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      Five Takeaways From Trump’s Unruly CNN Town Hall

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      Donald Trump is still Donald Trump.His 70 minutes onstage in New Hampshire served as a vivid reminder that the former president has only one speed, and that his second act mirrors his first. He is, as ever, a celebrity performance artist and, even out of office, remains the center of gravity in American politics.CNN’s decision to give him an unfiltered prime-time platform was a callback to the 2016 campaign, even as the moderator, Kaitlan Collins, persistently interjected to try to cut him off or correct him.Mr. Trump was so focused on discussing and defending himself that he barely touched on President Biden’s record — which people close to Mr. Trump want him to focus on. But he was disciplined when it came to his chief expected primary rival.Here are five takeaways.Trump won’t let go of his lies about 2020 or Jan. 6If viewers were expecting Mr. Trump to have moved on from his falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen from him, he demonstrated once again, right out of the gate, that he very much hasn’t.The first questions asked by Ms. Collins were about Mr. Trump’s refusal to accept his loss in 2020, and his false claims of fraud.“I think that, when you look at that result and when you look at what happened during that election, unless you’re a very stupid person, you see what happens,” Mr. Trump said, calling the election he lost “rigged.”Mr. Trump later said he was “inclined” to pardon “many” of the rioters arrested on Jan. 6, 2021, after the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob during certification of President Biden’s Electoral College win. His avoidance of an unequivocal promise pleased people close to him.He also came armed with a list of his own Twitter posts and statements from that day — an idea that was his, a person familiar with the planning said. He lied about his inaction that day as Ms. Collins pressed him about what he was doing during the hours of violence. And he said he did not owe Vice President Mike Pence, whose life was threatened by the mob, an apology.As time has worn on, Mr. Trump has increasingly wrapped his arms around what took place at the Capitol and incorporated it into his campaign. Wednesday night was no exception.“A beautiful day,” he said of Jan. 6.It was a reminder that embracing the deadly violence of that day — at least for Republicans — is no longer seen as disqualifying. Privately, Mr. Trump’s team said they were happy with how he handled the extensive time spent on the postelection period during the town hall.The G.O.P. audience stacked the deck, but revealed where the base isThe audience’s regular interruptions on behalf of Mr. Trump were like a laugh track on a sitcom. It built momentum for him in the room — and onscreen for the television audience — and stifled Ms. Collins as she repeatedly tried to interrupt him with facts and correctives.No matter how vulgar, profane or politically incorrect Mr. Trump was, the Republican crowd in New Hampshire audibly ate up the shtick of the decades-long showman.He would pardon a “large portion” of Jan. 6 rioters. Applause.He mocked the detailed accusations of rape from E. Jean Carroll as made up “hanky-panky in a dressing room.” Laughter. No matter that a New York jury held him liable for sexual abuse and defamation this week, awarding Ms. Carroll $5 million in damages.Calling Ms. Carroll a “wack job.” Applause and laughs.Flip-flopping on using the debt ceiling for leverage, because “I’m not president.” More laughs.The cheers revealed the current psyche of the Republican base, which is eager for confrontation: with the press, with Democrats, with anyone standing in the way of Republicans taking power.It made for tough sledding for Ms. Collins, who was like an athlete playing an away game on hostile turf: She had to battle the crowd and the candidate simultaneously.“You’re a nasty person,” Mr. Trump said to her at one point, echoing the line he used against Hillary Clinton in 2016.The town-hall format felt like a set piece for Mr. Trump that he leveraged to cast himself as both the putative Republican incumbent — “Mister president,” he was repeatedly addressed as — and the outsider, recreating conditions from his two previous campaigns.Republicans cheered, but so did Democrats looking to the general electionPresident Biden’s team had changed the televisions on Air Force One from CNN to MSNBC as he returned from New York on Wednesday evening. But that didn’t mean his political team was not eagerly watching the town hall unfold, and cheering along with the Republican audience.Mr. Trump defended Jan. 6 as a “beautiful day.” He hailed the overturning of Roe v. Wade as a “great victory.” He wouldn’t say if he hoped Ukraine would win the war against Russia. He talked again about how the rich and famous get their way. “Women let you,” he said. And he refused to rule out reimposing one of the most incendiary and divisive policies of his term in office: purposefully separating families at the border.Mr. Trump’s answers played well in the hall but could all find their way into Democratic messaging in the next 18 months.Late Wednesday, the Biden campaign was already figuring out what segments could be turned quickly into digital ads, seeing Mr. Trump staking out positions that would turn off the kind of swing voters that Mr. Biden won in 2020.Shortly after the event ended, Mr. Biden issued a tweet. “Do you want four more years of that?” it read. It was a request for donations. It was also a reminder how much of the Biden 2024 campaign is likely to be about Mr. Trump.Trump aggressively dodged taking a stance on a federal abortion banMr. Trump is perhaps the single Republican most responsible for the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last year. He appointed three of the court’s justices who powered the majority opinion. But he has privately blamed abortion politics for Republican underperformance in the 2022 midterms and has treaded carefully in the early months of his 2024 run.Before the town hall, his team spent considerable time honing his answer to a question they knew he would be asked: Would he support a federal ban, and at how many weeks?His repeated dodges and euphemisms were hard to miss on Wednesday.“Getting rid of Roe v. Wade was an incredible thing for pro-life,” he began.That was about as specific as he would get. He said he was “honored to have done what I did” — a line Democrats had quickly flagged as potential fodder for future ads — and that it was a “great victory.”Mr. Trump’s Republican rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis, recently signed a six-week abortion ban in Florida, getting to Mr. Trump’s right on an issue that could resonate with evangelical voters. Mr. Trump did not even mention Mr. DeSantis until more than an hour into the event, and only after prodding from a voter. “I think he ought to relax and take it easy and think about the future,” Mr. Trump urged.In refusing to say if he would sign a federal ban, Mr. Trump tried to cast Democrats as radical and pledged that he supported exemptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. “What I’ll do is negotiate so people are happy,” he said.“I just want to give you one more chance,” Ms. Collins pressed.He dodged one final time. “Make a deal that’s going to be good,” he said.He deepened his legal jeopardy with comments on investigationsThe most heated exchange that Mr. Trump had with Ms. Collins was over the special counsel investigation into his possession of hundreds of presidential records, including more than 300 individual classified documents, at his private club, Mar-a-Lago, after he left office.And it was the area in which he walked himself into the biggest problems.“I was there and I took what I took and it gets declassified,” said Mr. Trump, who has maintained, despite contradictions from his own former officials, that he had a standing order automatically declassifying documents that left the Oval Office and went to the president’s residence.“I had every right to do it, I didn’t make a secret of it. You know, the boxes were stationed outside the White House, people were taking pictures of it,” Mr. Trump said, intimating that people were somehow aware that presidential material and classified documents were in them (they were not).In what will be of great interest to the special counsel, Jack Smith, Mr. Trump would not definitively rule out whether he showed classified material to people, something investigators have queried witnesses about, in particular in connection with a map with sensitive intelligence.“Not really,” he hedged, adding, “I would have the right to.” At another point he declared, “I have the right to do whatever I want with them.”He also defended himself for a call he had with Georgia’s secretary of state in which he said he was trying to “find” enough votes to win. “I didn’t ask him to find anything,” Mr. Trump said.There are few issues that worry the Trump team and the former president as much as the documents investigation, and Mr. Trump wore that on his face and in his words on the stage in New Hampshire. 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      Release of Justice Stevens’s Private Papers Opens Window Into Supreme Court

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      Justice John Paul Stevens’s files on thousands of cases, including landmark decisions on abortion and the 2000 election, have been made public, opening a window on the Supreme Court.WASHINGTON — In June 1992, less than two weeks before the Supreme Court reaffirmed the constitutional right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy sent a colleague some “late-night musings.”“Roe was, at the least, a very close case,” Justice Kennedy wrote in the three-page memorandum, which included reflections on the power of precedent, the court’s legitimacy and the best way to address a cutting dissent.The document is part of an enormous trove of the private papers of Justice John Paul Stevens released on Tuesday by the Library of Congress. They provide a panoramic inside look at the justices at work on thousands of cases, including Bush v. Gore and the 1992 abortion case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey.The papers are studded with candid and occasionally caustic remarks, sometimes echoing current concerns about the court’s power and authority.In the Casey decision, Justice Kennedy joined a controlling opinion with Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and David H. Souter that saved the core of the constitutional right to abortion established in Roe in 1973.In June, the current Supreme Court overturned Roe and Casey after considering questions about precedent and the court’s legitimacy, coming to the opposite conclusion from Justice Kennedy.There are other echoes of recent events in the papers of Justice Stevens, who served on the court for 35 years, retired in 2010 and died in 2019, at 99.There was, for instance, an apparent leak, one that prompted Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist to write a stern note to all of the law clerks on June 10, 1992. The current issue of Newsweek, the chief justice wrote, “contains a purported account of what is happening inside the court in the case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey.”The article, attributing its information to “sources” and “clerks,” said that “at least three of the nine justices are planning to draft opinions in Casey” and predicted, correctly, that the decision would be released on June 29.Chief Justice Rehnquist admonished the clerks to follow a rule in the court’s code of conduct, which said, “There should be as little communication as possible between the clerk and representatives of the press.” He added, underlining the last three words: “In the case of any matter pending before the court, the least possible communication is none at all.”Researchers will be studying the Stevens papers for decades, and only small glimpses were possible in a day’s scrutiny of a selection of them. But those glimpses made clear that the current turmoil at the court has historical analogues.In 2000, for instance, when the court handed the presidency to George W. Bush in Bush v. Gore by a 5-to-4 vote, members of the majority wrote scathing private memos protesting what they called unduly harsh language in the dissents.Justice Stevens’s dissent ended this way: “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”In a memo to his colleagues on Dec. 12, 2000, the day the decision was issued, Justice Kennedy, who had voted with the majority, appeared wounded.“The tone of the dissents is disturbing both on an institutional and personal level,” he wrote. “I have agonized over this and made my best judgment.”He added, “The dissents, permit me to say, in effect try to coerce the majority by trashing the court themselves, thereby making their dire, and I think unjustified, predictions a self-fulfilling prophecy.”Justice Antonin Scalia, who had also voted with the majority, said he was “the last person to complain that dissents should not be thorough and hard hitting.”But he said he could not “help but observe that those of my colleagues who were protesting so vigorously that the court’s judgment today will do irreparable harm have spared no pains — in a veritable blizzard of separate dissents — to assist that result.”At an earlier stage of the case, Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who dissented in Bush v. Gore, urged his colleagues to stay away from the dispute, recalling the role that Supreme Court justices had played on a commission created to resolve the contested presidential election of 1876.“Rather than the court lending the process legitimacy, the process damaged the legitimacy of the court,” Justice Breyer wrote. “I doubt very much that our intervention would assure anyone that the process had worked more fairly. Rather, I fear that history could repeat itself, were we to intervene now.”In statements after the Supreme Court’s recent abortion decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. has said that attacks on the court’s legitimacy, as opposed to its reasoning, should be out of bounds.In the 1992 memo containing his “late-night musings,” which was addressed to Justice Souter and copied to Justices O’Connor and Stevens, Justice Kennedy also reflected on the court’s legitimacy in the context of abortion.He appeared troubled by aspects of Chief Justice Rehnquist’s dissent, which said public opinion should not affect the court’s work.“You can fend off the chief,” Justice Kennedy told Justice Souter, “by stating that we are not concerned with preserving our legitimacy for our own sake but for the sake of the Constitution. Thus, when we speak of the principled character of our decisions, we mean that they are informed by precedent, logic and the traditions of our people, all with reference to our constitutional heritage.”“We must be clear,” he went on, “that we are not guided by expediency, contemporary attitudes or our own morality.”The newly released files cover the years up to 2005, when Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined the Supreme Court. They are filled with notes in Justice Stevens’s not always legible scrawl, marked-up briefs, draft opinions, vote tallies, memos among the justices, recommendations from clerks and all manner of other paperwork.Before the new release, the most recent set of Supreme Court papers was from the files of Justice Harry A. Blackmun, who served through 1994 and died in 1999.The only current member of the court featured in the new files is Justice Clarence Thomas. The remaining parts of Justice Stevens’s papers are scheduled to be released in 2030.Kitty Bennett More

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      Anti-Abortion Group Urges Trump to Endorse a National Ban

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      Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, seeking a ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy, threatened to campaign against any candidate who does not support the proposal.Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a prominent anti-abortion political group, threatened on Thursday to campaign against Donald J. Trump unless he endorsed a national ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a bold challenge that exposed the rift between the former president and some of his onetime allies.The group’s statement was a line in the sand for all conservative 2024 hopefuls. “We will oppose any presidential candidate who refuses to embrace at a minimum a 15-week national standard to stop painful late-term abortions while allowing states to enact further protections,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of SBA Pro-Life America.Mr. Trump has been unwilling to wade into abortion battles after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year and ended federal protections, thanks largely to a majority of conservative justices he helped muscle through as president. Last year, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina introduced legislation for a federal ban on abortions after 15 weeks, an idea that split Republicans.Democrats campaigned on abortion rights in the 2022 midterms, and Republicans had another disappointing cycle. Mr. Trump blamed anti-abortion activists for Republican losses, saying they “could have fought much harder.” Others have attributed the party’s disappointing showing to Mr. Trump’s insistence on making election fraud a top issue for candidates.Ms. Dannenfelser’s statement on Thursday was a response to a Washington Post article about the abortion issue in which Mr. Trump’s campaign did not directly address whether he supported an abortion ban after six weeks of pregnancy, which was the limit that Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is preparing his own Republican presidential bid, recently signed into law in the state.Instead, Mr. Trump’s campaign issued a statement saying abortion “is an issue that should be decided at the state level.”Mr. Trump was mostly muted about the ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade when it happened. In an interview with The New York Times last year, Mr. Trump downplayed his central role in paving the way for the decision’s reversal.“I never like to take credit for anything,” said Mr. Trump, whose name is affixed to most of his businesses and properties.In a statement, Mr. Trump’s campaign said he was “the most pro-life president in American history, as pro-life leaders have stated emphatically on repeated occasions.”It added: “Even though much work remains to be done to defend the cause of life, President Trump believes it is in the states where the greatest advances can now take place to protect the unborn.”In her statement, Ms. Dannenfelser said “President Trump’s assertion that the Supreme Court returned the issue of abortion solely to the states is a completely inaccurate reading of the Dobbs decision and is a morally indefensible position for a self-proclaimed pro-life presidential candidate to hold.”A Gallup survey last year found that the share of Americans identifying as “pro-choice” had jumped to 55 percent after hovering between 45 percent and 50 percent for a decade. That sentiment was “the highest Gallup has measured since 1995,” while the 39 percent who identified as “pro-life” was “the lowest since 1996,” the polling firm said. More

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      Where the Likely 2024 Presidential Contenders Stand on Abortion

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      Not quite a year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, abortion continues to be one of the main issues shaping American politics.Abortion is not fading as a driving issue in America, coming up again and again everywhere policy is decided: in legislatures, courts, the Oval Office and voting booths.An 11-point liberal victory in a pivotal Wisconsin Supreme Court race last week was fueled by the issue. Days later, a Texas judge invalidated the Food and Drug Administration’s 23-year-old approval of the abortion drug mifepristone (late Wednesday, an appeals court partly stayed the ruling but imposed some restrictions). And Florida, under Gov. Ron DeSantis, a likely Republican presidential candidate, is poised to ban abortion after six weeks’ gestation.The fallout from the Supreme Court’s revocation of a constitutional right to abortion last year looks poised to be a major issue in the upcoming presidential race. So where do the likely candidates stand?Here is what some of the most prominent contenders, declared and likely, have said and done:Anti-abortion protesters rallying in Indiana last July while lawmakers there debated an abortion ban during a special session.Kaiti Sullivan for The New York TimesPresident BidenPresident Biden condemned the ruling invalidating the approval of mifepristone, which his administration is appealing, and called it “another unprecedented step in taking away basic freedoms from women and putting their health at risk.”Mr. Biden has a complicated history with abortion; before his 2020 presidential campaign, he supported restrictions, including the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding for most abortions. But he has since spoken more forcefully in defense of unfettered access, including endorsing congressional codification of the rights Roe v. Wade used to protect.White House officials have said he is not willing to disregard the mifepristone ruling, as some abortion-rights activists have urged.Mr. Biden has said he is planning to run in 2024, but has not formally declared his candidacy.Donald J. TrumpMore than perhaps any other Republican, former President Donald J. Trump is responsible for the current state of abortion access: He appointed three of the six Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade and the district judge who invalidated the approval of mifepristone. But lately, he has been loath to talk about it.Last year, Mr. Trump privately expressed concern that the ruling overturning Roe would hurt Republicans — and it did, both in the midterms and in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election.If elected again, he would be under tremendous pressure from the social conservatives who have fueled the Republican Party for decades — and who helped elect him in 2016 — to support a national ban. He has not said whether he would do so.Ron DeSantisGov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whom polls show as the top potential Republican competitor to Mr. Trump, is pushing forward with the Florida Legislature to ban most abortions after six weeks. The bill passed on Thursday and was sent to Mr. DeSantis’s desk. Polls show that most Americans, including Floridians, oppose six-week bans.It is a more aggressive posture than he took last year, when Florida enacted a ban after 15 weeks and Mr. DeSantis — facing re-election in November — did not commit to going further. He made his move after winning re-election by a sweeping margin.Nikki HaleyAt a campaign event in Iowa this week, Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina and former United Nations ambassador, gestured away from anti-abortion absolutism — saying that she did not “want unelected judges deciding something this personal.”But her comments were muddled: She said she wanted to leave the issue to the states, but at the same time suggested that she would be open to a federal ban if she thought there was momentum for one.“This is about saving as many babies as we can,” she said, while adding that she did not want to play the “game” of specifying when in pregnancy she believed abortion should be allowed.Asa HutchinsonSince starting his presidential campaign this month, former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas has said only that he is “proud to stand squarely on my pro-life position” when it comes to abortion.He has not detailed what, if any, federal legislation he would support.Last year, Mr. Hutchinson criticized the lack of an exception for rape and incest in an Arkansas abortion ban he had signed. When he signed it, he said that he wanted the exception but legislators didn’t, and that he accepted their judgment as the will of voters — though a poll last year found that more than 70 percent of Arkansans supported such an exception.Mike PenceA staunch social conservative, former Vice President Mike Pence has been more open than most Republicans about continuing to advertise his opposition to abortion.“Life won again today,” he said in a statement on the mifepristone ruling. “When it approved chemical abortions on demand, the F.D.A. acted carelessly and with blatant disregard for human life.” Last year, Mr. Pence said anti-abortion activists “must not rest” until abortion was outlawed nationwide. Mr. Pence is considering a 2024 run, but has not formally joined the race.Tim ScottSenator Tim Scott of South Carolina repeatedly dodged questions about whether he supported federal restrictions on abortion in the days after announcing a presidential exploratory committee this week.Asked in an interview with CBS News whether he supported a 15-week ban, he called himself “100 percent pro-life.” When the interviewer suggested that his stance indicated he would support a 15-week ban, he replied, “That’s not what I said.”On Thursday, he told WMUR, a New Hampshire news station, that he would support a 20-week ban, but still did not say whether he would back something stricter. More

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      The Abortion Ban Backlash Is Starting to Freak Out Republicans

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      After the Republican Party’s disappointing performance in the 2022 midterms, fueled in large part by a backlash to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the Republican National Committee recommitted itself to anti-abortion maximalism.A resolution adopted at the R.N.C.’s winter meeting in January urges Republican lawmakers “to pass the strongest pro-life legislation possible.” Addressing their party’s poor showing in November, it said that Republicans hadn’t been aggressive enough in defending anti-abortion values, urging them to “go on offense in the 2024 election cycle.”The 11-point loss of the Republican-aligned candidate in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election on Tuesday has influential conservatives rethinking this strategy. “Republicans had better get their abortion position straight, and more in line with where voters are, or they will face another disappointment in 2024,” said a Wall Street Journal editorial.Ann Coulter tweeted, “The demand for anti-abortion legislation just cost Republicans another crucial race,” and added, “Please stop pushing strict limits on abortion, or there will be no Republicans left.” Jon Schweppe, policy director of the socially conservative American Principles Project, lamented, “We are getting killed by indie voters who think we support full bans with no exceptions.”But having made the criminalization of abortion a central axis of their political project for decades, Republicans have no obvious way out of their electoral predicament. A decisive majority of Americans — 64 percent, according to a recent Public Religion Research Institute survey — believe that abortion should be legal in most cases. A decisive majority of Republicans — 63 percent, according to the same survey — believe that it should not. When abortion bans were merely theoretical, anti-abortion passion was often a boon to Republicans, powering the grass-roots organizing of the religious right. Now that the end of Roe has awakened a previously complacent pro-choice majority, anti-abortion passion has become a liability, but the Republican Party can’t jettison it without tearing itself apart.The reason voters think Republicans support full abortion bans, as Schweppe wrote, is that many of them do.In the last Congress, 167 House Republicans co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act, conferring full personhood rights on fertilized eggs. In state after state, lawmakers are doing just what the R.N.C. suggested and using every means at their disposal to force people to continue unwanted or unviable pregnancies. Idaho, where almost all abortions are illegal, just passed an “abortion trafficking” law that would make helping a minor leave the state to get an abortion without parental consent punishable by five years in prison. The Texas Senate just passed a bill that, among other things, is intended to force prosecutors in left-leaning cities to pursue abortion law violations. South Carolina Republicans have proposed a law defining abortion as murder, making it punishable by the death penalty.In Florida, which already has a 15-week abortion ban, Gov. Ron DeSantis is expected to soon sign a law banning almost all abortions at six weeks. This isn’t something Florida voters want — polls show a majority of them support abortion rights — but it’s a virtual prerequisite for his likely presidential campaign.Republican attempts to moderate abortion prohibitions even slightly have, for the most part, gone nowhere. Last year, the Idaho’s Republican Party defeated an amendment to the party’s platform allowing for an exception to the state’s abortion ban to save a woman’s life. In the weeks before the Wisconsin election on Tuesday, Republican lawmakers introduced a bill providing some narrow exceptions to the state’s abortion prohibition for cases of rape, incest and grave threats to a pregnant person’s health, but they lacked the votes in their own party to pass it.It’s true that this week Tennessee’s Legislature passed a bill permitting abortion to save a patient’s life or prevent “serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.” But the legislation is meaningless to the point of perversity, since it places the burden of proof on doctors rather than on the state, so that they must still fear prosecution for treating pregnant people in severe medical distress. Language that would allow women to end “medically futile pregnancies” was stripped out.It’s not surprising that voters have reacted with revulsion to being stripped of rights they’d long taken for granted, and to seeing the health of pregnant women treated so cavalierly. But the backlash seems to have caught Republicans off guard. Last May, when the Supreme Court’s draft decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization leaked, Coulter assured her readers that the end of Roe wouldn’t help Democrats. “Outside of the media, no one seems especially bothered by the decision,” she wrote.Part of what happened here is that conservatives fell for their own propaganda about representing “normal” Americans. (This, incidentally, is the same reason many on the right can’t admit to themselves that Donald Trump lost in 2020.) Coulter was sure Americans would be turned off by those outraged by the end of Roe, writing, “Everybody hates the feminists.” When a poll last year showed that 55 percent of Americans identified as pro-choice, a piece in National Review told readers not to worry: “Many of our policy goals enjoy strong public support.”Untethered to actual Republican voters, Coulter was able to pivot, but the Republican Party cannot. Instead, its leaders are adopting a self-soothing tactic sometimes seen on the left, insisting they’re being defeated because they’ve failed to make their values clear, not because their values are unpopular. “When you’re losing by 10 points, there is a messaging issue,” the Republican Party chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, said on Fox News, explaining the loss in Wisconsin.But you can’t message away forced birth. Republicans’ political problem is twofold. Their supporters take the party’s position on abortion seriously, and now, post-Roe, so does everyone else.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Seeking Evangelicals’ Support Again, Trump Confronts a Changed Religious Landscape

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      Evangelicals were wooed by Donald Trump’s promise of an anti-abortion Supreme Court. Now, they’re back playing the field.On a recent Sunday morning at Elmbrook Church, a nondenominational evangelical megachurch in Brookfield, Wis., Jerry Wilson considered the far-off matter of his vote in 2024.“It’s going to be a Republican,” he said, “but I don’t know who.”In 2016 and 2020 he had voted for Donald J. Trump. “He did accomplish a lot for Christians, for evangelicals,” Mr. Wilson, 64, said. But “he’s got a lot of negative attributes, and they make you pause and think, you know? I’d like to see what the other candidates have to offer.”White evangelical voters were central to Mr. Trump’s first election, and he remains overwhelmingly popular among them. But a Monmouth University poll in late January and early February found Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida who has not declared his candidacy for president but appears to be Mr. Trump’s most formidable early rival, leading Mr. Trump by 7 percentage points among self-identified evangelical Republican voters in a head-to-head contest.It was an early sign that as he makes a bid for a return to office, Mr. Trump must reckon with a base that has changed since his election in 2016 — and because of it.Some of the changes clearly benefit Mr. Trump, but others may have weakened his hold on evangelical voters and the prominent evangelical pastors who are often seen as power brokers in Republican politics.The Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in June, which overturned the constitutional right to an abortion, has shifted much of the fight to further roll back abortion rights — the near-singular political aim of conservative evangelicals for more than four decades — to the state level. Last year, Mr. Trump disparaged Republican candidates for focusing too much on the “abortion issue,” a statement that was viewed as a betrayal by some evangelicals on the right and an invitation to seek other options.Conservative evangelical politics have both expanded and moved sharply rightward, animated by a new slate of issues like opposition to race and history curriculums in schools and L.G.B.T.Q. rights, and shaped by the Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, which some pastors rallied against as a grave affront to religious freedom. These are areas where Mr. DeSantis has aggressively staked his claim.Who’s Running for President in 2024?Card 1 of 7The race begins. More

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      Abortion Rights Supporters See Biden Address as Missed Opportunity

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      While praising the administration’s actions so far, activists say the State of the Union speech could have done more to address what they view as a national health crisis.During the midterm campaigns, Democrats spent months focused on the demise of federal abortion rights and the danger they said it posed to all Americans.In his State of the Union speech, President Biden spent roughly 42 seconds.The White House says that it used the moment to call on Congress to reinstate the protections provided under Roe v. Wade, and that it has taken the most aggressive approach to abortion rights of any administration in history. But some abortion rights supporters said they saw the brief mention as a missed opportunity to leverage the power of the bully pulpit in what they often describe as a national health crisis. They were also mystified that the president passed up a chance to play up his own record, which nearly all praised.“President Biden’s remarks on the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade were disappointing and a lost opportunity,” said Nancy Northup, president and chief executive of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which argued the case over Roe at the Supreme Court. “As demonstrated resoundingly in the midterms, abortion rights are a kitchen-table issue that Americans care deeply about, and highlighting that reality would have fit into the president’s theme of fundamental fairness.”The White House believes President Biden has most likely reached the legal limits of his powers through executive actions on abortion issues.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesThe criticism reflects Democrats’ limited options on the federal level, as the fight has shifted to state legislatures. The issue became a potent tool for the party in the midterms, energizing voters and staving off some expected defeats. But after Democrats lost control of the House, it became all but impossible for them to fulfill promises to reinstate a federal right to abortion.Since the court ruling in June, Mr. Biden has signed a series of executive orders protecting access to medication abortion and contraception, ensuring emergency medical care for pregnant women and protecting patient privacy. But at times his administration has fallen short in activists’ eyes, including in declining to declare a national emergency over the summer. The administration says such a measure wouldn’t offer any new tools to combat the restrictions.The White House believes Mr. Biden has most likely reached the legal limits of his powers through executive actions, leaving few options other than rallying voters and providing assistance to Democratic state legislators working to stop or undo restrictions.Biden’s State of the Union AddressChallenging the G.O.P.: In the first State of the Union address of a new era of divided government, President Biden delivered a plea to Republicans for unity but vowed not to back off his economic agenda.State of Uncertainty: Mr. Biden used his speech to portray the United States as a country in recovery. But what he did not emphasize was that America also faces a lot of uncertainty in 2023.Foreign Policy: Mr. Biden spends his days confronting Russia and China. So it was especially striking that in his address, he chose to spend relatively little time on America’s global role.A Tense Exchange: Before the speech, Senator Mitt Romney admonished Representative George Santos, a fellow Republican, telling him he “shouldn’t have been there.”Mini Timmaraju, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, praised Vice President Kamala Harris’s efforts and called Mr. Biden the “most pro-choice reproductive freedom president” in history, saying abortion rights got more attention than in any previous State of the Union.“The tension is that he represents a lot of progress, but it’s never going to feel like enough because we’re in a crisis,” she said. “Everybody in our community wishes we had more of the president’s time, more of the president’s attention, more presence in that State of the Union, but that being said, I keep going back to judging this administration on what they’re getting done.”On Tuesday night, Mr. Biden mentioned the battle over abortion rights an hour into his 80-minute speech, typically a moment for presidents to outline their priorities..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.He did not propose any new policy initiatives on the issue. Nor did he describe the struggles of the guests invited by a number of Democratic lawmakers and the first lady, Jill Biden, who represented the issue. Dr. Biden brought a Texas woman who almost died from sepsis after the state’s abortion restrictions caused a delay in treatment for her pregnancy.“Congress must restore the right that was taken away in Roe v. Wade and protect Roe v. Wade,” he said. “The vice president and I are doing everything to protect access to reproductive health care and safeguard patient safety. But already, more than a dozen states are enforcing extreme abortion bans.”He added, “Make no mistake about it: If Congress passes a national ban, I will veto it.”Any sweeping abortion action remains unlikely given the divided control of Congress. Democrats lack the votes in the Senate, and Mr. Biden is unable to grant Roe’s protections through executive action.His brief remarks cut a striking contrast with the deluge of words about the issue from Democrats during the midterm elections, when the candidates and their allies spent nearly half a billion dollars on ads mentioning abortion — more than twice what they spent on the next top issue, crime, according to AdImpact, an ad-tracking firm.Mr. Biden, a practicing Catholic, has spent years wrestling with his faith and Democratic politics over the issue, generally supporting abortion rights but personally opposed to the procedure. But since the ruling, he has been more vocal about his disagreement with the court and his support for Congress’s legislating a federal right to an abortion.Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, at the Capitol last month. The end of Roe energized Democratic voters in last year’s midterms.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesSince the midterms, Mr. Biden has largely delegated the issue to Ms. Harris, who has hosted dozens of events with state leaders to discuss abortion access. Last month, on what would have been the 50th anniversary of Roe, she warned that “no one is immune” from efforts to curb access to reproductive health care.In a statement released after the speech, Planned Parenthood Action Fund highlighted the nine abortion patients, providers and advocates invited by Dr. Biden and Democratic lawmakers as guests to the speech. The group “is grateful to have a trusted partner in the Biden administration,” it wrote, and declined to offer additional remarks.While they’ve been pleased with this administration’s actions, some leaders of the abortion rights movement would like to see Mr. Biden talk more specifically about plans to expand access to the procedure.“We really wanted to hear what the administration is prepared to do for the current reality of abortion access and the continued threats that exist across the country,” said Morgan Hopkins, president of All* Above All, a reproductive justice coalition. “We didn’t hear that.”The moment is particularly fraught, as activists and the administration await a ruling as soon as this week in a Texas case brought by conservative groups seeking to revoke a more than two-decade-old federal approval of mifepristone, a common medication abortion pill. The decision will be made by a single judge, Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee known for his conservative views on social issues.Given that medication accounts for more than half of abortions and that the pills have become a way for some women to circumvent state bans, a ruling against the drug could have sweeping impacts. Any appeal of the decision would go to the right-leaning Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and, eventually, to the Supreme Court with its conservative majority.Last week, Xavier Becerra, the secretary of health and human services, met with abortion providers at a clinic in Alexandria, Va. And a number of agencies, coordinated by the White House, are planning for a variety of outcomes, though they are limited in terms of executive actions. More

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      in Elections

      Does the War Over Abortion Have a Future?

      by

      In decades past, as the calendar turned to January, the anniversary of Roe v. Wade would come into view. Abortion opponents would be planning to acknowledge the date with the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C. Supporters of abortion rights would schedule seminars or meet for quiet conversations about whether and when the Supreme Court might actually go so far as to repudiate the decision it issued 50 years ago on Jan. 22, 1973.There will, of course, be no Roe to march against this year, the right to abortion having died a constitutional death in June at the hands of five Supreme Court justices. There has been ample commentary on how anger at the court for its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization helped to block the predicted “red wave” in the midterm elections. Not only did Dobbs-motivated voters enable the Democrats to hold the Senate, but they also, given the chance to express themselves directly, accounted for abortion rights victories in all six states with an abortion-related question on the ballot (California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana and Vermont).But the justifiable focus on the role of abortion in the country’s politics has crowded out much talk about what this unexpected political turn actually means for the future of abortion. There is a case to be made, it seems to me, that abortion access has won the culture war.I know that might sound wildly premature, even fanciful: Abortion access has vanished across the South in the wake of the Dobbs decision, and anyone anywhere in the world remains free to pursue Texas women seeking abortions, along with anyone who helps them, for a minimum $10,000 bounty under the state’s S.B. 8 vigilante law. The picture is bleak indeed. But it’s when it appears that things couldn’t get worse that weakness can become strength.Consider that as the midterms approached, Republican candidates for whom taking an extreme anti-abortion position had been as natural as breathing started scrambling for cover, blurring their positions and scrubbing their websites, as Blake Masters did to no avail in his campaign for an Arizona seat in the U.S. Senate. (Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, held to his extreme no-exceptions position, and that didn’t help either.)The full dimension of the post-Dobbs world will come into ever clearer view, as news accounts mount up of what happens when women whose wanted pregnancies have gone drastically wrong are denied the prompt terminations that barely seven months ago would have been the obvious treatment. People who have regarded abortion as something that befalls wayward teenagers will come to realize that abortion care is — or was — an ordinary and necessary part of medical care. And while all the justices in the Dobbs majority were raised in the Catholic church, nearly two-thirds of American Catholics believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases.In suggesting that abortion has won its corner of the culture wars, I don’t mean that those wars are over in general or that the road ahead for abortion access is easy. Trans teenagers and their struggle to find a place in the world will continue to be fodder for cynical politicians. School boards taken over by conservative activists will continue to vet reading lists for any hint that the country’s past was less than perfect. Those Supreme Court justices who remain unreconciled to marriage equality will keep looking for ways to enable self-described Christians to avoid treating same-sex couples equally in the marketplace for goods and services. Texas voters just re-elected Greg Abbott as their governor, and the Texas Legislature is not about to repeal S.B. 8.What I mean is that the polarity has shifted. The anti-abortion position that was so convenient for Republican politicians for so long is, with surprising speed, coming to seem like an encumbrance. The once-comfortable family-values rhetoric no longer provides cover for the extremism that the Dobbs decision has made visible. Yes, the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives this week passed two anti-abortion measures, both recognized as dead on arrival. The important point about this bit of legislative theater was the label a conservative South Carolina Republican, Representative Nancy Mace, affixed to it: “tone-deaf.” Even so, she voted for the two bills.In a recent article published by ProPublica, Richard Briggs, a Tennessee state senator and cardiac surgeon who co-sponsored the state’s exceptionally strict abortion ban in 2019, now says he had assumed the law would never actually take effect and believes it is too harsh “because the medical issues are a lot more complex.” Not incidentally, 80 percent of Tennessee voters believe that abortion should be legal at least under some circumstances.Abortion is surely not going away as an issue in politics. But it will be just that: an issue, like food safety, reliable public transit, affordable housing and adequate energy supplies. All these, and countless others, are issues in politics, too. We need these things, and if the government won’t provide them, we assume at least that the government won’t stand in the way of our getting them.Democrats played defense on abortion for so long (remember the apologetic Clinton-era mantra “safe, legal and rare”?) that defense became part of the Democratic DNA. What this posture ultimately led to was Dobbs. And now the midterm elections have made Dobbs not an end point but an opportunity, a gift, albeit an unwelcome one, in the form of a national admonition on what extremism looks like.The decision and its aftermath have freed people to acknowledge — or even shocked them into realizing for the first time — that a civilized country requires access to abortion. It is possible, and I’ll even be bold enough to say that it is probable, that in Roe v. Wade’s constitutional death lies the political resurrection of the right to abortion.Linda Greenhouse, the recipient of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008 and was a contributing Opinion writer from 2009 to 2021.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More