Over the course of the past week we have called your attention to Donald Trump’s appeal to pro-choice voters. See our posts here and here.
Today at The Atlantic, Peter Wehner makes a similar case:
The most common argument made by former President Donald Trump’s evangelical supporters in defense of their support is that although Trump may not be a moral exemplar, what matters most in electing a president is his policies. And for them, abortion is primus inter pares.
Trump is a great pro-life champion, they say, perhaps the greatest in history, and that is what most distinguishes him from the abortion extremism of Kamala Harris. On that basis alone, they insist, Trump, regardless of his faults and failures, deserves their votes.
I understand that line of argument, though I strongly disagree with it. The rationale was always weaker than Trump’s supporters were willing to admit, because Trump’s moral depravity was always far worse and more dangerous than they were willing to acknowledge. And his achievements fell far short of their hopes and claims to end abortion.
But the pro-life justification for supporting Trump has just collapsed. Trump, who described himself as “strongly pro-choice” in the 1990s—including support for so-called partial-birth abortion—has returned to his socially liberal ways. “My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights,” he recently declared on Truth Social. Kamala Harris couldn’t have stated it any more emphatically.
It’s true that Trump’s appointees to the Supreme Court played an essential role in overturning Roe v. Wade. But ending Roe is not the same thing as reducing the number of abortions in America. In fact, the number of abortions has increased since the 2022 Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe. As Philip Klein wrote in National Review, “overturning Roe was only the necessary first step of a much longer battle to protect the lives of the unborn. And on that battle, it increasingly looks like Trump is joining the other side.”
From a pro-life perspective, though, it’s actually worse than that. Trump has done what no Democrat—not Bill or Hillary Clinton, not Mario Cuomo or John Kerry, not Joe Biden or Barack Obama, not any Democrat—could have done. He has, at the national level, made the Republican Party de facto pro-choice. Having stripped the pro-life plank from the GOP platform, having said that Governor Ron DeSantis’s ban on abortion after six weeks is “too harsh” and a “terrible mistake,” and having promised to veto a national abortion ban, Trump has now gone one step further, essentially advocating for greater access to abortion.
Read the rest here.
If any of you anti-DJT for PREZ, can in any way justify voting for H/W from a Christian Biblical
World-View, I would love to see the Article.
If anyone can justify voting for Trump from a Christian Biblical World-View, I would love to see that!
Jeremiah 29:7 plays a really important role in guiding my vote: “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” As a citizen of God’s Kingdom, I and other Christians are in a kind of “exile” here: as much as I love this country, it is not my home. My home is a different realm, and they do things differently there. Meanwhile, I seek the good of my neighbors: their flourishing in terms of their security and the stuff needed for life, which leads to the kind of peace where the gospel can be preached and obeyed.
The data show me that the Democrats are at least even with Republicans by most measures, and demonstrably better on many.
Democratic administrations have a much better record of job creation. They’re better when it comes to poverty alleviation. They’re not ideologically opposed to using government as a tool to alleviate the many problems that inhibit flourishing: this can lead to coercive utopianism in places, but we have a reliable federal system of divided government and checks and balances, which over time addresses those problems. The Republicans lean in the direction of rank laissez-faire in their government skepticism: this makes people cynical and angry because problems aren’t being addressed, so they look for scape-goats–usually among strangers, others, and the vulnerable–as an outlet for their resentments. That’s not a prosperous city by my lights. On the number one killer of children in the US–guns–Democrats are clearly the party of sanity in seeking solutions; Republicans have doubled down on a do-nothing ideology. Even on abortion–largely due to their more pro-family policies and better economic record–the facts n the ground indicate a Democratic administration is to be preferred if you want to minimize the number of abortions: Abortions went down under Obama, and they went up during Trump; indeed, they even went up after the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v Wade–and significantly, pro-life attitudes have declined in popularity, even in conservative states, since Dobbs and the poorly thought-out subsequent policies Republicans have proposed. For anyone who cares about the world and foreign policy, it’s only a slight difference between Democrats and Republicans, but it’s now being revealed that the former have learned the lessons of the 1930s-40s, while the latter are (quite dangerously, by my lights) discarding them. For these reasons and others, I vote not just against some candidates, but for others, who have shown they’re far from perfect, in many places they are far from good, even, but whose policies contribute to the peace and prosperity of the city.