It didn’t all happen on Day 1.
But by the end of his first full week in office, President Trump waded back into an issue that he finds particularly politically treacherous: abortion.
Late last week, amid a hailstorm of other policy measures, the president pardoned 23 anti-abortion protesters. He overturned two orders issued by former President Joseph Biden that had burnished federal abortion protections. And he reinstated a longstanding Republican policy barring federal funds from going to organizations overseas that perform or promote abortions.
Those moves on abortion were nothing like the shock-and-awe approach Trump took to immigration or D.E.I., and they fell far short of what his conservative, anti-abortion base would eventually like him to do.
His strategy reflects the fact that, as much as he claims a sweeping electoral mandate, he faces a delicate political calculus on abortion, which polling shows a majority of Americans believe should be legal. For now, he appears to be looking for ways to reward the ardent abortion opponents who have backed him without immediately taking more overt steps that most Americans oppose.
Democrats and supporters of abortion rights see an opening all the same.
“I think, while he is quiet about it, he is trying to lay the groundwork to erode reproductive rights in ways that are very dangerous,” said Representative Jennifer McClellan, a Virginia Democrat, adding, “We need to be very bluntly pointing out the impact of these orders.”
‘Pro-life in the fullest sense’
One of the Trump administration’s actions that supporters of abortion rights found most alarming — and that opponents were quick to celebrate — was tucked into an executive order that had nothing to do with abortion at all.
A phrase in an executive order on gender delighted activists who have long wanted to grant “personhood” — and with it, constitutional rights — to embryos.
“I don’t know if you saw his executive order on gender, but it defines life as beginning at conception, rather than birth,” Speaker Mike Johnson told anti-abortion activists on Friday in Washington during the March for Life, where he praised the White House for showing its “resolve” on the issue.
Vice President JD Vance addressed the crowd there, too, calling Trump the “most pro-life American president of our lifetimes” and applauding him as “the man who delivered on his promise of ending Roe.”
“Now, the task of our movement is to protect innocent life,” Vance said to the audience. “It’s to defend the unborn, and it’s also to be pro-family and pro-life in the fullest sense of that word possible.”
Ryan Stitzlein, vice president of political and government relations for the abortion-rights group Reproductive Freedom for All, said his organization intended to draw attention to actions by the Trump administration that could clear the way for abortion restrictions, even when they fly under the radar. Abortion-rights supporters have long warned that the Trump administration could use its power to enforce the Comstock Act, an 1873 law, to criminalize the shipping of abortion pills, which are used in most abortions in the United States.
“The work that we’re going to need to do is to highlight and amplify that for the general public,” he said. “That’s not the mandate that, you know, that voters sent in this election. Voters do not want abortion restricted at the federal level.”
Democrats mull their message
Democrats seeking to attack Trump over abortion rights will have to overcome the challenges they faced in 2024.
During his first presidency, Trump appointed three of the Supreme Court justices on the bench who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, and he bragged about it after they did so in 2022. Democrats hoped that would be a death knell for his 2024 presidential campaign, but he sought to distance himself from abortion opponents by saying he thought the issue should be left to the states.
“He was really artful and wily about trying to get out from underneath the abortion issue,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who once predicted abortion could win the election for her party.
Vice President Kamala Harris made the issue a centerpiece of her abbreviated campaign against Trump, but it wasn’t enough to win over voters who considered the economy and immigration to be more important.
And while voters often supported abortion rights when given the chance to vote on that issue by itself, Democrats found that didn’t always mean they supported the presidential candidate who agreed with them on the issue. Voters in Arizona, for example, approved a ballot referendum protecting the constitutional right to abortion even as Trump won the state by 5.5 percentage points. Voters also protected abortion rights in redder states such as Missouri and Montana.
Now, advocates will try to argue that Trump and congressional Republicans could endanger abortion rights regardless of whether voters have established protections in their state.
“Some people actually said, ‘I’ve taken care of it in my state, Trump can’t do anything,’” McClellan said. “I do think we need to recognize the irony of that and help people understand: Even with state protections in place, President Trump can still undermine reproductive freedom. It goes back to how we talk about it.”
The Moment
‘This is the beginning of the Roaring Twenties 2.0’
What do Donald Trump’s supporters want from his second term? For three days during inauguration week, the photographer Philip Montgomery and the reporter Charles Homans crisscrossed Washington, D.C., asking people who came to celebrate Trump’s return to office what they hoped to see. Here’s what a couple from Sugarcreek Township, Ohio, told them at an inauguration event hosted by Newsmax on Jan. 19. I recommend taking in their whole project.
Robert Shinkle
We expect that Trump will usher in a new golden era for America. That’s why we’re dressed the way we are. This is the beginning of the Roaring Twenties 2.0. You’re going to see so much economic prosperity, the cost of energy going down, while American hegemony increases dramatically. It’s very hopeful right now — way more than his first term. There’s been a lot of lessons learned.
Carolyn Beauregard-Shinkle
It’ll be a different kind of presidency, these next four years. He has excellent people in place in the cabinet as well as throughout the White House staff. I think that he knows that he has limited time to get a lot done.
