Don’t Worry, Mike Pence, Trump Will Sign Your Abortion Ban

Has Donald Trump betrayed the anti-abortion movement? It’s a hard case to make against the president who appointed the Supreme Court justices necessary to gut Roe’s protections once and for all, and who’s gone to some lengths to take a victory lap for doing little more than being the warm body who complied with the Federalist Society’s honey-do list. But this does seem to be the position of Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, who spent last weekend working himself into a lather over Trump’s weeks-old commentary on the matter, in which he appeared to disavow his support for a national ban on abortion.

The end product of Pence’s considerable vexation is an op-ed in The New York Times, a halting work of high dudgeon in which the former vice president meanders through eight paragraphs before eventually alighting on his complaints about his former boss. Pence says that Trump’s “recent retreat from the pro-life cause” has left him “disheartened.” “I was deeply disappointed,” he says, when the former president “stated that he considered abortion to be a states-only issue and would not sign a bill prohibiting late-term abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, even if it came to his desk.”

It’s hard to say who this op-ed is for. Pence doesn’t exactly command any kind of political constituency and he’s now well outside Trump’s circle of influence. And for all of Pence’s melodramatic talk of betrayal, he arrived rather late to this particular party, some weeks after Trump made the statement in question. All that said, I feel duty-bound to tell Pence to cheer up: If Trump is reelected, he will absolutely sign a national abortion ban. I’m really not sure why anyone even doubts this. Take it to the bank.

Perhaps we should go back and actually reflect upon what Trump actually said:

My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint, the states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land, in this case, the law of the state. Many states will be different. Many will have a different number of weeks, or some will have more conservative than others, and that’s what they will be.

If this is why Pence is so mad, the fault perhaps lies in his cognitive abilities, not Trump’s remarks. As Semafor’s Jordan Weissman noted, “If you actually listen to Trump’s statement on abortion, he doesn’t say ‘should’ be left to the states. He says ‘will’ be left to the [states]. It’s just a statement of what the law is. He leaves unsaid what would happen if a ban crosses his desk.”

Indeed, it wasn’t until days later that Trump actually offered any kind of political commitment, telling a reporter on the airport tarmac in Atlanta that he would not sign a national abortion ban into law. Here, I must offer a reminder that this promise isn’t worth much, as Trump is—and I can’t believe I have to explain this to Mike Pence—an inveterate liar. Even the reporting on Trump’s comment is careful to note that this represents a shift from Trump’s prior position on the matter and alludes to the former president’s possible motivation, to “to make one of his greatest political liabilities disappear.”

As I’ve written before, lies and prevarications are what you should expect from Trump and his fellow Republicans this year as they attempt to regain power in a world where the Dobbs decision has rebounded to their political detriment. It’s been well established that conservatives are planning further rollbacks to abortion rights behind the scenes, even as they endeavor to present themselves as more politically palatable to the public—an effort that involves “rebranding” the pro-life movement in an effort to obfuscate its plans.

Here, conservatives haven’t been doing anything different than what they’ve been doing for decades. Pence, in fact, is prevaricating in this very op-ed when he says, “I believe the time has come to adopt a minimum national standard restricting abortion after 15 weeks in order to end late-term abortions nationwide.” I’m not sure he actually believes this! In 2010, Pence told an Indiana anti-abortion group that “abortion should never be legal”—though he offered some concessions on saving the life of the mother. As recently as last May, Pence vowed his support for a national ban on abortion after six weeks. Perhaps Mike Pence should explain to the pro-life movement why he’s become such a squish on the issue before he tries to fillet his former boss.

If Trump is reelected, the last thing you should expect is this kind of wishy-washiness. As Susan Rinkunas recently reported for Jezebel, leaders on the right are “increasingly discussing the prospect” of using the Comstock Act to “ban abortion nationwide if he wins a second term.” The still-on-the-books law from 1875, which the Christian Right has been hoping to revive, is one of the linchpins of Project 2025, the de facto second-term playbook that the Heritage Foundation has created on Trump’s behalf—which states that “the Dobbs decision is just the beginning.”

As Rinkunas documents, the level of prevarication around the right’s out-in-the-open plan to use Comstock as a reproductive rights bulldozer is sky-high—and ably summed up by an anonymously quoted attorney who explained to The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey that Comstock is “obviously a political loser, so just keep your mouth shut. Say you oppose a federal [legislative] ban, and see if that works’ to get elected.” It’s not hard to see this in the subtext of Trump’s own remarks when he talks about the GOP’s “obligation to the salvation of our Nation…TO WIN ELECTIONS.” As Rinkunas notes, Trump is eyeing his own salvation from potential criminal convictions as well.

But why tell the press that you plan to lie to the press about your abortion position? Here we should consider the world-historical awfulness of American political reporting—and how badly they biffed the story when Trump made his abortion remarks. As The Present Age’s Parker Malloy reported, “NBC News, The New York Times, CNN, Axios, CBS News, NPR, ABC News, The Washington Post, The Hill, Forbes, Politico, Financial Times, the Associated Press, and The Wall Street Journal … all botched their reporting of Trump’s statement on abortion policy by inaccurately stating in headlines that he believes abortion rights should be left up to individual states to figure out.”

The media’s track record, to put it mildly, is shit! Sometimes it’s hard to know whether the political press doesn’t realize when they’re getting squid ink sprayed in their faces or if they simply look forward to being abused in that fashion.

It’s honestly hard to discern whether Pence’s op-ed isn’t meant to be more of this same dissembling. Only his near-total irrelevance to the conservative movement exculpates his involvement in their effort to paint Trump and his fellow Republicans as more moderate than they really are. Regardless, Mike Pence should calm down: He’s going to get everything he could possibly want out of a second Trump presidency—except for maybe an apology for that time Trump sent a mob to murder him. Given Pence’s voracious appetite for self-abnegation, though, maybe he doesn’t mind.

Next week marks the last week of oral arguments in this Supreme Court term, leaving little more than a sprint through the remaining decisions left unsettled. As of this writing, some heady matters remain unresolved. The ruling on the abortion pill has yet to be decided; there is a consequential gun rights case on the docket; and as always, the fate of the administrative state hangs in the balance. For many ordinary people, it will be another white-knuckle stretch, as they hope for narrow rulings that might limit the potentially life-altering—and precedent-shattering—damage.

For Democrats, the 6–3 split on the high court is a generational problem. At least, that’s how it’s often framed. In a recent post, my colleague Matt Ford stated the matter pretty starkly: “By some estimates, liberals may not have a chance to appoint a majority of Supreme Court justices until the 2050s. If Barrett stays on the court until she is the same age as Ginsburg, she will serve until at least 2059.” To think about this dilemma in these terms is to resign oneself to the idea that the solution won’t be arriving for several decades. But a lot can happen between now and 2059, and perhaps even sooner, because of another immutable law that holds that “shit happens.”

With that in mind, has anyone noticed that something seems to be up with Justice Clarence Thomas lately?

This past Monday, it was reported that Thomas was absent from the court and not participating remotely in the oral arguments of the day, with Chief Justice John Roberts assuring everyone that Thomas would get the full range of “briefs and transcripts” after the fact, ensuring that he’d be able to participate in the cases. Thomas doesn’t miss many days of work, and unlike a previous instance two years ago in which he missed a number of sessions during a hospital stay, no reason for his most recent absence was offered.

Into this blank space in the story, allow me to remind everyone that Thomas, 75, is the oldest of the justices, the longest-serving member of the court, and while I don’t doubt that Harlan Crow’s Garden of Dictators may be the venue for eldritch incantations of all varieties, there is no reason to believe that Thomas is immortal. In other words, he is still subject to the vagaries of the Universal Law of Shit Happening. (Fun fact: Samuel Alito is only a year younger than Thomas.)

It’s really no one’s fault that the comings and goings of sitting Supreme Court justices can be such a macabre business. Given the opportunity to amend the Founders’ work, I imagine that ending the whole “lifetime appointments for wizened, unaccountable elders in robes with the final say over American life” arrangement would be near the top of the list of improvements. But Democrats are probably too physiologically incapable of stating the potential stakes of the upcoming election to their voters in terms as stark as “Clarence Thomas might not be long for the bench; send Biden back to stem the tide of far-right jurisprudence.”

It’s not as if taking the high road hasn’t led anywhere: As The New Republic contributor Simon Lazarus has pointed out several times, a combination of consistent pressure and high-minded critique from liberals has, over the course of the past few terms, seemed to play a role in the justices taking a more tempered approach to their rulings. This strategy may yet bear more fruit this term, and forestall the kinds of extreme rulings that the conservative bloc’s two elder statesmen might hope to wrangle.

Still it’s weird to watch how some on the left are raising the salience of the justices’ mortality: by urging Democrats to bring Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s career to a premature end, the better to install a younger jurist now while Biden is still president. In that aforementioned article, Ford took a dim view of this way of thinking and suggested instead that Democrats might be better off simply winning elections. Regardless, this is a debate worth moving on from. It’s silly for Democrats to be divided in an election year over anything, let alone Sotomayor’s career, and anyway, no one’s run this plan to pull a late-in-the-day switcheroo past Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, whose permission is still required for such stunts.

Nevertheless, there is definitely a ruthlessness gap between the parties in this regard. Republicans have had enormous success in dispensing with the polite traditions that govern the high court’s promotions and relegations. That the GOP went to elaborate lengths to prevent Obama from appointing Merrick Garland to the bench was, during that ongoing folderol, evidence of how far they were willing to go to consolidate power. But it is also a reminder that there was once a time when the makeup of the Supreme Court wasn’t in their favor and they were staring down the tunnel of the same kind of generational problem that Democrats now face.

But the right has benefited from the happenstances of the Shit Happens Law, as well. The misfortuned timing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death created the opportunity for the 6–3 split and provided the catalyst for the Democrats’ recent agita over Sotomayor. Still, the lessons of the recent past—combined with all this recent talk of court-vacancy gamesmanship—illuminates a simple idea that Democrats should perhaps find the courage to speak aloud, regardless of the grisly implications: Elections matter, because you never know when the chance to appoint a new justice might arise. There is a clear mission at hand: Don’t let any of the court’s elder conservatives have the opportunity to make their escape through the safe harbor of a Trump presidency.

For as long as they have existed, No Labels have wanted one thing: to matter. But these self-styled centrist “problem solvers,” who’ve yet to advance anything resembling a political solution, have always faced substantial obstacles, mainly that they’re a venal gaggle of cosseted Beltway elites with no real constituency in the broader public. That they’ve been allowed to persist with their cotton-headed paeans to bipartisanship is a testament to structural problems with our political system (which is awash in money and enables too many people who care about nothing but maintaining power to come to Washington) and the commentariat (which is packed to the brim with thunderously credulous dolts).

But after more than a decade cashing checks from the biggest fools in the donor class (and some of the biggest assholes as well), No Labels’ demise finally appears imminent. The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that the group has abandoned its plan to field an independent third-party presidential ticket on account of the fact that no actual candidate wanted to have anything to do with the effort. That means the fear that the group might play spoiler and hand the White House to Donald Trump—which it seemed to want—is over. In a statement, No Labels founder Nancy Jacobson said the organization “would remain engaged in promoting unity and giving voice to America’s commonsense majority.” Here’s a thought: Quit instead.

This has been a stupendously silly journey. A month ago, after prevaricating for the better part of a year, No Labels announced that they were moving “forward with the process of forming a presidential ticket to run in the 2024 election,” which everyone thought they had already been doing all this time. And yet, it made headlines. Give these terminally inside-the-Beltway toffs some credit: You can’t become a Washington lifer without mastering the art of making news out of nothing at all. If you can successfully pass activity off as achievement in This Town, more often than not the gravy train will keep on running.

But behind the scenes, matters were considerably more grim. In leaked audio that TNR’s Greg Sargent obtained, it became clear that the organization had “no idea whether it will be able to move forward” with its electoral ambitions. “No serious candidates appear interested,” Sargent reported at the time, “and there’s no sign that this is changing.” A month on, matters had not improved. In mid-March, Geoff Duncan became the latest in a long list of candidates—including GOP primary also-ran Nikki Haley, West Virginia filibuster fanboy Joe Manchin, and former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan—to decline to be the organization’s sacrificial lamb, ending any or all opportunities to finally answer the question: “Who is Geoff Duncan?” (He is apparently the former lieutenant governor of Georgia, but I invite you to double-check.)

Meanwhile, the group was considerably hampered by the recent death of founding chairman Joe Lieberman, whose stalwart defense of the organization was fully in keeping with the former Connecticut senator’s quarter-century-long conniption fit. As the Associated Press reported, Lieberman’s passing “not only mark[ed] an irreplaceable loss for No Labels, it inject[ed] a new level of uncertainty into the organization’s 2024 ambitions.” According to the AP, Mitt Romney, Chris Christie, and Brian Kemp had also turned down the chance to be the organization’s presidential candidate. So many people have rejected this group’s advances that I honestly have a hard time keeping track. (Did you turn down the chance to be the No Labels presidential candidate? Let me know!)

In an effort to prove that there is no way of taking No Labels seriously, Politico’s Alexander Burns offered some last-ditch the tongue-in-cheek advice that the organization should enlist some entertainer or outside-the-Beltway “provocateur” to be its standard-bearer instead of the “bloodless and gray” career dweebs it’s approached. As former Jesse Ventura strategist Bill Hillsman told Burns, No Labels’ efforts were “misconstrued from the beginning,” arguing that “few voters” would be inclined to see “a unity ticket forged from within the political establishment as an answer for their grievances with the system.”

I can’t stress enough that an organization led by Lieberman and Beltway donor doyenne Jacobson is physiologically incapable of imagining an outsider in its ranks. Perhaps that’s why a former Bush administration official recommended in a Hill op-ed that the group go ahead and put Lieberman on the ticket, even though he’s dead. (Come to think of it, a Weekend at Bernie’s presidency would be preferable to a second Trump term.)

At any rate, I have a better idea: No Labels should fold. This organization has a sad and decrepit legacy of timidity and corruption, and as Meredith Shiner reported in 2014, it isn’t even sincere in its core beliefs: Internal documents revealed that its leadership was “banking on more political dysfunction in an attempt to find ‘opportunity’ and relevance for itself.” And let’s face it: The day the organization handed Trump its “problem solver” endorsement during the 2016 presidential primaries should have marked the end of taking it seriously.

Alas, two presidential cycles later, these lowlifes’ grift persists. But now that their “unity ticket” plan to doom the republic has come to naught, all of the people who’ve hitherto been fleeced by them, financially or ideologically, should wise up and pull the plug. The rest of us can only be grateful that No Labels’ last hurrah—much like all of their grand designs—foundered without bringing ruin to us all. Still, it’s a searing indictment of the United States that people with such bad ideas can ascend to such great heights that they could help trigger our democracy’s demise.

This article was adapted from Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Last August, TNR’s Matt Ford took a look a year ahead, saw that former President Donald Trump would be competing in a Republican primary while serving as a semiprofessional defendant in no less than four trials, and declared that it was destined to “get pretty weird along the way.” A healthy dose of weirdness has, truly, been delivered. Trump now owes something in the vicinity of $500 million in legal fines, bringing us closer to the answer of an age-old question: “Does Donald Trump have $500 million?” The certainty of this burden, and the evident frustrations of the former president as he seeks out a sucker to take his bond, have stuck him in the teeth of a pay-up-or-shut-up deadline, one that may well unmoor him. I don’t think Trump minds being thought of as corrupt even one bit—but he hates being thought of as broke.

But to liberals’ considerable consternation, Trump is in a strong position both electorally and legally. While he owes E. Jean Carroll and the state of New York some mountains of money, he’s catching a lot of breaks elsewhere in the legal system, notably in the form of procedural delays that threaten to push his various criminal trials much later in the year and potentially past Election Day. For those who have been eyeing polls suggesting that President Joe Biden would benefit if Trump caught a conviction, each delay has been greeted as a damaging wound to Democrats’ hopes. But there may be an upside: Democrats will stop waiting for someone else to save them.

The Trump era revealed a certain myopia among Democratic elites, who reacted to Trump’s election as if it were an aberration, a foreign object injected into the bloodstream of the body politic—one that our democracy’s immune system would surely recognize and destroy quickly. And so liberals yassified Robert Mueller without regard for how difficult the task of convicting a sitting president of crimes truly was. They threw their back into impeachment proceedings without regard for the fact that Republican senators do, in fact, exist. Now, I fear, too many have put their hopes on Jack Smith—the dark, gritty Robert Mueller reboot who will finally finish the job. 

But with the Supreme Court’s decision to take up Trump’s presidential immunity case—and back-burnering it until April—it’s an open question as to when Smith will even get started on his January 6 insurrection case. Most observers believe there is no way to wrap things up by November. So be it. There is no deus ex machina coming to save Democrats, no miracle cure for Trump. But rather than lapse into another long sorrow session, Democrats should be glad to be unburdened of the colossal expectations that the judicial system would save them, and get up off the fainting couch to mount the nimble and powerful campaign that our democracy deserves. 

It begins with an attitude adjustment: Instead of being despondent that Trump can’t be convicted by Election Day, be damned glad that he won’t be acquitted before America casts its votes. Because Trump getting off scot-free was always a possible outcome. What was the plan, exactly, if those hoped-for judicial punishments ended up being a series of exonerations for Trump to crow about?

The good news is that Democrats don’t actually need courts to hand down a bunch of verdicts to make hay out of Trump’s legal woes. Everything that Trump is standing trial for remains a live issue, and in the absence of breaking news stories about the latest courtroom blowup or legal setback, Democrats have a free hand to feed the media beast with derogatory information related to these trials (the insurrection, the attempted Georgia election coup, his rampant fraud, the stolen documents), as well as other scandals (the foreign money he’s pocketed, his role in Roe’s demise, his plans to transform the civil service into an instrument of personal retribution). 

As Brian Beutler notes in a recent edition of Off Message, there are plenty of creative ways “for Democrats to draw attention to Trump’s corruption even if he’s able to delay official legal proceedings.” They just need to break with some old habits:

Democrats put serene faith in the power of paid advertising to convey information like this, so much so that they devote almost no strategic thought into generating free media around these disqualifying liabilities. Meanwhile, everything Trump’s doing can be viewed as an effort to dodge the free-media penalty of being a criminal, a rapist, and a fraud. 

Democrats really can’t afford to lapse into thinking that the media, the scales finally loosed from its eyes, will eventually notice the merits of their case and come out in support of it. They have to recognize that the political press prefers to be met on the proverbial low road, and get over the crass implications of participating in a politics that’s less high-minded.  

Into the vacant space left by delayed trial proceedings, Democrats need to tell the story of how Trump came to be so entangled in the first place, reminding people that this man paid hush money to an adult film star with whom he was having an affair, illegally took classified documents and stored them at Mar-a-Lago as if they were spare toilet paper (then lied about it and obstructed justice), also lied about his net worth to defraud others of countless millions, led a “criminal racketeering enterprise” to overturn the 2020 election result in Georgia, and of course directed a mob of thousands to attack the Capitol. 

And above all, they must remind voters that Trump is seeking the presidency precisely because he wants to dodge responsibility for all of these crimes. This is the bumper sticker: Joe Biden is running for office; Donald Trump is running from the law.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Our little experiment in multiracial democracy rarely leaves an encounter with the Supreme Court unscathed, but Monday’s 9–0 decision in Trump v. Anderson—in which the justices ruled that Colorado could not keep Donald Trump off the ballot—has left a deeper wound than most. As The New Republic’s Matt Ford explained soon after the unanimous, unsigned per curiam decision was handed down, the ruling is an absolute cock-up that willfully misinterpreted the plain text of the Fourteenth Amendment, seemed to misunderstand how either the Constitution or most elections in the United States work, took up questions that hadn’t been brought before the court in the first place, and found terrible ways to answer them.

The American people began the day armed with a constitutional fail-safe that provided them with the means of keeping an insurrectionist off the ballot. By noon, the court had ruled that they weren’t entitled to that tool, that it would be up to the voters themselves to decide whether an insurrectionist can hold higher office, and that their decision was subject to review and reversal in the form of a subsequent insurrection. Seems like a bad way to run a country.

As far as the legal matters in play are concerned, the ruling is, for the lack of a more polite descriptor, hot garbage—a sentiment, as Ford documented, shared by many people, including those who actually believed Trump should remain on the ballot. But outside of the jurisprudential hash left steaming on the courthouse steps, there is a rather savage truth sitting there, sub rosa, in the decision: It seems the Roberts court unanimously agrees that the Republican Party is truly, and despicably, lawless.

“How could the court butcher the ruling so badly?” asked Ford. “The simplest answer appears to be fear.” Fear was especially apparent in Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s admonition of the liberal trio’s fiery concurrence. “The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election,” she wrote. “Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up.” It’s a bit rich coming from one of the justices whose rulings, most notably on the abortion rights front, have done a great deal to elevate that “national temperature,” and sow considerable chaos along the way.

But as New Republic contributor Jess Coleman quipped, “Things definitely tend to get messy when a political party unequivocally chooses an insurrectionist as its nominee.” It’s on this precise front that the court curiously avoided taking an obvious escape hatch: disputing that Trump had, in fact, aided an insurrection. Trump’s legal team provided that off-ramp, arguing that the former president was innocent of such treachery. Still, as Ford told me, most of the constitutional arguments that Trump’s lawyers advanced in his defense “only apply if, all other things being equal, he did participate in an insurrection.” That the Supreme Court chose to try to resolve the matter along constitutional lines suggests an admission: They believe Trump to have done the very thing that the Fourteenth Amendment forbids. From there, their mission became to backfill a rationale in support of the notion that Colorado’s remedy would cause too much pandemonium if it were to be administered.

But as they put themselves to this task, the court continued to quietly snitch out the GOP for their misrule. At one point, the court warns in its unsigned opinion of an “evolving electoral map” that could “dramatically change the behavior of voters, parties, and states across the country, in different ways and at different times,” potentially leading to the nullification of the people’s will. Here, Ford said, the court was “essentially caving to threats”—chief among them the ones raised in amicus briefs from a “coalition of Republican-led states” that darkly hinted at the possibility that “some states might exclude other presidential candidates from the ballot if Trump were disqualified.”

Naturally, it’s hard to see why anyone should fear a Republican secretary of state citing the Fourteenth Amendment in an effort to remove a Democratic candidate who had participated in an insurrection. I daresay that I am 100 percent in favor of such Democrats being barred from higher office. Here, however, the justices seem to be implying that the GOP will have reckless disregard for the law, and kick off candidates who cannot be said to have contributed to the sort of crimes that the Fourteenth Amendment inveighs against.

Indeed, we can foreclose the possibility of Democrats abusing their power in this fashion. For starters, at least one Republican secretary of state, Jay Ashcroft, had already issued such a threat, the cited reason simply being that he was upset that Colorado and Maine had moved to keep Trump off the ballot. Meanwhile, there is no such behavior among Democrats: Nikki Haley, a more fearsome opponent for President Joe Biden, was left on the ballot, untroubled by Democratic secretaries of state that might have wanted to help the Democratic candidate. (Also, it wasn’t Democrats who sent amicus briefs to the court written in the spirit of “Nice democracy you’ve got here, be a shame if anything happened to it.”)

It’s understandable that the Supreme Court would be worried about a Republican Party that doubles as a criminal cartel, because we’ve seen how, in the Trump era, they have descended into that lowly state, with one of their chief exports being the fomenting of political violence. This fact happened to be on the mind of Colorado Secretary of State Jenna Griswold as she wrestled with whether or not to invoke the Fourteenth Amendment in the first place: After the Supreme Court ruling was handed down, Griswold gave an interview on cable news where she lamented how the insurrection to which she was trying to respond hasn’t actually ended, as threats to her state election officials keep pouring in.

“We have had 38 percent of our county clerks step down since 2020,” Griswold said. “We can’t allow people who would use intimidation or threats to win that battle.” From the Supreme Court came the reply: If you don’t allow those people to win, the Republican Party might very well hurt you next.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.