Could Dobbs Boomerang on Trump?
Plus: A perfect eclipse in Cleveland.
Cleveland’s reign in national news coverage has come to an end . . . for now. But the city enjoyed the attention—and money!—that came from the Women’s NCAA Final Four and being blessed by nature for prime total eclipse real estate.
Families lined up in their semi-rural neighborhood in lawn chairs, between a park and an old farm overlooking U.S. 422. Others set up pet corrals for their dogs or lit untrendy bonfires. People came from far and wide, some even car camping for the occasion. I passed a blue 1981 Volkswagen Vanagon Westfalia with European and Illinois plates sputtering to find a spot, which I’m sure they did here in spacious Geauga County, but we already had a perfect spot: my parents’ back deck.
Along with some friends and our dogs, my family enjoyed the nearly four minutes of totality in a serene setting, with appropriately sun-themed music on Majic 105.7. Other people shot off fireworks, I’m told, but we didn’t hear anything aside from the occasional woooo! from across a wooded valley. The eclipse was perfect, almost like a movie. Perhaps most importantly, none of us went blind. After reflecting on the awesomeness of what we just witnessed, we turned to baseball, and the dulcet tones of Guardians broadcaster Tom Hamilton calling Opening Day.
If you have Eclipse FOMO, Joe Perticone recommends this New Yorker guide to total eclipses. But don’t fret! The next one in the lower 48 is in 2044, so save the date. Happy Tuesday.
—Jim Swift
Could the Dobbs Decision Defeat Donald?
Donald Trump might consider checking out from the Mar-a-Lago lending library an edition of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. He might then re-read the “Life of Pyrrhus.”
A reminder for the those whose Plutarch may be a bit rusty: King Pyrrhus of Epirus was an impressive military commander who, in 280 and 279 BC, won great victories over the mighty Romans. But his army took terrible casualties, and the Epireans couldn’t replenish their ranks as quickly as the Romans. When congratulated on the victory, Pyrrhus wryly commented that “one other such victory would utterly undo him.”
This line ensured Pyrrhus would go down in history as the eponymous origin of the term Pyrrhic victory.
His relevance to Trump a couple of millennia later is obvious: Was the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn Roe v. Wade, a decision made possible by three justices Trump put on the Court, his Pyrrhic victory? Will Trump have won the case only to lose his bid to regain the presidency two years later?
Trump does not, of course, care about the issue of abortion, as our colleague Will Saletan writes today. He committed to overturning Roe in order to hold together his political coalition.
It worked. Trump became president, and after his defeat in 2020, he was able to come back, with the support of social conservatives, to clinch the GOP nomination for a third consecutive time.
Yet here he is, in April 2024, stuck with a position that’s politically unpopular and clearly hurt Republicans in 2022 in key swing states. What’s to be done?
Maneuver. Obfuscate. Lie. And ultimately retreat to a position of states’ rights. Which is what Trump did, or tried to do, yesterday.
But orderly retreat, the military experts tell us—and as Pyrrhus must have known—is difficult. It’s especially difficult in the heat of battle. Trump’s attempt yesterday to retreat in an orderly manner to safer ground doesn’t seem to have worked.
Trump hoped, as he said, to take the issue off the table. But it turns out it’s not so easy to hand wave away a 5-4 Supreme Court decision overturning an almost 50-year-old precedent on an issue a lot of voters care about.
In addition, there are too many outstanding issues for the subject simply to go away now. There are questions about red states’ enforcement of their post-Dobbs abortion bans, about the intrusiveness of those restrictions, about federal regulation of interstate commerce in abortion drugs, about various possible actions by Congress, and about future Supreme Court and lower court appointments. These are all real issues. They remain up for political dispute. The issue isn’t going away because Trump wants it to.
And Trump or his allies are going to be on the unpopular side of many or most of these fights.
Speaking of his allies, I’ll note that it won’t be so easy for Trump to run away from them, either. Democrats can point out that Trump, however insincerely, has been in bed (so to speak) with forces that are zealous and fanatic; that he’s unleashed them in the past and can’t necessarily control them in the future; and that he’s therefore been an agent of chaos and an enabler of extremism. It should be possible to hang Trump’s most militant supporters and the most extreme state laws around his neck. Democrats should be able to make the case Trump has enabled and wants to enable a bunch of extremists to intrude on your freedom.
Finally, Trump’s zigging and zagging could make him look weak.
Which, as Trump knows, is bad—especially when your brand is strength. Bill Clinton said that in politics, “Strong and wrong beats weak and right.” On abortion, Trump looks both wrong and weak.
And if you’re wrong and weak, you may end up . . . a loser.
—William Kristol
Catching up. . .
UConn bests Purdue to win back-to-back titles, and coach Dan Hurley wants to make it three: ESPN [Bonus Flashback: Joe Lieberman doing the U-C-O-N-N cheer on the Senate floor.]
Pence condemns Trump's latest abortion stance as a “Slap in the face”: Axios
Trump’s $175 Million Bond Is Even Shadier Than It Looks: Daily Beast
Be sure to vote for Will Saletan & the Bulwark audio team in the Webby Awards!
Quick Hits
Reasons for optimism
She might be the cohost of a show with JVL that specializes in darkness, but A.B. Stoddard offers some scraps of good-news flotsam and jetsam to grab ahold of, in what feels like a flood of bad news of late:
After his March 7 State of the Union address, which energized Democrats and comforted voters worried about Biden’s age and stamina, the money started pouring in. Within 48 hours, the campaign raised $10 million, and then the three-president fundraiser featuring Barack Obama and Bill Clinton joining Biden in New York raised another $25 million.
Then those universally bad polls began to budge. Biden is now moving ahead of Trump in numerous general election polls and some swing state polling as well.
Team Trump realizes RFK wants his voters, too.
Once lavished uncritically by conservative media, RFK was viewed as an entertaining spectacle . . . when the story was that he could cause a Biden loss. Now that reality is setting in that RFK’s candidacy is chaos in every direction, Trump and the conservative media have turned on him, writes Marc Caputo:
TRUMP ADVISERS QUIETLY acknowledge they and the right helped build up RFK Jr., especially after the pandemic when Kennedy’s anti-vaccine activism gained broader attention and support among conservatives.
“For more than two years, Kennedy was on more conservative media than any of the Republicans who ran for president, so he’s partly a monster of our own making,” said one adviser in Trump’s orbit. “But the same conservative media apparatus that built him up is starting to tear him down. It’s easy. He’s a liberal.”
Cheap Shots
I assume this has been posted here or elsewhere already--I know Tim talked about it on YouTube. But in case you haven't seen it, this unbelievably powerful ad by the Biden campaign is worth a watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wInNjr_9D28.
And this probably doesn't apply to this couple, although who knows--but Texas has the highest uninsured rate in the country, I believe, and has not expanded Medicaid. For something like a quarter of Texan women, that stay in the ICU would have left them in unrecoverable medical debt. We should never forget how cruel MAGA Republicans are.
Also, less politically engaged people are waking up to the fact that abortion isn't just about abortion. It's also about miscarriage care, criminalizing pregnancy outcomes, IVF, access to contraception, it's about the doctor exodus, it's about people making decisions on what state to move to and invest in, having clinics closing down that also do a lot of other things besides abortion (cancer screenings, pap smears, STD screenings, prenatal care, etc) and replacing them with CPCs that lie to you about your health in exchange for a few diapers. It's about forcing a raped 13 year old to give birth. Or becoming a "walking coffin" forced to risk your own health and life to give birth to a baby you know will die.
It's easy to make judgement calls about specific types of abortion, but we're so so so far past that in way too many states now. Whatever abortion restrictions someone might think is reasonable- that is not what's happening. Trump's statement yesterday was both a total lie AND completely absurd.