This story was originally published by The 19th.
Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, has cast abortion to the background of his campaign and declined calls to champion a national abortion ban.
But, if reelected, Trump’s tune could change: Without the aid of Congress, the former president would have tools to quickly curtail access to the procedure — and the pressure on him to wield them has already started.
Despite equivocating over decades on whether he supported abortion rights, Trump was in his previous term one of the anti-abortion movement’s most dependable presidents. His record as the president who helped bring down Roe v. Wade, the personnel who staffed his administration, and his wide-ranging allyship with evangelical leaders and anti-abortion groups suggest a willingness to further restrict access, abortion scholars and political analysts said.
“He’s always been dodgy [on abortion], and deep down he is dodgy on it. But he’ll listen to the people around him — he did it in his first term,” said Molly Murphy, a pollster and president at the Democratic-aligned firm Impact Research who tracks abortion-related public opinion. “He’d trade on this issue to get something he wants, which is why I think it would be very much on the chopping block. The people willing to work with him will deeply care about it.”
While a national ban appears unlikely to get sufficient support in Congress — a 2022 effort from Sen. Lindsey Graham failed to gain traction even among his colleagues — the administration can act on its own. With Roe overturned, and the anti-abortion movement subsequently emboldened, their options are far-reaching.
“There are lots of differences between what happened in the first Trump administration and what would be happening now — starting with the fact that there’s no more Roe and continuing through the fact that the Republican Party has been much less expressive about abortion since Dobbs,” said Mary Ziegler, a historian who studies the anti-abortion movement. “But there are signs that there may be more continuity between the first and second Trump administration than you might expect.”
Trump was the first president to attend the March for Life, the nation’s largest anti-abortion rally. Under his watch, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) barred health clinics that referred patients for abortion services from receiving federal funds under a family planning program. The change cut off federal funds from more than 1,000 clinics, including more than 400 Planned Parenthood affiliates. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is in charge of minors who are in immigration custody, sought to block pregnant teenagers from getting abortions.
Those actions earned credibility with evangelical leaders and anti-abortion groups. Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion group SBA Pro-Life America, said last year that her group wouldn’t back a GOP presidential nominee who didn’t get behind a 15-week national ban. A month later she signaled........