Trump Is Still the Pro-Life Candidate

When Rudy Giuliani ran for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, he had already flip-flopped on abortion once. Having switched from pro-life to pro-choice in his first New York City mayoral campaign, he didn’t think he could plausibly change back for the Republican presidential primaries.

Still basking in the glow of being “America’s Mayor” on 9/11, Giuliani sought the presidential nomination of a pro-life party as a pro-choice candidate. But he did make a few modifications to his position: He defended the partial-birth abortion ban, which he had opposed during his short-lived 2000 Senate campaign in New York, backed parental-notification laws, and vowed to appoint “strict constructionists” to the Supreme Court who might someday vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Giuliani sat atop the national polls for most of 2007, making him the Republican frontrunner. But his pro-choice position ultimately proved fatal, as it informed his disastrous political strategy of skipping the early states. Iowa and South Carolina were too socially conservative for a New York abortion rights advocate. New Hampshire might have more fertile ground, but he feared losing to Mitt Romney, then of neighboring Massachusetts.

Romney switched from pro-choice to pro-life and was rewarded with the Republican presidential nomination four years later. (He would later have to switch states from Massachusetts to Utah to continue his political career, but that’s another story.) So did Donald Trump four years after that.

Unlike Romney, Trump was elected president. And unlike Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush, the judges Trump appointed did overturn Roe v. Wade. If Robert Bork as well as Clarence Thomas had been confirmed, it might have happened 30 years earlier—but he wasn’t, and it didn’t.

All this history comes in the context of the first post-Roe presidential race. Trump is panicking about abortion. And pro-lifers are panicking about Trump.

Trump has gone too far in using phrases like “reproductive rights” to describe abortion (though he might have meant IVF, which is different, though it raises its own set of pro-life ethical issues). He excessively diluted the pro-life plank of the Republican platform, making it the weakest it has been since 1976. He still takes credit for Roe’s reversal, but is clearly rattled by recent Republican electoral setbacks on abortion, especially now that he is running a more competitive race against a female opponent.

Much as was the case when Trump’s pal Rudy was the GOP frontrunner all those years ago, Republicans who don’t care much about abortion are telling pro-lifers to shut up and fall in line if they want to win. 

While I have defended Trump for not wanting to rush headlong into where the pro-choice position is strongest, his backsliding on abortion has become excessive. And like his ditching of Project 2025, it risks shifting from a strategic retreat from movement conservatism’s excesses to reinforcing one of Trump’s worst tendencies: treating loyalty as a one-way street.

It would still be disastrous to the pro-life cause for Vice President Kamala Harris to be elected president. Her Justice Department would continue the persecution of pro-life activists and pregnancy centers, which are now more important than ever. If Harris ever got to govern with a Democratic Congress, the Senate filibuster would probably be gone and she would sign into law a bill that would usher in a worse national abortion policy than prevailed for most of the final 30 years of Roe. The health exception would make most existing abortion restrictions toothless, and she would move to promote taxpayer funding of abortion.

Regardless of whether Trump was the most sincere pro-life president, he was the most successful one during his first term. The power of pro-lifers to enact their preferred policies at any level of government hinges at the moment on this election. The fact that they cannot do so in many states has more to do with the weakness of their current position than with Trump’s lack of pro-life fervor.

The question is how to improve that position. Defeating Giuliani to ensure the GOP remained a pro-life party advanced the cause. But that was during the Republican primaries, while abortions were declining and after years of intermittent pro-life gains both legislatively and in public opinion, and ahead of a general election that was probably unwinnable for any Republican after Iraq and the Great Recession. This by contrast is a winnable election against a candidate who supports federally funded abortion on demand as well as measures that codify the most permissive reading of Roe and packing the Supreme Court to topple its current anti-Roe majority.

Even if Trump lost because he did not motivate pro-life voters to turn out for him, there is a strong chance Republicans would reach the opposite conclusion—that he was defeated because of his role in undoing Roe—and run further away from abortion. That is what they will hear from donors, and the media. It’s also what Republicans have done after losing elections the past, even when there has been fairly strong exit-polling evidence to the contrary.

Trump is a unique figure who isn’t influenced in the same ways as a normal politician, and he is limited to a single term. He has chosen a running mate who is more pro-life than he is, even if J.D. Vance currently has to follow the boss’s line (as Dick Cheney once did on gay marriage).

It’s possible that pro-lifers could luck out, and Harris won’t have the congressional support necessary to enact the most radical pro-abortion policies. Even the worst-case scenario in November suggests Republicans could hold 51 Senate seats next year. An election forecast by the Hill and Decision Desk gives House Republicans a better chance of retaining their majority than Trump winning the White House.

Then maybe Harris is unpopular again and Democrats have a bad midterm election. The 2026 Senate map looks favorable to the GOP. But have politics for the past decade really been that predictable?

These are the dilemmas that face a pro-life movement that no longer has meaningful bipartisan support. The future is hard to predict. The past track records and current positioning of the two major-party candidates shouldn’t make this a close call for prudent pro-lifers, especially those living in battleground states.

Trump delivered the biggest pro-life victory in 50 years. Harris wants to take it away.