Trump Contorts Himself on Abortion inSearch of Political Gain
 

Former President Donald J. Trump at a campaign event in La Crosse, Wis., on Thursday. He has angered some social conservatives by equivocating on his position on abortion rights.  Jim Vondruska for The New York TimesCredit...


At the age of 53, in a 1999 interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Donald J. Trump described himself as “very pro-choice.”

In 2011, without any explanation about the change, he informed a packed room at a conservative conference that he was now “pro-life.”

In 2016, as a Republican candidate for president, he told the MSNBC host Chris Matthews that he had become so ardently opposed to abortion rights that he would even support punishments for women who got abortions. He did not realize that this position went too far even for the social conservatives to whom he was trying to pander, and he quickly reversed himself.

The 2024 version of Mr. Trump is once again tying himself in knots — but this time the stakes could not be higher.The latest example came on Friday, when Mr. Trump — nearly a full day after his campaign had to clean up his suggestion that he might support a Florida ballot measure allowing abortion up to 24 weeks following backlash from social conservatives — told Fox News that he would vote against it.

Back in 2022, the former president had told allies — as the Supreme Court was preparing to overturn Roe v. Wade — that the move would hurt his party. Since that year, when Republicans underperformed expectations in the midterm elections, Mr. Trump has been privately emphatic with advisers that in his view the abortion issue alone could kill their chances of victory in November. And he is willing to make as many rhetorical and policy contortions as he deems necessary to win.

It is through that narrow political lens that Mr. Trump has been weighing the subject, despite his role in reshaping the Supreme Court that overturned the landmark 1973 abortion decision.The results have been confusing and fluid, a contradictory mess of policy statements as he has once again tried to rebrand himself on an issue that many of his supporters view in strict moral terms, and had come to believe that he did, too.

Mr. Trump’s shifting views have been especially difficult for social conservatives to navigate. Some anti-abortion leaders in his orbit have tried lobbying him to align his public position with theirs. Many others are staying quiet and sticking by him, hoping that what he is saying now is just an act to get elected and that, if he does get elected, he will again govern as “the most pro-life president” in American history.