TWENTY DAYS AGO, DONALD TRUMP promised he would soon talk about how he would vote on Florida’s abortion rights initiative, but a number of evangelical leaders and advisers are telling him to just keep his mouth shut about it.
Poll after poll has shown that abortion is a lost cause for Trump and Republicans in general. And with an amendment on the ballot in Florida in November that would enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution, he has made a major effort to avoid talking about it– or too many details. For some of the activists who hope the amendment will be defeated, that’s fine.
“The most important thing we need from him is for him to win,” said Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life and an adviser to Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 and 2020, who is still in contact with Trump’s presidential campaign over the proposed Florida law change.
“If he didn’t say anything about abortion between now and Election Day, that wouldn’t bother me, simply because we know where he stands,” said Pavone, a prominent activist and laicized priest who opposes the initiative in Florida, said The Bulwark“I believe he is pro-life. He has proven that. That’s why I don’t need pro-life speeches from him. It’s my job to articulate pro-life principles, and it’s his job to be elected and to govern.”
That activists are hoping for silence from Trump (rather than an alliance) underscores how far abortion politics have shifted. Some anti-abortion leaders share Pavone’s view that it is OK – and perhaps even wise – for Trump to sit out the Florida debate. But in interviews with a dozen other senior conservative politicians and advisers to Trump, others said they believe the former president is betraying the movement by not participating in Florida’s initiative, which is considered Amendment 4.
For Trump, abortion remains a hornet’s nest. The former president has repeatedly expressed his pride in the role he played in repealing the Roe v. Wade. But he also has has vetoed any new abortion restrictions, praised not to restrict access to abortion pills if he is re-elected, and his campaign will not say if he were to veto a federal law protecting abortion rights.
While some activists like Pavone are willing to accept Trump’s silence, his ever-changing statements and his shifting rhetoric (Trump recently promised to stand up for “reproductive rights”), for others they are too much.
“Due to their increasingly pro-abortion position, Trump/Vance are extending the electoral strategy of the lesser of two evils into an untenable position,” said abortion opponent Lila Rose. said this week. “With no indication that they will commit to making our country a safer place for unborn children, they make it impossible for pro-lifers to support them. Being less passionate about killing babies than Harris/Walz is not enough.”
A Trump campaign adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said activists like Rose have no realistic idea of the reality of modern election campaigns.
“She should start a new group called CLA: The Coalition to Lose on Abortion,” the consultant said.
Trump’s advisers have suggested he privately opposes Amendment 4 — drafted by a coalition of liberal groups led by Planned Parenthood — because it is too permissive. But they also admit they have no idea if or when Trump will discuss it, although the former president said in an Aug. 8 press conference that he would announce his position “in the near future.”
Many in Trump’s orbit see the amendment as an unwelcome trap that keeps him on the defensive against Vice President Kamala Harris, who has made support for legal abortion a core principle of her campaign. If there is any support for Amendment 4 in the Trump campaign, no one is admitting it. And longtime Trump advisers like Michael R. Caputo, a theology student at Ave Maria University in Florida, have made their opposition to Amendment 4 clear while attacking activists like Rose who criticize the candidate.
“Why isn’t Lila working to stop abortion laws and referendums in the states? Why isn’t she in Florida to FIGHT Amendment 4?” Caputo published Tuesday morning. “What does she do besides chatting on social media and raising and spending millions? How much do you PAY yourself @LilaGraceRose?”
Rose didn’t answer.
WHAT IS CLEAR ABOUT TRUMP’S VIEWS ON ABORTION IN FLORIDA is that he considers the state’s existing six-week abortion ban to be “too harsh,” a Statement he made to me last year after I repeatedly tried to pin him down on his point of view.
Abortion opponents stuck with Trump even after he protested the ban. The fact that many continue to stand by him despite his “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to Amendment 4 suggests that they are suffering from the political setbacks they have suffered in the two years since the Fourth Amendment passed. roe was repealed. Abortion opponents watched as voters across the country protected abortion rights and rejected restrictive initiatives in both red and blue states since the Supreme Court’s decision in 2022. The repeal of roe The Democrats were also motivated and played a role in the Republicans’ poor performance in the midterm elections that year.
This frightened Trump so much that he began privately referring to abortion as “the A-word.”
For more than a year, Trump has been walking a tightrope, boasting that he helped roe He did not go into much detail, saying only that he opposed late-term abortions, supported exceptions to abortion (in cases of rape, incest, or when the mother’s life was in danger), and believed the issue should be decided at the federal level.
Florida is a special case among the 10 states voting on abortion rights this November because it is Trump’s adopted home state. As a proposed state constitutional amendment, the initiative needs 60 percent of voters to approve it, a high hurdle. The initiative currently has more than that in polls, even though opponents still have millions of dollars to spend on it.
Lynda Bell, an opponent of Amendment 4 and chair of Florida Right to Life, said Trump’s opposition to late-term abortions and his advocacy of parental rights shows that he would not and should not support Amendment 4. She said she cannot imagine Trump being silent on the amendment because the issue will be “a debate question. It will be a media question. And they will continue to say, ‘Look at this pro-lifer dodging the question.'”
“When he’s going to dodge, he’s going to dodge,” she added. “I think if he was really smart, he would handle it in a way that would spin the issue in a way that makes the left look radical. … I don’t want Donald Trump to look like a lackey.”
A leading evangelical leader who advises the Trump campaign and works with The Bulwark complained on condition of anonymity that anti-abortion activists had done too little to promote more family-friendly policies outside of abortion, resulting in them losing “the hearts and minds” of the movement in the face of a “media campaign by Planned Parenthood.”
The politician argued that Trump was “smart to stay out of the fray. Unfortunately, it’s a losing situation for him. If he speaks out against the Florida ballot initiative, you know there’s $100 million ready to continuously berate him for his overly restrictive abortion bans.”
Another social conservative who has advised Trump agreed that he should keep his mouth shut because “when he talks about abortion, he loses” – but “when he talks about the economy and immigration, he wins.”
The adviser was not entirely optimistic about the political situation, however, noting that anti-abortion enthusiasm is at risk this fall, especially after Trump’s campaign pushed through changes to the Republican platform that significantly reduced the focus on abortion.
“It’s not that the program ended up being wrong,” the person said. “But we had no reason to believe that we were going to go into a meeting where the program would be adopted with virtually no debate after 15 minutes and then it would be all over. So some of us are scared to death. And the fact that we’re not getting an answer to this (Amendment 4) is exacerbating the PTSD.”
