Democrats are understandably frantic to make abortion policy a key issue in the 2024 elections. But they aren’t entirely on the same page about how to deal with Donald Trump’s latest tactics on the subject. The former president, who enabled the end of Roe v. Wade, is pretty clearly trying to take the issue off the table by foreswearing any interest in a federal abortion ban and depicting himself as largely indifferent to what states decide to do. Some critics hope to drive a wedge between Trump and one of his party’s most important constituency groups by suggesting that he has thrown the anti-abortion lobby “under the bus,” discarding them now that they are making very unpopular demands. Others accuse Trump of lying about his plans for abortion policy once he’s back in the White House. And still others suggest that this supremely transactional man can’t be trusted to take a principled position on much of anything that doesn’t touch on his personal power and his lust for vengeance against his many enemies.
All of these perspectives have merit. But from a coldly political point of view, Democrats should recognize a tactic that one of their own presidents perfected to the befuddlement of allies and opponents alike: triangulation.
Bill Clinton was masterful at addressing issues that were bedeviling his party in ways that neutralized their salience and strengthened the impression he was “a different kind of Democrat.” This did not mean simply adopting Republican positions, as intraparty critics often complained (as did conservative politicians, who whined that Clinton was “stealing our ideas”). It meant, as the 42nd president’s one-time Svengali Dick Morris put it, to “use your party’s solutions to solve the other side’s problems. Use your tools to fix their car.” For example, instead of refusing to talk about crime because it was a “Republican issue,” Clinton promoted community policing and putting more cops on the street instead of the GOP’s preferred policies of tougher sentencing and sanctioned violence against criminal suspects. More controversially, he responded to the popular craving for welfare reform not by cutting off public assistance but by focusing it on transitional support aiming at immediate employment. Whatever you think of those policies (and they didn’t age very well), at the time, they helped insulate Democrats from attacks while driving Republicans nuts.
Trump seems to be trying something similar on abortion: He’s distancing himself from the anti-abortion extremists, who have been perhaps his staunchest allies, without becoming pro-choice. Trump’s “It’s a state issue” stance conveniently allows him to deny reproductive rights will even be an issue for him as president, without embracing abortion rights in any way, shape, or form. He’s embellished his evasive stance by selectively and vaguely criticizing total state abortion bans as “too harsh,” and undergirded his faux-centrist posture by falsely claiming “legal experts on both sides” wanted to reverse Roe v. Wade and make abortion a state issue. Meanwhile, anti-abortion militants understand that there’s not going to be any federal abortion ban until (a) Republicans have a governing trifecta and (b) they decide it’s safe to kill the Senate filibuster. So they’ll tolerate Trump’s disrespectful rhetoric, much as many old-school Democrats backed Clinton even though they were deeply annoyed by his “third way” stylings.
