Donald Trump Is Trying To Obscure His Position on Abortion

Donald Trump has often bragged about his role in eliminating federal abortion rights. “I was able to kill Roe v. Wade,” he has boasted. But as the November election approaches, with reproductive freedom likely to be a defining issue at the ballot box, the former president has sought to soften and obscure his stance—including on a ballot measure in his home state of Florida.

Speaking to NBC News on Thursday, Trump suggested the six-week ban enacted by Governor Ron DeSantis was “too short”: “I told them I want more weeks,” the former president said. But his lack of clarity left him some wiggle room, and his campaign quickly released a statement emphasizing that he has not yet said how he will vote on the Florida ballot initiative. “He simply reiterated that he believes six weeks is too short,” the statement read.

Trump’s comments—which he’d previously said he’d discuss in a press conference “at some point in the near future”—came the same day he claimed that a second Trump administration would pay for Americans’ IVF treatments. “We just think it’s great, and we need great children, beautiful children in our country,” he told NBC News. Earlier this summer, the Republican Party adopted a policy platform that supported states instituting fetal personhood through legislation and access to IVF. However, it’s unclear how the party would support both as they are widely seen as at odds. Trump told Tulsi Gabbard in a Wisconsin town hall Thursday that he is “actually very much for” IVF. “We want to produce babies in this country, right?” he said. “We want to produce babies.”

Trump—who just months ago spoke before a group that seeks to “eradicate” abortion—is attempting to neutralize attacks from Kamala Harris over his extreme record on reproductive freedom. But in trying to cast himself as a moderate on the issue, he may be risking the support of some of the antiabortion crusaders who helped elect him the first time: “It’s disappointing to say,” antiabortion activist Lila Rose told Politico on Thursday, “but perhaps he personally lacks principle on this issue.”

The ex-president, of course, “lacks principle” on just about every issue. But his extreme record betrays his equivocating rhetoric: His first term led to the fall of Roe—and if he wins in November, Harris warned in a rally Thursday, “Donald Trump will go further.”