Earlier this week we had pondered how serious a schism was developing inside MAGA world between Team Forced-Birth and Team More-“Babies”-Will-Die-If-Kamala-Harris-Is-Elected-So-Shut-The Fuck-Up, comparing it to the Blue Coalition’s inner turmoil over Israel’s ongoing malevolent depraved indifference to human life in Gaza, given the electoral similarities. While the admittedly clunky premise and framing of “Maybe this is all just Twitter bullshit, and maybe it isn’t” left some readers lost on the significance of a growing revolt inside of the MAGAverse – and that’s on us – it seemed plenty others did in fact get it but outright dismissed that the rift could be metastasizing.

Is convicted felon former President Trump telling NBC “six weeks is too short, it has to be more time, and I’ve told them that I want more weeks, I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks” when asked about how he would vote on the Florida Amendment 4 abortion ballot measure and then, less than 24 hours later, telling Fox News that he was going to vote against it a strong enough signal that, yeah, maybe it was metastasizing and Trump was in fact getting worried?

You really have to step back and appreciate just how hard of a U-turn the hardcore “pro-lifers” just forced out of him. Months and months of the fat bastard “moderating” on abortion to try to sap President Joe Biden’s strongest issue with voters – one now even stronger for Vice President Kamala Harris – to the point where he literally posted “My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights” eight days ago. Then a week later he endorses keeping in place a pretty hard six-week ban that’s a non-starter with pro-choice voters. Why the hell else would they have gotten hundreds of thousands of people to sign a petition to get it on the November ballot?

Thank you, @realDonaldTrump!

Please help the great people of Florida defeat this horrific amendment!

If Trump starts talking like former President Trump who at the March for Life said “Together, we must protect, cherish, and defend the dignity and sanctity of every human… https://t.co/a3FvUEJiz2

— Lila Rose (@LilaGraceRose) August 30, 2024

Great for Trump that this Lila Rose – an activist few had heard of before last week – is happier than she was in an interview Politico printed the day before. “He’s alienating his base. Kamala Harris spent a whole week at the DNC rallying her pro-abortion base. Abortion was a headline issue at the DNC, and Trump’s response to that is saying, ‘Well, I guess I’m going to alienate my base.’ He’s not getting Kamala’s base,” Rose said, also stating outright she would not have voted for Trump if the election were that day. Big win for MAGA there, to the tune of 5,000-odd Twitter upvotes.

We were to understand however that “Operation Define Kamala Harris” Version 3.7 was to portray her as “a flip-flopper” with no principles other than whatever simply gets her elected, that she’s incapable of evolving on the issues. You might say “It doesn’t matter, Trump always gets away with it because low-info voters don’t pay enough attention,” and yeah, you’d probably be right. Or at least you’d be unlikely to get a clear enough answer about any impact from polling or news coverage of such an incongruence. After all, why else would we write a piece like “Maybe this is all just Twitter bullshit, and maybe it isn’t”? It can be pretty freaking hard to parse through the noise these days.

But, as you might have heard, there’s a pretty important debate in 11 days. One that the Guardian’s Trump beat guy Hugo Lowell wrote was seen by the Mar-a-Lago crew as their one and only chance at overcoming a “serious predicament for Trump and his campaign as he struggles to land effective attacks against the vice-president just months before the election.” There’s probably going to be an even larger audience than the one that saw Joe Biden collapse on CNN back in June. How’s it going to look when Trump calls Harris out for “waffling” on fracking? We get that it’s a pretty freaking important issue, particularly in Pennsylvania. It’s also pretty niche and circlejerky, and there’s a certain cunty arrogance to telling a 25 year-old woman in Arizona who doesn’t know what fracking even is that one candidate’s lack of consistency on that issue is more important than the other’s lack of consistency on policies with a direct impact on that female voter’s reproductive health.

If “flip-flopping” is so bad then why the fuck did Trump just do it?

And to pose the question not so rhetorically, if Harris brings her A-game and doesn’t implode the way Joe Biden did (We have to be more circumspect with this, we didn’t manage expectations ahead of the last one), then how do Trump’s handlers expect him to be able to make that happen?

Similarly, Trump also this week claimed he was going to make in-vitro fertilization government-funded and/or mandate insurers pay for it. Not exactly a “flip-flop” by him personally, though his Mike Pence replacement voted against a bill establishing its legality nationally back in June. But how’s it going to look for the Republican Party if Senate Dems turn around and immediately put Trump’s proposal to a vote? If Schumer and pals don’t act with their typical fecklessness they can squeeze the Senate GOP pretty hard here, forcing all of them – not to mention the couch fucker running mate – into taking a position opposite their Orange God Emperor’s.

Trump's stance on IVF means insurance companies and you will be paying for this. https://t.co/LcI19xC6Je

— Katy Faust (@Advo_Katy) August 30, 2024

And when they block it, at least Lila Rose will be happy. She retweeted the above.