This week, Donald Trump gave his clearest answer to date about whether he would enforce the Comstock Act, a 19th-century obscenity law, as an abortion ban. In truth, Trump’s answer was anything but clear: He suggested that “specifics” remained to be determined, but that he “generally” wouldn’t enforce the Comstock Act against abortion pills, whatever that means. This was played up in mainstream media as Trump rejecting the use of Comstock Act as a de facto national abortion ban. They should not have gone so far.

Trump’s statement wasn’t actually all that new: Trump has spent the election season giving muddy answers in the hope of keeping antiabortion voters close without alienating everyone else. But Trump’s latest interview has infuriated key anti-abortion supporters, in the process revealing a major mistake made by conservatives in the aftermath of Dobbs. Abortion opponents were so sure of their chances of continuing to win before a conservative Supreme Court that they unveiled a disastrously unpopular Comstock strategy before an election year. As reaction to the CBS interview suggests, conservatives’ overconfidence might have created a trap that Trump will have trouble getting out of.

The idea for Comstock revival came from Jonathan Mitchell, the former Texas solicitor general, and pastor Mark Lee Dickson, the team behind Texas’s S.B. 8 bounty law, which allows anyone to sue an abortion provider or someone aiding them for at least $10,000. Mitchell and Dickson’s objective was to find a way to bring about an abortion ban that could succeed before the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, not to win an election.

That’s where the Comstock Act came in. It was clear that Americans didn’t want a sweeping national ban on abortion. It seemed improbable that Congress would have a large enough Republican majority to pass one........

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