As he campaigns for another term, though, he is undermining both accomplishments.
In recent months, Trump has criticized Florida’s ban on abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy — a ban that makes exceptions in cases of rape, incest and threats to the mother’s life — as “terrible.” Intended as a shot at rival Ron DeSantis, the governor who signed that law, the comment inflicted collateral damage on the pro-lifers who have passed similar laws, or ones that protect even more unborn children, in a score of states.
Since abortion became a national issue in the late 1960s, Republicans have never run a presidential candidate who opposed antiabortion policies. If Trump is nominated, that streak will end.
Trump has also tried to set up pro-lifers to take the fall for Republican political losses. He said their extremism caused many defeats in 2022. He is not entirely wrong about that: Candidates who opposed abortion without making exceptions in cases of rape or incest fared badly. But candidates who ran on the kind of pro-life laws Trump calls “terrible” won many elections. Some incumbent governors who signed such laws won reelection by large margins — and none lost.
The no-exceptions candidates who lost were often the very ones Trump had selected, because they also endorsed his conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. Those theories were another electoral anchor, one the former president wants Republicans to ignore. Hence his assignment of full responsibility to pro-lifers. As the nominee, he would be tempted to attribute every setback he encounters to the unpopularity of abortion bans.
Trump’s inner circle is reportedly sour on the kind of Federalist Society judges he appointed, with Trump himself enraged about how many of them dismissed his crankish election theories. He wants the kind of lawyers who indulged him through the end of his term, even though those lawyers were unable to persuade judges — sometimes Trump-appointed judges — to take their cases seriously. Several of the lawyers who stuck with him now face prosecution, and some have pleaded guilty.
For decades, the critique of mainstream conservative judges from the left has been that they talk about the rule of law but really care only about delivering political victories for Republicans. Trump’s objection to those judges is that they don’t live down to that caricature. They let legal niceties, such as evidence and the wording of statutes, get in the way of fighting Trump’s enemies.
There is a self-defeating element to this latest Trump turn. He has already encouraged his supporters to exalt losing political candidates such as Kari Lake over victorious ones such as DeSantis. The subterranean logic, only occasionally voiced, is that if DeSantis were any good the deep state would have kept him from winning. Trump now appears to be applying the same instinct to lawyers: If they win their cases, they’re not hardcore enough.
Lawlessness tempered by incompetence was an unofficial theme of Trump’s presidency. Federalist Society-style lawyers largely insulated the legal operation in the White House and the Justice Department from that trend. Trump is intent on changing that if he gets another term.
Trump is banking on Republicans’ gratitude for his past successes even as he makes it harder to build on them. He wants pro-lifers to reward him for the end of Roe even as he stands in the way of passing the laws that were their motive for wanting Roe gone. He wants credit for a record of judicial appointments that he has no intention of replicating. That this bet looks likely to pay off is another symptom of Republican pathology.
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