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In an appearance on Pittsburgh’s CBS affiliate KDKA on Tuesday, Donald Trump was asked by interviewer Jon Delano if he supported any “restrictions on a person’s right to contraception.”
His answer was the exact same boilerplate response he’s had every other time he’s been asked about reproductive rights in the last month or so.
“We’re looking at that, and I’m going to have a policy on that very shortly,” he said. “And I think it’s something that you’ll find interesting, and it’s another issue that’s very interesting, but you will find it, I think, very smart. I think it’s a smart decision.”
He then followed that up with, “You know, things really do have a lot to do with the states, and some states are going to have different policy than others.”
Unsurprisingly, the interview made its way around the internet pretty quickly, leading Trump to respond in a calm and reasonable way on his failing Truth Social site.
“I HAVE NEVER, AND WILL NEVER ADVOCATE IMPOSING RESTRICTIONS ON BIRTH CONTROL, or other contraceptives,” he wrote. “This is a Democrat fabricated lie, MISINFORMATION/DISINFORMATION, because they have nothing else to run on except FAILURE, POVERTY, AND DEATH. I DO NOT SUPPORT A BAN ON BIRTH CONTROL, AND NEITHER WILL THE REPUBLICAN PARTY!”
I mean, it’s not a “Democrat fabricated lie” — it’s literally what he said, out loud, in a television interview for all the world to see.
See?
I don’t believe that Donald Trump personally wants to outlaw birth control or allow the states to outlaw birth control. I don’t think that what happened during that interview was Trump “opening the door” to allowing states to outlaw or otherwise restrict birth control.
What I do believe, deep in my heart, is that he doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about and doesn’t care to. I think he’s landed on what he thinks is a good thing to say whenever someone brings up reproductive rights — that he has a forthcoming statement/policy that everyone is going to love and agree with, but also that it should be left to the states — and that’s what he says whenever it comes up. It’s almost word for word what he said about the Comstock laws in that interview with Time.
Trump doesn’t know the words or the music when it comes to any of this, but that has never made him any less of a danger than a true believer. In fact, many of the mistakes he’s made in this regard have had the effect of pushing the Overton Window to the right on abortion. Before he suggested in a debate with Hillary Clinton that women were having abortions up until the moment of birth, you didn’t hear anyone say that. But he did and now they say it all the time. The anti-abortion Right has also become increasingly comfortable with the idea of punishing women for having abortions ever since he said “there has to be some form of punishment” for them during a town hall.
In this respect, he has been more dangerous than he might be if he were a true believer. There’s no line for him, there’s nothing he actually believes, which frees him up to take the most extreme position he can.
There is no question that Trump would outlaw birth control if he were surrounded by people who wanted to outlaw birth control and who told him that outlawing birth control would please his base — which, at this point, it probably would. A significant number of them, anyway.
Project 2025, the plan that lays out exactly what Trump will do for his first 180 days in office, was crafted by the Heritage Foundation, an organization which has, in fact, been very vocally opposed to birth control pills.
“Conservatives have to lead the way in restoring sex to its true purpose, & ending recreational sex & senseless use of birth control pills,” they tweeted just last year.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas also wrote in his Dobbs opinion that the decision very well could lead to the overturning of Griswold v. Connecticut and the end of legal birth control.
So while I don’t think Trump had a damned idea what he was saying in that interview, screwing with legal birth control is absolutely on the table, because nothing is actually off the table.
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