Flying under the radar of The Narrative™ and its hyper-focus on the Holy Orange Savior’s miraculous survival of an assassination attempt and Democrats suicidally despondent over it these days is the deep feelings of betrayal among “pro-life” Evangelicals furious with their most important issue being aborted from the Republican Party’s official 2024 platform, with one leading fetus-loving activist, 2020 RNC guest speaker Abby Johnson, telling NOTUS she’s hearing from “thousands” of fellow forced birthers supposedly intent on staying home in November after this snub.
“A lot of people feel politically homeless right now. They feel so betrayed by the Republican Party, and honestly, they feel betrayed by Trump because of the things that he’s been saying about life in the womb,” said Johnson, adding “there’s a lot of people that are going to sit [the election] out, and that’s really unfortunate.” Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Mohler echoed the sentiment saying “The gap is there. We’re about to find out where the GOP is going on this and where Donald Trump is going on this. He must have overwhelming evangelical Christian support.”
“And he better remember that,” Mohler added. Sounds very warning-y. It’s not clear why these people aren’t in on the kayfabe that Trump is just pretending to move to the center on abortion politics, that he’ll do whatever they want if reelected and he’s simply bullshitting his way through the campaign in a lame attempt to neutralize the Dems’ strongest issue. But that’s his problem, not ours, and we’d be more than happy to see it metastasize and cost him the votes of Evangelicals who aren’t picking up on the pretty obvious reality that he would continue to deliver for them.
“The attempt on Trump’s life brought some breathing room. The former president, who isn’t particularly religious, said on Truth Social that ‘it was God alone’ who allowed him to survive the shooting – a claim that Christian conservatives seemed to agree with,” NOTUS writes. Since they brought it up, we might as well raise the possibility that Trump’s “moderation” on abortion was a motivator for Thomas Crooks, one we can toss onto the pile with anti-semitism and accelerationism.
Anyway, we’ll see if Trump’s math works out here and whether any depression in turnout among forced birthers is offset by his “moderation” taming the intensity of pro-choicers. The wider political media has since the Dobbs decision in 2022 defaulted to underestimating the latter while tuning out the former. They might do well to try to figure this out instead of dicking around as usual.