What Else Is Terrible About Trump's Abortion Comments
Three of Donald Trump's fundamental beliefs about law and social policy, according to columnist Tamara Tabo.
In the past couple of weeks, presidential candidate Donald Trump has had a lot of problems with the abortion issue.
Most notoriously, Trump suggested during a town hall style event hosted by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews that there ought to be some criminal penalty for women who obtain abortions. His remarks sounded morally tone-deaf, even to pro-lifers.
Unfortunately, that’s not the only terrible thing that Donald Trump has said while discussing abortion lately.
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If you listen carefully to Trump responding to public questions about his stance on abortion, you can also hear him reveal a few of his fundamental beliefs about law and social policy more generally. Here are three.
#1: Unless a major issue of law and social policy might come up during a media appearance, Trump doesn’t understand why he should bother thinking about it.
Trump spoke with Anderson Cooper last Tuesday night for CNN’s town hall meeting. The full transcript is here, but here’s part of what Trump said about abortion:
TRUMP: Well, I mean, you could say, I am – as you know, I’m pro-life, and I was originally pro-choice. I will say this, that as a developer and as a businessman I’m not sure I was ever even asked the question, are you pro-life, pro-choice?
And it was not something that as one of magazines recently said, Donald Trump is a world-class businessman. He was never asked those questions before. But you know, if I was asked those questions years ago it’s something I never really gave much thought to.
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Trump admits that, though he is now pro-life, he was once pro-choice. Fair enough. Flip-flopping from wrong to right is better than staying wrong.
But notice how Trump accounts for his original stance on abortion. He says that he didn’t really think about it, that nobody was asking him questions about it years ago because he was known as a real estate developer, not a legal theorist or policy maker.
First, it is worth noting that Trump has been asked about abortion for a long time. For example, in 1999, when Trump was considering running for President as the Reform Party candidate, he described himself as “very pro-choice” in a Meet the Press interview.
Even if it were true that Trump had not been asked in interviews until recently about his abortion stance, that fact would not fully explain why he had not “given much thought” to the issue.
Most of us are not running for President. Most of us don’t anticipate members of the press corps ever asking us whether we think abortion should be legal. Yet most American adults have thought about abortion and arrived at — at least provisional — conclusions about what they think abortion laws ought to be.
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Somehow people other than Donald Trump manage to form opinions on important policy issues, just because that’s what engaged citizens tend to do.
Donald Trump, by his own description, has not, at least in the case of abortion.
#2: Even if major issues of law and social policy come up in media appearances, Trump doesn’t understand why he should bother really thinking about the issues.
Donald Trump (by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia)
During the MSNBC event with Chris Matthews — full transcript here — Trump begins his comments on the abortion question by saying, “OK, well look, I mean, as you know, pro-life. Right, I think you know that, and I — with exceptions, with the three exceptions. But pretty much, that’s my stance. Is that OK? You understand?”
After that, there is a pause. Trump sounds as though he might have answered the question to his own satisfaction, even though he can’t even be bothered to state what he considers the “three exceptions” to be, only that there are three exceptions.
It’s an oddly short reply for a guy who loves the sound of his own voice. It’s also an oddly short reply for a complex, heated issue like abortion.
Only when Matthews presses him, asking, “What should the law be on abortion?” does Trump elaborate.
Of course, Trump rapidly recited the practiced response he has given many times before when confronted with anything like an abortion question: “I am pro-life with the three exceptions.”
Trump knows that he is supposed to say these things, now that he is a putative Republican. One does not help one’s chances of being the GOP nominee for President without describing oneself as pro-life. Ask Rudy Guiliani. Trump knows this, and he could care less about the abortion issue apart from its impact on political strategy. So, he learned his lines and he performs them as many times as he is asked.
#3: Trump doesn’t understand why someone might not legally enforce all of his preferences and value judgments.
Throughout the segment with Chris Matthews, Trump responds to Matthews’s challenges, not by explaining his own views, but by instead grilling Matthews on his views on abortion. It’s pretty audacious stuff, since Matthews is the moderator and not the presidential candidate.
Trump asks Matthews, a practicing Catholic, how he feels about the Church’s position on abortion. Matthews explains that he agrees with the Catholic Church’s moral position on abortion, but he does not think that there ought to be laws enforcing that moral position.
Trump then counters, “So you’re against the teachings of your Church?”
Matthews replies, “I have a view — a moral view — but I believe we live in a free country, and I don’t want to live in a country so fascistic that it could stop a person from making that decision [ . . . ] That would be so invasive.”
Trump then calls out Matthews for being a bad Catholic. He says, “But I’ve heard you speaking so highly about your religion and your Church [ . . . ] Your church is very, very strongly as you know, pro-life. [ . . . ] What do you say to your Church?”
Matthews tells Trump, “I say, I accept your moral authority. In the United States, the people make the decision, the courts rule on what’s in the Constitution, and we live by that.”
Trump complains, “Yes, but you don’t live by it because you don’t accept it. You can’t accept it. You can’t accept it. You can’t accept it.”
I, personally, don’t agree with Chris Matthews about what the Constitution says about abortion. Nonetheless, I agree with the general principle that not all moral transgressions should be made into legal transgressions.
That doesn’t mean that some immoral acts shouldn’t also be illegal. It doesn’t mean that moral values can’t inform our decisions about what to make illegal. Just because you think that people should avoid lust or envy doesn’t mean that you want to pass legislation criminalizing lust or envy.
The hard work of building something other than a theocracy is that people of different religions, moral theories, and worldviews will have to hash out which bits of our normative preferences should be mirrored in our laws. Chris Matthews and I happen to agree on that abortion is morally bad. We happen to disagree about whether abortion should be legally bad. So, we can go about trying to convince one another.
Trump, on the other hand, apparently doesn’t care for concepts like the separation of church and state, the distinction between morality and legality, and (even lowercase “l”) libertarianism. Donald Trump is an authoritarian, through and through.
For him, anything less than a one-to-one correspondence between one’s preferences and the long, strong arm of state enforcement just doesn’t compute. Why bother holding office if it doesn’t mean that you get to make things exactly as you like them, right?
Tamara Tabo is a summa cum laude graduate of the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the school’s law review. After graduation, she clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and ran the Center for Legal Pedagogy at Texas Southern University, an institute applying cognitive science to improvements in legal education. You can reach her at tabo.atl@gmail.com.
