When news broke Wednesday night that Melania Trump supports abortion rights, and has apparently done so her entire adult life, it was met with surprise and confusion.
Melania Trump’s husband, Donald Trump, is rapidly recalibrating his approach to abortion ahead of Election Day. Is his wife trying to help him? Did you hurt him? Or neither?
Melania Trump detailed her support for the process in her upcoming memoir.
“Why should anyone other than women themselves have the authority to decide what to do with their bodies?” she wrote. “A woman’s fundamental right to personal freedom over her own life gives her the power to terminate a pregnancy if she wishes.”
Shortly after The Guardian reported the news, Trump uploaded a black-and-white video of himself to social media, accompanied by evocative music.
“Without a doubt, there is no room for compromise on this essential right that every woman is born with,” she said. “Personal freedom. What does my body, my choices mean?”
The news that Melania Trump supports abortion rights comes as she seeks to convince voters that her husband can be trusted to protect abortion rights.
Abortion has been an Achilles heel for the Republican Party in the years since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in 2022. While this cost Republicans victories in the 2022 midterm elections, abortion rights supporters also won a series of ballot measures in red states like Kentucky, Kansas, and Ohio.
Early in the campaign, Trump claimed to be pro-abortion-for-all, and that he helped overturn Roe by appointing three of the justices who voted to repeal it. He boasted and fumed that his hard-line stance on abortion was hurting the Republican Party. election. But since Kamala Harris, a highly effective messenger on abortion, became the Democratic presidential nominee, he abandoned that approach in favor of misguided support for abortion rights.
“Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free!” Trump recently posted on Truth Social. “You won’t think about abortion anymore, because it’s always where it should be. It’s with the nation.”
Melania Trump’s revelations are therefore aimed at reassuring undecided voters that, like the majority of Americans, they do not intend to vote for Harris but support abortion rights. There is a possibility that there are. But Tresa Undem, a pollster who has been surveying people about abortion for more than 20 years, said it’s “pretty unlikely” such comments would appeal to moderates or pro-abortion conservatives. Ta.
After all, regardless of her personal beliefs, it seems unlikely that Melania Trump will have any real influence over her fiery husband’s policies. Her pro-abortion rights beliefs didn’t stop Donald Trump from helping destroy Roe. It also doesn’t help that Melania Trump’s relationship with Donald Trump, at least in public, is far from cozy. (He recently said he had not read the book, even though he had written the foreword.)
“Republican statements will not distract Americans from the reality they are seeing with their own eyes: rape and incest victims being forced into pregnancies; “President Trump has banned abortions,” Democratic National Committee spokeswoman Emilia Rowland said in a text. mentioned in.
Melania Trump’s disagreements with her husband are also not as new as one might think. Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, who studies the history of reproductive law, said Betty Ford, wife of Republican President Gerald Ford, was an ardent supporter of abortion rights. In the end, it didn’t make much of a difference to Gerald Ford’s campaign.
“I think people understand that Melania and Donald Trump are very different people,” Ziegler said. “We saw independent and floating voters saying, ‘Wow, that’s great.’ It’s bad that even Donald Trump’s wife doesn’t like Donald Trump’s positions.”
The Melania Trump news appears to have angered anti-abortion activists, who make up some of Trump’s most trusted supporters. These activists were already irritated by President Trump’s recent attempts to portray himself as an abortion rights advocate.
“Melania Trump’s support for abortion is anti-feminist and clearly departs from the teachings of our Catholic faith. She is wrong,” said a statement from the pro-life organization Students for Life of America. “This is a missed opportunity to inspire generations of young women,” chairman Kristan Hawkins wrote in a post on X.
Melania Trump’s strategy may be much simpler than activists and politicians currently believe. She doesn’t seem particularly interested in becoming first lady, and seems invested in reclaiming the title, given that she has largely disappeared from the 2024 campaign. I can’t see it.
But Trump seems interested in at least one thing: selling books. Suggesting that there is controversy within the pages of her memoir will likely help increase circulation.
or not. In her post, Hawkins added, “I will not buy Melania’s books.”
