Too bad progressives missed it.
They might never understand how it really happened. It certainly wasn’t the tax returns. It wasn’t the DOJ raid on Trump’s house.
It wasn’t Russian bounties, Alpha Bank, two impeachments (or was it three?), or even the January 6 Committee. It wasn’t Cassidy Hutchinson, E. Jean Carroll, or Stormy Daniels.
It was this:
“It wasn’t my fault that the Republicans didn’t live up to expectations in the MidTerms. I was 233–20! It was the “abortion issue,” poorly handled by many Republicans, especially those that firmly insisted on No Exceptions, even in the case of Rape, Incest, or Life of the Mother, that lost large numbers of Voters. Also, the people that pushed so hard, for decades, against abortion, got their wish from the U.S. Supreme Court, & just plain disappeared, not to be seen again. Plus, Mitch stupid $’s!”
Trump waited a good long while to lob this particular missive into the public sphere, and it might be worth wondering why.
The election was well nigh on two months ago. Is Trump only just now coming to this conclusion? That’s odd considering Democrats have been ceaselessly pushing that same theory since the leaked Dobb’s decision first hit the presses.
Is the jury in, so to speak? Did Trump’s team fully complete a post-election post-mortem over the past months? Was Trump publishing these findings for peer review?
He took his time in putting out this statement. It revealed more than Trump intended.
Sometimes the real story is between the lines. Even when people, or entire organizations, lie — as often to themselves as others — they sometimes give themselves away without meaning to.
Take the New York Times’s recent, and somewhat embarrassing, results of a poll conducted of NYT readers on the subject of politically correct language. Plenty of the progressive left’s favorite politically correct terms — like Latinx — fell utterly flat to the surprise of no one except the editors of the New York Times.
But when the NYT concludes on the polling results that new politically correct terms, “have a long way to go,” the agenda is obvious: This isn’t a news organization dispassionately reporting the results of a public opinion poll. This is a media outlet with an end result firmly in mind; shaping the narrative and socially engineering public opinion to fit it.
How else could the results of a public opinion poll be considered a failure?
Donald Trump similarly revealed his true colors with his opinion on the midterms, which was obviously not off the cuff, but something Trump had two long months to think about.
With his statement, Trump revealed he doesn’t know any more about the pro-life lobby than do his Democratic counterparts who dismiss right-to-lifers out-of-hand as anachronistic religious loonies who have no business whatsoever in modern political discourse and even less dictating the policy positions of their moral, intellectual, and cultural betters.
The grass-roots pro-life lobby — for it couldn’t possibly exist in the face of such unrelenting cultural opposition, so successfully, and for so long, if it were anything else — doesn’t stand up for the rights of the unborn because they enjoy infringing on the reproductive rights of women.
Pro-lifers behave as they do because they genuinely believe, in their hearts, that abortion is the cold-blooded, premeditated murder of a child. In the opinion of pro-lifers, abortion stops a beating heart, it ends forever a unique genetic code that has never been configured before, and will never, ever be again.
Progressives don’t understand this, and they don’t want to. That is understandable, if regrettable. Pro-lifers and their pro-choice opposition should perhaps set their differences aside to pursue a common goal everyone can agree upon, which is long overdue and overlooked: Normalizing motherhood in the workplace.
Donald Trump, who purports to be a champion of the religious right, should have known better.
The faithful, pro-life conservative voters who comprise such a large and loyal portion of Trump’s base, who have stood beside him through allegations of sexual assault, Stormy Daniels, and sundry revelations from his checkered personal past, will not forgive this.
They want to win elections — of course they do. Elections have consequences. Nobody understands that better than the victorious pro-life movement which just managed, in case anyone missed it, to overturn a law it has been trying to undermine for literally decades.
But pro-lifers will never, ever agree to — as they will see it — sacrifice the lives of unborn babies to win elections.
If Trump thinks pro-lifers would be willing to make such a compromise — “if we allow at least some unborn babies to be killed, we can avoid political blowback and win more elections,” — he understands even less about the movement than do progressives.
These are the same voters who oppose casinos in their county, and who will never, ever vote to legalize drugs in their communities. It isn’t that they don’t understand the tax benefits of casinos and legalized recreational drugs; most people understand the fundamentals of taxation and the community chest.
These voters oppose gambling and drugs because they believe — truly believe, with all their hearts — that these things are bad for families, corrosive to communities, and undermine the public good.
For taxpayers who make this kind of moral calculation, no promise of repaired roads, remodeled YMCAs, or new public school gymnasiums could be worth sacrificing the mental, financial, and social health of their neighbors and community.
Voters like these feel even more strongly about the social ills of abortion, which they do not see as remotely empowering to women or society. Donald Trump may have been willing to appoint conservative justices; but that was probably because he, like so many others, never imagined the Supreme Court would overturn Roe V. Wade.
Abortion is a moral point on which pro-lifers of the religious right will never compromise. Progressives understand this, even if they don’t understand why.
Donald Trump should, too.
(contributing writer, Brooke Bell)