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The mere suggestion of slapping down the pro-life dream of a six-week abortion ban would be a campaign-ending stance for just about any Republican presidential primary candidate.
Not for former President Donald Trump, who has made a habit of trampling on Washington’s conservative orthodoxy and emerging unscathed and often stronger.
Mr. Trump has changed directions for Republicans in areas such as free trade and defense policy, and party voters have followed.
“It’s certainly the case that people are willing to treat him differently when it comes to holding him accountable for what he says and what he does,” said Christopher Budzisz, a political science professor at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa. “If you start from the premise that he’s not a normal candidate, when he does things that for a normal candidate would kill their candidacy, it wouldn’t kill his because he’s starting from a different starting point.”
Abortion policy could be his biggest test.
Many Republican presidential candidates are calling for strict limits in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, but the former president has been a dissonant voice.
“Terrible” is how he described the bill that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed. The state law bars abortion once a heartbeat is detectible, usually five to six weeks into pregnancy.
Religious and social conservatives have held Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds and fellow Republicans across the country in high esteem for similar laws.
Mr. Trump refused to endorse a more flexible 15-week ban while promising to negotiate an agreement that would work for both sides.
His stance worries some pro-life voters, who have constituted the Republican Party’s shock troops for decades.
“Trump is criticizing a law and lawmaker that acted, following the will of the people, on what he made possible through the Dobbs decision,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. She was referring to the Supreme Court case that overturned Roe last year.
The former president says he is not shying away from abortion politics. He takes credit for installing three of the justices who were part of the 5-4 ruling that overturned Roe.
He also says the party must confront political realities, including the sense that the pro-life position is losing at the ballot box. Indeed, where others blame his complaints about the 2020 presidential election, Mr. Trump said abortion politics caused Republicans’ struggles in congressional elections last year.
He said Republicans must at least embrace exceptions to abortion bans, such as cases of rape or incest or when the mother’s life is at stake.
“We would probably lose the majorities in 2024 without the exceptions and perhaps the presidency itself,” Mr. Trump said at a recent campaign stop in Dubuque. “In order to win in 2024, Republicans must learn how to properly talk about abortion.”
He told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that his approach would be to negotiate a peace between the pro-life and pro-choice sides. That kind of conciliatory line has doomed other Republican presidential hopefuls.
Since 1980, no Republican running as a pro-choice candidate has won the party’s presidential nomination.
In 2000, Texas Gov. George W. Bush hardened his pro-life stance to beat back criticism that he was squishy on that core conservative value. He went on to win the Iowa caucuses and the presidency.
As governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney also underwent a conversion. He ditched his longtime pro-choice stance to prepare for a 2008 presidential campaign, which he lost, and a 2012 run, when he captured the party’s nomination but lost to President Obama.
New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani attempted in 2008 to prove that a pro-choice candidate could win the party’s nomination. He went from front-runner to afterthought and failed to win a single delegate for the nominating convention.
Mr. Trump’s abortion politics have been tricky to pin down over the years. In the 1990s, he proclaimed himself “very pro-choice.” By 2016, he presented himself to social conservatives as a believer in the pro-life cause.
His new tone has social conservatives fretting.
“Donald Trump is as pro-choice now as he was in 1994,” Bob Vander Plaats, head of the conservative Christian Iowa Family Leader, said on social media. “Just because he appointed three Supreme Court justices, they overturned Roe v. Wade — that was a transactional deal. It wasn’t a transformational belief.”
The former president’s other challenges to Republican orthodoxy are many.
The party’s leaders in Washington are unabashed free traders, but Mr. Trump has long-held protectionist views. He blasted “globalists” and freely wielded tariffs as a policy tool during his four years in office.
His break with Republican war hawks has opened a major conversation within the party, particularly over U.S. support for Ukraine in its war with Russia.
Mr. Trump also has reset the party’s agenda on immigration. He reversed the Republican National Committee’s postmortem on its 2012 presidential election loss, which blamed an overly harsh stance on illegal immigration, and ushered in the most aggressive policy in history against illegal immigration.
The payoff has been an unshakable lead in early state polling and a growing sense that Mr. Trump’s rivals in the 2024 Republican presidential race are operating on borrowed time.
Mr. Budzisz said much of it seems driven by political calculations.
“I guess not having hard-core convictions is actually kind of liberating for him because he can say these things without any sort of, you know, second thought or shame or anything else, right?” he said. “So he has a certain, there’s a certain freedom associated with the fact that at his core, he’s a pretty fungible character.”
• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.
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