For some reason, Donald Trump was posting angrily to his personal account on the Trump-branded social media site Truth Social at 3:30 in the morning on the East Coast this Sunday.
The specific time that the post was published was 3:29 a.m. This time, Trump was again ranting about abortion, painting an unbelievably rosy picture of the national situation around the overturning in 2022 by the U.S. Supreme Court of Roe v. Wade, a case that until then had provided decades of legal protections to abortion. In the absence of that national baseline, legislators at the state and federal levels were suddenly free to pursue their own paths on access to the procedure, and while some Democratic-leaning areas have seen new protections around the critical health care, Republican state officials elsewhere have run with a panoply of restrictions.
“After 50 years, Abortion is now up to the States, where everybody, Republican and Democrat, plus all legal scholars and experts, have wanted it to be,” Trump wrote online. “The people choose, and many States, like Ohio and Kansas, have chosen. Many others are in the process of choosing. Arizona’s Legislature has just voted to kill an old 1800’s law, and a new one will soon be voted on by the people. It is all working, will never go back to the Federal Government, and our Country will soon start uniting on this long contentious issue.”
The idea that “everybody” wanted the legal outcome that undid Roe v. Wade is rebuffed by the fact that the context for that happening was, in fact, a court case in which not even the entirety of the nation’s highest court ended up on the same side. If “everybody” wanted that outcome, why was it a legal dispute at all? Why have there been extensive U.S. protests around abortion access, drawing attention to the threats against pregnant individuals inherent to many of the GOP restrictions?
