Donald Trump says he’s against Florida’s abortion ban: His campaign walked it back

Donald Trump is trying to split hairs on abortion, against the interests, it appears, of the people running his campaign for him.

“He has not yet said how he will vote on the ballot initiative in Florida, he simply reiterated that he believes six weeks is too short,” Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement issued by the campaign on Thursday, in an attempt to walk back a comment that Trump had made earlier in the day in an interview with NBC reporter Dasha Burns in which he indicated that he didn’t support Florida’s six-week abortion ban.

The issue there is, voters in Florida, including Trump, a resident of Florida, will be voting in November on a proposed constitutional amendment that would abolish the state’s new ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and replace it with a 24-week limit.

Burns asked Trump how he planned to vote on the ballot measure.

His response:

“I think the six-week is too short, there has to be more time,” he said.

Burns then pressed, asking Trump if he will be voting in favor of the amendment.

“I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks,” Trump said.

He reiterated his stance in an interview with Daily Mail political correspondent Rob Crilly.

“I think six weeks is a mistake. And I’ll be expressing that soon, but I want more than six weeks,” Trump said, going on to add: “And in Florida, we have a six-week program, and that’s what I believe that you’re voting on, and I think it should be more than six weeks.”

Donald Trump

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The reason the campaign higher-ups would be contradicting the candidate would seem to be the issue with the splitting of hairs.

The Trump Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, and Democrats have seized on the upheaval at the state level, with 23 Republican-majority state legislatures either outright banning or putting severe restrictions on women’s reproductive rights, at the ballot box, holding back the predicted “red wave” in the 2022 congressional midterms, and nearly sweeping the off-year state elections in the 2023 cycle.

Trump appears to be trying to do a reach-out to voters who think the Dobbs decision that reversed Roe went too far, but in doing that, he risks losing the evangelical voters who had pushed for the Roe reversal for 50 years, and comprise a significant chunk of Trump’s voting base.

Doing that to try to reel in a sliver of support from people who aren’t likely to fall for it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense.

“American women are not stupid, and we are not going to trust the futures of our daughters and granddaughters to two men who have openly bragged about blocking access to abortion for women all across this country,” U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said earlier this week in an interview on MSNBC, illustrating that point.

“Today, 30 percent of all women live in states that effectively ban abortion. Donald Trump and J.D. Vance in the White House, it won’t be 30 percent, it’ll be 100 percent,” Warren said. “The only way that we’re going to protect access to abortion is to have a Democratic Congress send a bill to Kamala Harris. She will sign it into law. And then we will restore a right to half the population in this country. And no longer will a women have to go into an emergency room and be told she’s not near enough death to get the medical treatment that she needs.”