All posts tagged: Trump’s attempt

The Pro-life Movement Is Mad at Donald Trump

The Pro-life Movement Is Mad at Donald Trump

A few weeks ago, the Texas anti-abortion activist Mark Lee Dickson told me that he viewed Donald Trump as the Constantine of the anti-abortion movement: a man who, like the Roman emperor, had been converted to a righteous cause and become its champion. “There are some who believe that Constantine was a sincere Christian and others who believe that he wasn’t,” Dickson said. Regardless of whether Trump is genuinely opposed to abortion rights, “he was good for Christianity and the pro-life movement.” But after hearing Trump’s abortion comments on Sunday’s Meet the Press, Dickson, who is one of the architects of Texas’s so-called heartbeat ban, feels differently. He’d been helping plan a big Trump rally in Lubbock. Now he’s worried. “What I want to do is get up onstage and brag about Trump. But at this point, his statements do not represent what we have worked for for 50 years,” Dickson said. “The goal of the movement was not overturning Roe v. Wade—it was ending abortion in all 50 states.” Trump confounded Dickson and the …

They Are Still With Him

They Are Still With Him

Come November of next year, Donald Trump might be elected president of the nation whose democracy he attempted to overthrow. Although it’s early, Trump is polling strongly against his successor, President Joe Biden, despite having been indicted for state and federal crimes, including a conspiracy to keep himself in power after his 2020 election loss. The indictment, filed by Special Counsel Jack Smith yesterday, offers a detailed recounting of Trump’s effort to “overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election and retain power,” using as pretext claims of voter fraud that Trump knew were false—in the words of one of his advisers, “conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.” In addition to simply making unfounded allegations of electoral fraud, which is irresponsible but protected as free speech, Trump and his advisers hatched one bizarre plan after another to illegitimately seize power by overturning the election. If you’re trying to understand how, despite all of this, Trump could still be president again, you need look no further than the reactions of his primary rivals and …