The media gives Trump benefit of the doubt on abortion. He doesn’t deserve it

This was the week when the corporate media decided to mansplain Donald Trump to women and anyone else who might care about their reproductive rights.

“Don’t worry your pretty little heads about what he says,” we were told. “We’re going to tell you what he means.”

First, let’s tease out the most charitable take. The media always wants a ”story.” Thus, the thinking goes, Trump’s video statement this week describing his position on abortion must have been rooted in some political necessity. The Republican Party’s 2024 electoral hopes are obviously hemorrhaging on the issue of reproductive choice, so Trump must recognize his vulnerability on that issue, and must have felt it necessary to accommodate all of us by moderating his position. After all, it’s common for politicians to shape-shift on policy matters, even marginally. Those subtle changes in policy are eagerly picked up and parsed by the news media because they create conflict and drama that, in turn, provides a narrative for the press. 

But Trump is not a “normal” political candidate. For Trump, to acknowledge any shift or change on his abortion position would have gone against every ingrained aspect of his personality. It would be an admission, in effect, that he had miscalculated, or done something wrong. 

RELATED STORY: Trump's attempt to address abortion loses big—with everyone

So when Trump issued his scripted video—because he clearly couldn’t handle the intense discomfort of a live press conference—it was carefully crafted to acknowledge no error on his part. There was no sense he felt he’d miscalculated the impact of his long-asserted intent to overrule Roe v. Wade through his appointment of three virulently anti-abortion Supreme Court justices.

Instead, he bragged about it, spewing a bunch of ambiguous verbiage deliberately designed to say nothing else. For someone incapable of owning up to his mistakes, on abortion or anything else, it really couldn’t be otherwise.

But nearly all the mainstream media—Reuters, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, NPR, and CBS—wanted that “story,” that sensible, rational narrative to present to their viewers. So what they all did—every one of them, in fact—was invent a story out of whole cloth: that this was evidence that Trump was actually behaving like a normal political human being and moderating, ever-so-slightly, his position on abortion.

In doing so, they did all Americans a grotesque disservice, because Trump didn’t change a thing about his position. It was the media that did that for him, as astutely pointed out by Media Matters’ Matt Gertz:

Former President Donald Trump’s strategy of ducking questions on abortion requires mainstream reporters to let him off the hook and leave pro-choice swing voters with the false impression that he is more moderate than he actually is. So far, it’s working.

Major news outlets are falsely claiming that Trump said abortion “should be left to the states” in a video announcement Monday on his Truth Social platform. In fact, Trump said only that abortion “will” be left to the states, a statement of law that does not address how he would respond if Congress passed a federal abortion ban or how regulators would treat abortion under a second Trump administration.

Gertz has the receipts. As he posted on the social platform X, the media complicity in distorting what Trump said was as repetitive as it was egregious:

The inaccurate claim that Trump said abortion "should be left to the states" is everywhere in mainstream coverage. https://t.co/DZBs7IZ8pr pic.twitter.com/SUtH9Mzv13

— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) April 8, 2024

This is not some minor quibble. What Gertz illustrates here is literally serial misinformation being spun by every recognized paladin of  “mainstream” news. And that misinformation was dutifully picked up and disseminated by subsidiary outlets to foster and spread a phony narrative that Trump has somehow moderated his position on abortion. He hasn’t.

By reporting in headline after headline that Trump said abortion “should”—rather than “will”—be left to the states, the media have created the impression that for Trump, the abortion issue is now settled, and implicitly, that he won’t take abortion restrictions further should he be elected again in 2024.

So, to the casual reader of these headlines, which is as far as many readers go, that means he’s abandoned his intent, expressed just last month, to establish a national abortion ban, and It means no effort to outlaw mifepristone through the FDA. However, as Kaili Joy Gray and Kos have both written on this site, that is not what Trump said at all.

Anyone in the mainstream news who has followed Trump over the past eight years should have known that he does not ever acknowledge his own misjudgments. He didn’t do it for his disastrous COVID-19 response. He never gave the slightest indication that he erred in the heinous conduct that led to either of his impeachments. 

So he wasn’t about to do it for an issue, such as abortion, for which he clearly has no personal sentiments. The problem here is that the media still continue to treat Trump as a normal politician, equivocating in a way that the media have come to expect. That conventional narrative may be a way to reassure themselves or their audience, but it’s false.  

Trump is fundamentally incapable of making such an admission. There has not been a single instance in Trump’s public career where he has admitted any error in judgment, let alone admitted it to the news media. His past actions can’t be questioned, and if they are questioned his response, invariably, is to become angry and dismissive. This peculiarity of Trump’s personality was entrenched by his mentor, Roy Cohn, one of the most malignant and ruthless political operatives of the 20th century. Cohn had a singular rule that he hammered regularly into his young protege: Never, ever admit mistakes.

Gertz observes that Trump’s statement was simply a reiteration of what the existing law on abortion actually is: nothing more, nothing less. The media ran with that and assumed that Trump was “limiting” himself by those statements. As Gertz points out, he did no such thing:

Trump did not say whether he would sign a federal abortion ban if Congress passed it. Nor did he say whether federal regulators under his administration would move to ban medication abortions or restrict sending them through the mail, or how he will vote on the abortion referendum in his home state of Florida, or whether he will continue to appoint judges who will further curtail abortion rights.

So the media narrative as implied—and literally spelled out in many headlines—was wholly false. Instead, what we got were headlines that had the pernicious effect of minimizing the threat Trump actually represents, and more importantly, misrepresenting what he does or does not intend to do on abortion.

Nor did the situation improve on the nightly news. Gertz followed up by examining Monday’s broadcasts for ABC’s “World News Tonight” and “Good Morning America,” NBC’s “Nightly News” and “Today Show,” and CBS’ “Evening News.” All of them reiterated that Trump said abortion “should” be left to the states. CBS’s broadcast put it in a chyron, while a reporter falsely intoned that Trump had “suggested today that the federal government should stay out of the abortion rights debate.”

Again, no such language appears anywhere in Trump’s video speech. As Gertz notes, ABC egregiously characterized Trump’s statements as a “reversal” of Trump’s prior statements regarding a national abortion ban. And, as Gertz observes, none of the networks addressed Trump’s ludicrous claim that Democrats support “infanticide.” 

Viewed in the most charitable light, this is a massive, disturbing failure on the part of nearly every major news outlet in this country. The damage will reverberate well into the campaign season as voters are now going to have to reconcile what they they were told by their feckless media, whose misleading headlines are typically the solitary source of their information, with what is actually at stake for voters as the 2024 election approaches.

But it’s also difficult to reconcile the glaringly collective aspect of this. As Gertz points out, Trump is someone who habitually, routinely lies, to the point where very little he says can be given any credulity at all. It’s difficult to fathom why nearly every major news outlet leapt to the same erroneous conclusion about what he said, and pushed it to their viewers and readers in the exact same fashion. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow also pointed this out, while acknowledging her high regard for all of the sources involved. 

And now it’s even harder to argue with those who suggest that the media has normalized Trump and his pathologies, that its fixation on the horse race aspect of the 2024 election has clouded its own ability to distinguish facts from fiction.

That doesn’t mean we need to cynically reject everything the corporate-owned media decides to report about Trump, but it also doesn’t make us conspiracy theorists for calling out such blatant and obvious failures. Again, to reiterate a common phrase, despite eight long years of Roy Cohn’s protege living rent-free in our heads, none of this is normal. It’s not normal for the American public, and it should never, ever be normalized for those whose job it is to keep that public informed.

RELATED STORY: Rachel Maddow dissects pathetic media coverage of Trump's abortion video

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New GOP stunt hearing dresses up anti-abortion radicals as pro-child advocates

Republican lawmakers have been trying to dig themselves out of the ditch created when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled last month that frozen embryos created through in vitro fertilization should be considered children. And former President Donald Trump has been trying to throw off the political albatross of near-total abortion bans imposed in red states post-Dobbs v. Jackson as he campaigns for a White House get-out-of-jail-free card.

But now Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has come along with a shovel to dig that ditch a little deeper. Greene was creepily enough all smiles when she announced on X, formerly known as Twitter, that she would be conducting a hearing next Tuesday to investigate “the Black Market of Baby Organ Harvesting.” She also invited people to register on her congressional website for a livestream of the hearing.

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Join me and special guests David Daleiden and Terrisa Bukovinac for a Hearing on Investigating the Black Market of Baby Organ Harvesting on Tuesday, March 19th at 2 PM ET. REGISTER NOW: https://t.co/tBNqeUyKJQ pic.twitter.com/BB9RO428dY

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) March 11, 2024

To be clear, there is no black market of baby organ harvesting. And there’s nothing to smile about regarding Greene’s latest political theater stunt.

Vice President Kamala Harris made history on Thursday when she became the first sitting president or vice president to visit a facility that provides abortions—a Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Paul, Minnesota. Greene is trying to revive a malicious, debunked smear campaign against Planned Parenthood. Forced-birthers have falsely claimed that the health care provider has been profiting off of the illegal sale of aborted fetus parts to medical researchers.

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee created a special web page and YouTube videos to debunk misinformation about Planned Parenthood, such as the claim that its clinics conduct late-term abortions to get body parts to sell. They do not.

Only a few Planned Parenthood clinics have donated fetal tissue for medical research, with the informed consent of the patient, the organization said. Clinics in the past did receive compensation from researchers to cover their costs for processing and transporting the material, but the policy was changed in 2015, and clinics no longer accept reimbursement for expenses related to tissue donation.

But the biggest tell about what Greene is up to are the two witnesses she has announced that will appear at her hearing: prominent anti-abortion activists David Daleiden and Terrisa Bukovinac.

Daleiden, who founded a group known as the Center for Medical Progress, was linked by the Southern Poverty Law Center to ”some of the country’s hardest-line anti-abortion extremists.”

In 2015, Daleiden’s group released a series of deceptively edited undercover videos that claimed to show Planned Parenthood employees involved in the for-profit sale of supposed “body parts from aborted fetuses,” which would have been illegal. That led to efforts in several Republican-controlled states to defund Planned Parenthood health centers.

At least 13 states conducted investigations of Planned Parenthood that found that the organization had not engaged in any wrongdoing. A similar investigation by the House Oversight Committee, pushed by Republican House Speaker John Boehner, reached the same conclusion.

Planned Parenthood, in turn, sued Daleiden’s group. In 2019, a jury ruled in Planned Parenthood’s favor, finding that Daleiden and his group had violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and engaged in fraud, trespass, breach of contract, and illegal secret recording.

The jury awarded Planned Parenthood compensatory and punitive damages totaling more than $2 million for the harm caused by Daleiden and his co-conspirators. In October 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Daleiden group’s appeal of a lower court’s decision upholding most of the damages awarded to Planned Parenthood, Reuters reported.

Bukovinac gained notoriety in March 2022 during a protest outside the Washington Surgi-Clinic in D.C. when she and another anti-abortion activist, Lauren Handy, claim to have obtained a box containing five fetuses and 110 smaller ones from a medical waste truck driver. The clinic is not affiliated with Planned Parenthood.

Police later said the fetuses were aborted in accordance with D.C. law. In 2022, police removed the fetuses from a refrigerator in Handy’s home after she and several other protesters were indicted on federal charges of blocking access to the Surgi-Clinic during an earlier 2020 protest. In August 2023, Handy and four co-defendants were convicted of illegally blockading the reproductive health clinic. Bukovinac was not among those charged.

Bukovinac founded a group known as Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, which demanded that the D.C. clinic be investigated for infanticide. In September 2023, Bukovinac, who identifies herself as a “pro-life progressive,” stood outside the Surgi-Clinic to announce that she was running for president in the Democratic primary (though she’s gotten virtually no traction)—a move that she hoped would enable her to run graphic anti-abortion ads, Michigan Advance reported.

Daleiden and Bukovinac have already telegraphed on X what Greene’s hearing will be about. Right-wing media outlets like The Federalist have picked up a report earlier this month from Daleiden’s group. This time, Daleiden’s group didn’t use undercover videos, but apparently cherry-picked documents obtained via a public records request. Daleiden’s group claimed that Planned Parenthood of San Diego (now known as Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest) had a contractual agreement “to supply aborted fetal body parts” to the University of California San Diego in exchange for “valuable consideration”—namely a share of intellectual property rights derived through their research. 

“This new evidence shows Planned Parenthood sells late-term aborted baby body parts in violation of federal law, for far more money than has ever been discussed before,” Daleiden claims in the report.

But once you get past the sensational headlines, the report says the biological materials being referred to are actually “fetal and placental tissue.” Daleidin’s group also claims that the University of California’s total patent invention revenue for 2021-2022 was over $127 million, but the link is to a page referring to the entire U of C system, with no amount specified for patents derived from fetal tissue research at UCSD.

The website for Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest does not include any reference to the Daleidin group’s allegations. But there is something even more alarming about this hearing: the Alabama Supreme Court's ruling on frozen embryos, and efforts by the GOP to pass legislation that declares human life begins at conception.

And that is the impact on fetal tissue and embryonic stem cell research following the Supreme Court’s June 2022 ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, which had guaranteed abortion rights nationwide.

Immediately after the ruling, medical researchers were already expressing worries that the ruling would result in new restrictions that “will decrease the availability of fetal tissues and embryonic stem cells,” or lead some states to pass laws banning such research entirely, according to The Scientist website.

In 2021, the Biden administration scrapped restrictions imposed by former President Donald Trump on federal funding for medical research using human fetal tissue from elective abortions. If Trump wins in November, even harsher restrictions could be imposed.

The Guttmacher Institute, an abortion-rights advocacy research group, wrote that these federal grants support research “on a wide range of conditions including diabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, spinal cord injuries, hemophilia, leukemia, sickle cell anemia, ALS, and others.”

Back in 2016, when Daleidin’s group first went after Planned Parenthood, the Guttmacher Institute wrote in its report:

Fetal tissue research dates back to the 1930s, and has led to major advances in human health, including the virtual elimination of such childhood scourges as polio, measles and rubella in the United States. Today, fetal tissue is being used in the development of vaccines against Ebola and HIV, the study of human development, and efforts to treat and cure conditions and diseases that afflict millions of Americans.

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Trump’s messy abortion switcheroo is latest proof he and Republicans are running scared

Donald Trump has done something remarkable over the past week: He’s actually remained focused on something. During Sunday’s “Meet The Press” debacle, he told his hapless interlocutor, Kristen Welker, that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had made a “terrible mistake” in signing a six-week abortion ban. He also vaguely claimed that, if reelected in 2024, he’d be able to negotiate a “compromise” and impose some type of national abortion prohibition acceptable to everyone.

Facing predictable hand-wringing and consternation from his fellow Republicans, on Wednesday Trump did what he always does: He doubled down, telling an audience in Iowa that Republicans need to learn how to “properly talk about abortion,” and warning Republicans that they could lose the House majority “and perhaps the presidency itself” if they kept pushing more violent and draconian intrusions into people’s personal reproductive lives.

First, let’s be clear on one thing: As Adam Serwer concisely puts it in the title to his latest essay for The Atlantic, “Trump Is the Reason Women Can’t Get Abortions,” and, of course, that’s true for anyone who may become pregnant. 

RELATED STORY: Republican couple's shift: From party loyalty to pro-choice advocacy

As Serwer writes:

The person most responsible for what might be the greatest assault on individual freedom since the mid-20th century is Donald Trump, who appointed fully one-third of the justices on the Supreme Court, hard-core right-wing ideologues who overturned Roe just as he promised they would.

If you cannot get an abortion, if you fear leaving your state to get an abortion, if you are afraid to text your loved ones or type abortion into a search bar, if you are scared to ask a friend or loved one to help you get an abortion, if you know someone coerced into remaining in an abusive relationship because they fear prosecution, if you cannot find an obstetrician in your state, if you have a relative who was left at the edge of death by doctors afraid to risk prosecution by violating an abortion ban—you have Donald Trump to thank.

Trump, of course, is not changing his tune on abortion because he’s actually had a change of heart. He is, in typical fashion, simply running a con, his dirty work having been accomplished. He may not have personally cared about abortion, but he knew what to say in 2016 to earn the votes of the white evangelicals who elect Republicans in this country, and he knew exactly what to do to please them once he attained the presidency. Most importantly, Trump realizes how much credit those religious voters grant him, how blindly devoted to him they are, and that they’ll never, ever vote for a Democrat, no matter what Trump says or does.

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So since those voters are already in his pocket, he’s searching for what he can say to try to neutralize the abortion issue among those who voted against him in 2020.

The short answer is “nothing,” and anyone who takes what Trump says seriously should rightly have their head examined. No one should even entertain the possibility of giving Trump any credibility—on any issue, but especially abortion. In that vein, Serwer’s article skewers the wholly predictable, knee-jerk reactions of the press to Trump’s statements. 

So let’s go beyond just gawking at Trump’s obviously cynical trial balloon, and instead look at what he’s really acknowledging: This issue is hurting him and Republicans, badly, and it’s not going to go away.

Republicans have been tying themselves into knots over the past few months trying to find a way out of the abortion trap they’ve caught themselves in. Some think there is a perfect number of weeks where punishing pregnant people feels okay; if they could just find it, an American public that overwhelmingly supports abortion rights will somehow be mollified and move on.

Others contend they can finesse the problem they’ve created with magical language: It’s not “pro-life” anymore, but “pro-birth control” or most recently, “pro-baby.” Or, as Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley suggests, politicians just “need to be specific” about what it is they mean when supporting laws imposing state controls and surveillance over pregnant patients’ choices. Does that mean prohibiting people from searching on the internet for information, punishing them for leaving the state to obtain an abortion, or inflicting criminal penalties on doctors, nurses and medical providers? Republicans just need to clarify the terms a little better, it seems.

RELATED STORY: Kentucky's Democratic governor shames Republican rival into retreating on abortion stance

No one is fooled by this nonsense. When given the chance, Trump used his power in office to strip away a right in place for 49 years. Republicans in state legislatures around the country then followed up by turning on the tools of state control, and they’re manifestly intent on finishing what they’ve started. There’s no getting around that fact, even if the (overwhelmingly white and male) proponents of these laws remain oblivious to the horrific, real-world implications of what they’ve done. 

For Trump to even raise this issue—multiple times in a week—confirms that both he and the Republican Party are simply running scared. On a national level, those voter-rich, highly-educated, suburban enclaves that can spell the difference between a Democratic or a Republican Congress, a Democratic or Republican governor, or a Democratic or Republican president? Those districts are swiftly falling out of reach for Republicans, specifically because of the abortion issue. The GOP is losing young people as well, because (among other reasons), it’s younger people who tend to have unwanted pregnancies.

Below is an ad currently being run by Kentucky’s Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear.

KY Gov Andy Beshear’s new ad on abortion. Democrats, this is the way. pic.twitter.com/GMfY6YHmRi

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) September 20, 2023

And yet Republicans continue to double down. In Ohio, a right-wing state Supreme Court rubber-stamped pejorative forced-birth ballot language inserted by Republicans desperate to dissuade Ohioans from voting Yes on a November referendum enshrining reproductive freedom in the state’s constitution. In Wisconsin, Republicans in the state Legislature continue to threaten baseless impeachment proceedings against a newly elected state Supreme Court justice who won her seat largely because of her pro-choice positions. In Texas, a Trump-appointed federal district judge and his right-wing Court of Appeals issued rulings threatening to outlaw mifepristone (the “abortion pill”), sending the issue to the same Trump-riddled Supreme Court responsible for this situation in the first place.  

And all this time, the horror stories of patients who were denied abortions even when their life was at risk continue to mount. Obstetricians and gynecologists, fearing criminal prosecution, simply pack up and leave states like Idaho, leaving patients to fend for themselves. A new bill in Texas would block internet service providers from allowing sites that inform users about abortion, much like China blocks sites about democracy.

No “magic language” or “consensus ban” is going to solve these problems for Republicans, and nothing Trump says is going to help him on this issue in 2024, or “separate” him from other Republicans.

As Serwer emphasizes in his Atlantic article, what Trump and Republicans say means nothing; it’s what they’ve done—and continue to do—that matters.  

They were always in this together. And now they’re going to have to face the consequences. Together.

RELATED STORY: Republicans don't want to talk about a federal abortion ban, but make no mistake: It's on the agenda