'He only fanned the flames': Trump's latest campaign tactic shredded in new op-ed

Former President Donald Trump's latest strategy to triangulate on the abortion issue is not going to help his 2024 presidential election campaign, Calder McHugh wrote for Politico on Monday evening.

After weeks of speculation about whether Trump would endorse a federal abortion ban, Trump issued a video statement on Monday in which he dodged the issue and proclaimed abortion was up to states.

This statement was padded with boasts about appointing three of the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade protections and praise of states that passed total bans on the procedure.

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Trump's position wasn't good enough for many anti-abortion activists, who responded with fury that the former president hadn't gone farther.

Ultimately, McHugh explained, Trump's statement was nonsense, and won't give him any political benefit.

"He gives away the unseriousness of the enterprise by opening with a statement that both sides can agree is untrue — that all legal scholars demanded an end to Roe v. Wade, the landmark case recognizing the right to abortion," wrote McHugh. "It was his attempted segue into laying out a position that might neutralize him from the coming onslaught from the Biden campaign — a serious vulnerability that he has yet to figure out how to address. Trump knows just how much the end of Roe hurt his party’s chances in the 2022 midterms, and even if abortion is an issue he’d prefer to sidestep, that’s an impossibility now that he’s responsible for the Supreme Court responsible for overturning Roe."

What Trump really had to do here was stake out a middle ground position, wrote McHugh, and he didn't do that, instead making "wild claims" and "jarring descriptions" of how Democrats support executing babies, which is not true.

Ultimately, Trump "believes that support for a nationwide abortion ban would cost him politically, so he’s jettisoned it," concluded McHugh.

"It was an attempt to extricate himself from a debate he doesn’t want to have. But for all the attention surrounding his announcement today, he didn’t say much to move the needle. He may have wanted to tamp down the issue, but he only fanned the flames."

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