Trump White House Has Troubling Response to the Creation of a New Pro-Life Group
In some cases, savvy political actors must make allowances for what former President George W. Bush might call “strategery.”
Unless something dramatically changes, however, this does not feel like one of those cases.
According to Axios, at least two advisers to President Donald Trump have denounced Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri for launching an anti-abortion political group ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
Hawley’s Love Life Initiative, launched in cooperation with his wife, Erin Hawley, will support pro-life ballot measures at the state level, as well as television ads.
“We think that there needs to be a… strong voice advocating for life,” Hawley said.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration, at least according to two advisers, views the abortion issue as a political loser.
“Clearly, Senator Hawley and his political team learned nothing from the 2022 elections, when the SCOTUS abortion ruling [overturning Roe v. Wade] resuscitated the Democrats in the midterms,” a “close” Trump adviser said, per Axios.
Indeed, Republicans engaged in substantial hand-wringing over the 2022 “red wave” that never materialized. Many blamed the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which corrected the half-century-old lie that abortion qualifies as a constitutional right.
After all, millions of women, even in red states, have bought that lie.
Thus, rather than make a conservative argument for life, Trump’s advisers appear determined to focus their energies elsewhere.
A second adviser, for instance, told Axios that Republicans must take “aggressive action focused on positive gains in the economy.”
“That alone will be the driving force behind the next election,” the adviser said. “Picking a fight on an issue like abortion in a midterm is the height of asinine stupidity.”
Do Trump’s advisers have a point? In certain circumstances, as a matter of pragmatism, yes, they would.
For instance, in August 1861, during the first year of the American Civil War, Union General John C. Fremont, who commanded the Department of the West, issued an emancipation proclamation freeing slaves in Missouri, which, though a slave state, had not joined the Confederacy.
President Abraham Lincoln, fearing that Missouri and the remaining border states would join the rebellion, rescinded Fremont’s order.
Lincoln, of course, hated slavery. But he also needed to keep the remaining Union intact. Thus, he did not have the luxury of taking a moral stance on the slavery issue when the Fremont order, in a practical sense, likely would have added strength to the slaveholders’ cause.
In short, “strategery,” or what Lincoln would have called “prudence,” sometimes takes precedence.
The present case, however, does not feel like one of those instances.
Had Trump’s advisers argued, for example, that we cannot risk the optics of an abortion fight while we ramp up deportations or battle tooth-and-nail to eradicate the deep state, then we might have had to pause and consider their views. But they did not.
Likewise, had they insisted that the public mind is not yet ripe for a profitable national debate on abortion, we would have at least had to consider the pragmatic question of timing before rejecting it in favor of doing the right thing. But they did not do that either.
Instead, they merely complained that trying to prevent the murder of babies would interfere with their economic message for the midterms.
To that assertion, conservatives should reply that unless Republicans start governing like Republicans, we will care nothing about your midterms.
Republicans hold power now. When will they do something that makes them worthy of that power?
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