The Right Is About to Try to Turn Trump Into an Abortion Moderate
There is precedent for this. Some of you may remember the first Barack Obama-Mitt Romney debate in 2012. Romney had spent a year-plus on the trail taking pretty hard-right positions (at least, for 2012; some seem mild now). Then, in that first debate, he turned on a dime. He took a range of centrist positions and waltzed casually away from his old primary-season positions as if he’d never even heard of them. And the right-wing commentariat went along with the whole act. If the Obama campaign hadn’t done a good job over the next month of reminding voters of those old positions, President Romney might well have been sworn in the following January.
That is exactly what I predict will happen this week. Sure a few voices will be allowed to dissent. Certain ministers will express their concern, and a House member or three will be permitted to say that a national ban remains an abstract, long-term goal. But that will be about it. The new line will be that Trump is the centrist here, and Joe Biden the extremist.
The big question is whether swing voters will buy this lie, and in what numbers. Whether or not they shift in Trump’s favor will depends a lot on what Democrats do in response—and how quickly. One obvious thing they need to do is keep on showing those clips of Trump bragging about getting rid of Roe, over and over. Another is to show clips of the numerous Republicans saying they want a blanket federal ban, just to remind voters of what nearly everyone in the GOP actually believes and wants. Democrats also need to make daily hay of Project 2025: The 180-day playbook that the right intends to run if Trump is re-elected, which is stuffed to the gills with all manner of extreme, unpopular, and extremely unpopular things the right have fantasized about doing to this country. The sentence from Project 2025 that you will want to remember is on page six of its foreword: “But the Dobbs decision is just the beginning.” This is the out-in-the-open plan that puts the lie to any and all of Trump’s feints at “moderation.”