The questioner at The Faulkner Focus town hall featuring women voters prefaced her question to former President Donald Trump with an assertion about a woman’s right to choose. Strikingly, a careful listener will hear Trump assent to this assertion when the questioner is still in mid-sentence.
The questioner standing at the microphone begins: “So facing the question of abortion, women are entitled to do what they want to and need to do with their bodies…”
“Right,” says Trump.
Question: Some abortions are necessary to save their lives. Why is the government involved in women’s basic rights?
Trump: *brags about overturning Roe* pic.twitter.com/2rf6cO5TYx
— Acyn (@Acyn) October 16, 2024
“…including their unborn,” she continues. “That’s on them regardless of the circumstance. Some are necessary to save their own lives. Why is the government involved in women’s basic rights?”
“Right, good,” replies Trump, “I think it’s great. I’m glad you asked it.”
Trump then characterizes the abortion issue as tearing the country apart for “52 years” and falsely claims that a consensus of scholars and lawyers wanted the federal protections of Roe v. Wade — the half-century-old Supreme Court precedent scuttled in 2022 by the Trump-heavy conservative SCOTUS — ended.
In a claim Trump often makes, which is easily shown to be untrue, he says again that “every legal scholar, the great ones, every lawyer…the Democrats, the Republicans, liberals and conservatives — they wanted it brought out of the federal government and brought back to the states for a vote of the people.”
Trump then compared himself to former President Ronald Reagan, citing their shared belief that there should be exceptions to abortion bans that permit the procedure in cases of “rape, incest, life of the mother.”
The latter expresses Trump’s current positioning on abortion, but that first assent — when Trump says “right” as the speaker asserts that women “are entitled to do what they want to and need to do with their bodies” — clearly does not align with his stated positions.
Trump’s instinctual response — “right” — may, however, be indicative of his natural inclinations, as before he was an anti-abortion advocate, Trump was pro-choice. Or as an NBC News story recalled: “At one point in 2015, during his run for president, [Trump] took ‘five positions on abortion in three days,’ according to The Washington Post.”