It’s been more than two years since the U.S. Supreme Court decided Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and yet, this past week, Donald Trump and the Republican Party showed that they are no closer to an answer on how to succeed politically — on a national level — in the post-Roe v. Wade landscape.

Trump, ironically, seems to grasp the necessity of finding an answer. And yet, in trying to get out, he inadvertently proved why there is no answer for today’s GOP.

Trump understands that the extremism on display in the wake of Dobbs is not supported by a large majority Americans.

From the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling that would have likely ended in vitro fertilization (IVF) in the state, Idaho’s Republican leaders fighting the Biden administration on emergency abortion care, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton forcing a woman to leave the state to get necessary abortion care, and so on, Trump keeps trying to insist he’s not one of those extremists.

The problem is that he still keeps taking credit for overturning Roe v. Wade, he doesn’t have specific answers as to where and how he will oppose extremism, and everyone around him keeps forcing him to go back to the extremism he keeps insisting he doesn’t support.

Falling back in the polls since Vice President Kamala Harris took the top spot on the ticket for the Democrats, Trump — aware of the many abortion ballot measures this November — saw that even his initial post-primary effort to present a moderated position on abortion and reproductive rights was not acceptable to a sufficient portion of the public. (This was, itself, inevitable. His “the states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both” position was, and is, “unrealistic, unworkable, and unpopular,” as I wrote in April when he announced it.)

On the day after Harris’s Democratic National Convention speech highlighted how Republican policies would restrict abortion and reproductive rights, Trump posted what is certainly one of the least convincing social media posts ever posted.

His claim that a second Trump administration “will be great for women and their reproductive rights” would be laughable if it weren’t deadly serious.

And yet, with it, the other problem for Trump became clear.

Many on the right took it very seriously. As Philip Klein at National Review put it:

Trump wasn’t done, either. This past week, Trump made a fact-free, policy-free claim that in a second Trump administration, either the federal government or insurance would pay for IVF treatments — despite Republicans’ opposition to even more modest IVF-access legislation this summer.

He also suggested he would be voting for Florida’s abortion ballot measure, telling NBC News, when asked specifically about his vote on the Florida measure, “I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks.” (Florida’s law is a six-week ban.)

That, it turned out, was a step too far.

Within 24 hours, he reversed on that, saying that he would be voting no.

As NBC News put it:

The backlash from anti-abortion advocates was fierce after Trump's interview with NBC News, with some warning that the Republican presidential nominee was risking losing support from a key bloc of the party’s base.

This is the problem for Trump and the Republicans.

For every political mind who can read the polls, there are too many people within the Republican Party who don’t care about that because of their opposition to abortion.

In this way, in fact, the “states will decide” possibilities of the post-Roe landscape mean that there will always be Alabama-style rulings, Idaho-style disputes, and Texas-style enforcement.

Those, in turn, will continue to force national Republican politicians to either support those efforts and risk alienating the majority of voters or oppose them and risk backlash from the right.

The Republican Party has put itself in this position. They will keep flailing like Trump did this past week trying to find a way out, but they will continue to end up right where Trump landed: Boxed in, and on the losing side.

Hitler corrections, and such

Benjamin Dreyer weighed in on The New York Times’s Hitler issue this weekend.

A Word About...

"a bit carried away"

Hey, hi, sorry to interrupt your holiday weekend, and yet…

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a day ago · 93 likes · 49 comments · Benjamin Dreyer

Click over and read it, but, the short of it as that Shawn McCreesh at the Times wrote that Moms for Liberty “can get a bit carried away” — by “accidentally” quoting Adolf Hitler in a chapter’s newsletter. The only problem: It wasn’t an accident. The quote was highlighted at the top of the newsletter with the name “Adolf Hitler” typed right beside it.

The Times eventually sort of corrected the offensive paragraph, issuing this correction:

Again, go read Dreyer.

For me, though, I have one further note.

As I wrote elsewhere, the criticism of and focus on that paragraph has been totally justified, but the entire article is dangerous for its normalization of Moms for Liberty.

The premise of McCreesh’s article is that the attendees at the Moms for Liberty event where Donald Trump spoke are both normal and representative of who Trump needs to “win over.”

The article introduced the group as “a bunch of agitated parents.” It then justified itself and that premise by presenting two people who don’t want to talk about Trump posting vulgar, sexist memes — while never even suggesting that they wouldn’t vote for Trump — as the basis for the alleged conflict presented the piece.

It’s a bad article with a nonsense premise and an imaginary conflict — and it required a Hitler-related correction.

So many supreme courts

Labor Day means that we’re roughly a month away from the start of the new U.S. Supreme Court term — but I won’t make you think too much about that just yet.

Instead, go check out the latest Strict Scrutiny episode for discussion of this year’s state supreme court races. And bookmark the Bolts guide from earlier this year to all of the state’s races. As Daniel Nichanian wrote:

Thirty-three states have elections for their high courts this year; some have as many as five or six seats on the ballot. In total, 82 seats are up for voters to decide. 

State high courts often get forgotten about until they issue an important ruling, but they are essential to protecting rights — particularly in light of today’s U.S. Supreme Court.