Trump wants to ban contraceptives, but also, doesn’t want to

Donald Trump, apparently, was against birth control before he decided that he is, in fact, for it.

“I HAVE NEVER, AND WILL NEVER ADVOCATE IMPOSING RESTRICTIONS ON BIRTH CONTROL, or other contraceptives,” Trump wrote on his social media platform, hours after telling a Pittsburgh TV station that, in fact, he was “looking at” restrictions on contraception.

What is going on here, more likely, is that somebody in TrumpWorld saw the headlines being disseminated on the interwebs about Trump’s statement in the interview with KDKA, and said, uh, oh.

In that interview, Trump was asked, point-blank, if he supports “restrictions on a person’s right to contraception?”

His answer:

“Well, we’re looking at that, and I’m going to have a policy on that very shortly. And I think it’s something that you’ll find interesting. And I’d see, it’s another issue that’s very interesting,” Trump said.

The walk-back had Trump going to his failing Truth Social platform, which is on course to lose more than a billion dollars this year, according to recent published reports, to blame his words, somehow, on Democrats.

“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!” Trump wrote, the caps, of course, being his.

In actuality, yes, the Republican Party does support a ban on birth control, with several Republican-majority state legislatures already taking up measures to ban birth control, in the wake of the successful legal efforts to overturn Roe v. Wade back in 2022.

Trump, naturally, in the KDKA interview, took credit for that one:

“We did something that everybody wanted: We got rid of Roe v. Wade,” Trump said in the interview, overstating by a country mile the supposed support for overturning Roe, which still, two years after it was overturned, enjoys the support of a supermajority of Americans.

The fallout post-Roe saw Republicans fall well short of the red wave that they had projected for themselves in the 2022 congressional midterms, and the issue played a decisive role in the 2023 Virginia state legislative midterms, in which Democrats took control of both houses of the General Assembly.

Trump’s bold talk about targeting contraceptives next, and the subsequent walk-back, is the latest evidence of the hair-splitting that he and Republicans are going to have to do on reproductive rights.

No matter what the polls say, this issue is going to be why Trump and Republicans are going to come up short in November.