As Donald Trump moves toward the Republican presidential nomination, he is learning to talk like a conservative.
Unfortunately, the student still needs more tutoring.
In response to an abortion question posed by Chris Matthews, Trump managed to reinforce not one but two arguments pro-lifers have been distancing themselves from for decades in the process of making what he clearly believed to be a cogent pro-life case.
The comment that got all the attention was about criminal penalties for women who have abortions. After a lengthy exchange on the topic with Matthews, Trump finally replied, “The answer is there has to be some form of punishment.”
“For the woman?” Matthews asked. “Yes,” Trump responded.
Trump later issued a statement walking this back.
But Trump also appeared to endorse the idea that there would be widespread back-alley abortions under his policy.
Matthews asked Trump how, logistically speaking, he would go about banning abortion.
“You go back to a position like they had,” Trump answered, “where they would perhaps go to illegal places, but we have to ban it.”
One of the leading pro-choice arguments is that banning abortion would do less to protect fetal life than it would endanger women’s lives. Women would simply turn from safe, legal abortions performed at licensed medical facilities to illegal abortions performed with dubious or nonexistent medical supervision.
You can disagree with this argument — one study found that more than 90 percent of pre-1973 illegal abortions were performed by licensed physicians; the numbers suggest penicillin did more to reduce the maternal abortion death rates than legalization — but it’s one that has persuaded a lot of people to support legal abortion.
That’s why Bill Clinton characterized his pro-choice position as the belief abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.”
It’s a phrase that would probably poll-test better than “unsafe, illegal and punishable by undefined criminal penalties for women.”
National Review’s Quin Hillyer argued the formerly pro-choice Trump’s comment amounted to “a wink-wink/nudge-nudge to the idea that illegal abortion mills or perhaps even back alleys are to be accepted as alternatives to legal abortions.”
Back when Trump still identified as pro-choice, he said he hated the “concept of abortion.” “I hate it,” he added. “I hate everything it stands for.”
Many voters are conflicted about abortion and would struggle to resolve complicated questions about how to balance a woman’s bodily integrity and the life of the unborn child. If that was all there was to Trump’s confusing abortion answers, it might endear to him to this part of the electorate.
Yet Trump sounded more like he hadn’t thought the issues through carefully and was trying to tell pro-lifers what he thought they wanted to hear, with a result similar to parents who want to be hip and incorrectly use popular slang terms when talking to their children, yo.
Trump has managed to overcome this on immigration throughout the campaign, but pro-lifers have had specific litmus tests for much longer.
Moreover, Trump’s abortion commentary comes not long after he named education and healthcare as two of the top three functions of the federal government, apparently unaware that most constitutional conservatives disagree. And after he tried to win a Republican primary by criticizing the state’s GOP governor for failing to raise taxes. And weeks after he tried to defend selling health insurance across state lines by repeatedly talking about eliminating the “lines around the states.”
Trump’s conservatism, as explained in an interview with the Washington Examiner in January, was never of the movement variety. He is very much a nationalist rather than a limited-government person, a pre-Reagan Republican.
The billionaire does not think like a Reagan or Buckley conservative. His exposure to conservative ideas has been limited. And he has rolled up an impressive number of delegates while gleefully ignoring conservative orthodoxy on a wide variety of questions.
But to win a majority of delegates he is likely going to have to pry some more movement conservatives away from Ted Cruz, who is fluent in their language. Perhaps there is a conservative Rosetta Stone he can buy to brush up on this foreign tongue.
