Opinion | Why Trump Can Afford to Disrespect His Anti-Abortion Voters

The Babylon Bee, which is like The Onion for conservative Christians, last month ran a despairing story about the presidential options anti-abortion voters have before them.“Pro-Lifers Excited to Choose Between Moderate Amount of Baby Murder and High Amount of Baby Murder,” said the headline.

It was a dark joke, but it spoke to something real: a disquiet among some anti-abortion activists over Donald Trump’s attempts to distance himself from the abortion bans enabled by his Supreme Court appointees.Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, told my Times colleague Astead W.

Herndon that declining evangelical enthusiasm for Trump could be a “grave danger” to his campaign.As someone who wants Trump to lose, I hope he’s right, but I’m skeptical.“One of the things that Trump has done is reveal what you might call the G.O.P.’s dirty little secret, and that is that it’s never really been only about abortion,” said Robert P.

Jones, the president of the Public Religion Research Institute.Conservative activists, he argued, have long seen themselves as part of a moral crusade against the killing of babies, but Republican voters, even white evangelical ones, tend to have more complicated views.

In P.R.R.I.surveys, he said, white evangelicals are more likely to identify the economy, crime and immigration as critical issues than abortion.

“The bond between Trump and rank-and-file Republicans and between Trump and white evangelical Protestants has really not been abortion,” said Jones.Clearly, a second Trump presidency would be catastrophic for reproductive rights.He obviously doesn’t care about abortion and is happy to take whatever position suits him at any given moment.

But many of the people he will sweep into office with him are devoted to abortion bans.Part of the purpose of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 was to make sure there was a deep bench of MAGA apparatchiks ready to staff a second Trump adm...