Trump on abortion.

If this election season is a D&D campaign Trump is the barbarian that tells the elven queen exactly what he's going to do with all the cool shit he finds in the sacred catacombs while he's down there fixing her ghost problem. And the rest of the party is like DUDE YOU CAN'T SAY THAT WE JUST GOT BLESSED IN A FIVE HOUR RITUAL SO WE COULD EVEN GET IN THERE WITHOUT BEING CURSED and Trump shrugs and walks out of the room because he's bored of not stabbing ghosts. 

The above quote is not mine, I found it on the internet and it's a pretty beautiful description of the man. The thing is, he isn't really much farther to the right than any other Republican candidate of this cycle, he just doesn't hide it well, or at all.

Last night and today Trump spent some time on Chris Mathews, and he of all people did a pretty decent job of getting him to actually say something sort of substantive about policy, and while a lot of shit came out, stuff like backing out of the Geneva convention and something to do with possibly nuking Europe, what has been blowing up this cycle are his comments on abortion, followed by his near immediate statement taking it all back.

The comments drew pretty near universal blowback from both the right and the left, and rightfully so, but the thing is he isn't actually saying anything these people don't already believe, rather, like the barbarian in the above metaphor,, he is just saying it outright rather than leaving it unsaid and doing it anyway.

And to be fair, punishing women for getting abortions would be a consistent platform. If you believe that a fetus is a person, and if you believe that aborting a fetus is murder, then a blanket ban on abortion in all its forms, with no exceptions and with punishments for both the mother and the provider are actually consistent beliefs and policies. What Trump said is actually more ideologically consistent than the majority of the right have been, which is the point really, because when you actually spell out the policies the right wants, they become incredibly unpalatable to the vast majority of the country no matter what side of the political divide they lie on.

If abortion is murder, then the women who pay for it should logically be punished like anyone who offers to pay to have someone killed, if they shouldn't be punished, then why should it be illegal? The idea of the women involved somehow lacking any agency or responsibility for the act seems like a leap that doesn't make a ton of sense, and kinda offensive really, but I admit my perspective there might be skewed.

Weirdly enough, Trump's proposal actually assumes women have more agency than the official party line, albeit only to punish them for something.

So why did the right react with such horror to the idea? Mostly because they are huge hypocrites and actually want abortion to be around as both an enemy to rally against, as well as an option if they need it. Specifically attacking women who get abortions is pretty unpalatable to the majority of people regardless of party affiliation.

What is also interesting is that Trump walked the statement back almost immediately following the interview in which he said it, this was probably the second biggest mistake he has made this campaign, the first being the decision to skip the debate before the Iowa caucuses. Walking it back does nothing to convince those opposed to him that he is worth voting for, and while his loyal base probably doesn't care what he says about abortion, they do care about weakness, and a public disavowal like this looks a lot like a sign of weakness from where I sit. If he'd ignored it, or said completely the opposite during the next interview or stump and denied the existence of the original statement, it would have gone better for him, but admitting weakness and publicly changing his mind is a sign the base is going to have a hard time ignoring.

I don't personally think Trump has much of an opinion either way on the topic, I think he just looked at the party platform and asked "how can I go farther to the right?" without realizing that in that particular field, the establishment is about as far right already as people will tolerate.

This doesn't kill him in the primary, it is far too late for that, but combined with his declining poll numbers in the upcoming states, it probably will depress turnout a bit, maybe even enough to keep him from getting 1237 delegates before the RNC, which is the best possible option, so as horrible as it was to hear, I am happy to see he has no interest in moderating himself or trying to rest on his laurels and coast into the convention.