Trump Abandons Pro-lifers; They May Abandon Him
In 1985, President Ronald Reagan addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference. It had been a very good five years for Republicans, starting with his own election in 1980 and, for the first time in 28 years, a Republican Senate.
He began by thanking the various groups in the room: the American Conservative Union, Young Americans for Freedom, National Review, and Human Events. “When you work in the White House, you don’t get to see your old friends as much as you’d like,” he playfully said.
And then, he delivered a line that would become famous: “And I always see the CPAC speech as my opportunity to ‘dance with the one that brung ya.’ ”
It was an important acknowledgment that conservatives had worked hard to wrest decades of control away from Democrats to become a mainstream party. “We are where we are because we’re winning the contest of ideas,” he said.
Reagan knew how he’d become president — it wasn’t because he was a kind of messianic figure who’d been ordained to rule over the fawning masses. It was because conservatives, who’d spent a century in the political “wilderness,” had slowly and arduously built a movement of ideas and coalitions on the backs of the very people in that room that night, a movement that went all the way back to Barry Goldwater.
Former President Donald Trump, whose loyalty has always flowed one way — to him — does not care to dance with the ones that brung him.
In a Truth Social announcement this week, he laid out his new — and vague — abortion policy.
“My view is now that we have abortion where everyone 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.”
There was no mention of a national abortion ban, which is what many pro-life voters have demanded and were expecting. Nor was there a commitment to a six or 10- or even 15-week ban, which some Republican governors have since enacted after the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
While Trump often likes to take credit for that seismic judicial event, and calls himself the most pro-life president in history, kicking the issue over to the states can rightly be seen as an act of political cowardice and expediency.
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