Michelle Goldberg: Why Trump can afford to disrespect his anti-abortion voters

The Babylon Bee, which is like The Onion for conservative Christians, last month ran a despairing story about the presidential options anti-abortion voters have before them. “Pro-Lifers Excited to Choose Between Moderate Amount of Baby Murder and High Amount of Baby Murder,” said the headline. It was a dark joke, but it spoke to something real: a disquiet among some anti-abortion activists over Donald Trump’s attempts to distance himself from the abortion bans enabled by his Supreme Court appointees. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, told my New York Times colleague Astead W. Herndon that declining evangelical enthusiasm for Trump could be a “grave danger” to his campaign.

As someone who wants Trump to lose, I hope he’s right, but I’m skeptical. “One of the things that Trump has done is reveal what you might call the GOP’s dirty little secret, and that is that it’s never really been only about abortion,” said Robert P. Jones, the president of the Public Religion Research Institute. Conservative activists, he argued, have long seen themselves as part of a moral crusade against the killing of babies, but Republican voters, even white evangelical ones, tend to have more complicated views. In PRRI surveys, he said, white evangelicals are more likely to identify the economy, crime and immigration as critical issues than abortion. “The bond between Trump and rank-and-file Republicans and between Trump and white evangelical Protestants has really not been abortion,” said Jones.

Clearly, a second Trump presidency would be catastrophic for reproductive rights. He obviously doesn’t care about abortion and is happy to take whatever position suits him at any given moment. But many of the people he will sweep into office with him are devoted to abortion bans. Part of the purpose of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 was to make sure there was a deep bench of MAGA apparatchiks ready to staff a second Trump administration, freeing him from the legal and bureaucratic roadblocks that stymied his first administration. The same people Heritage selected to defend Trump at all costs have thought deeply about how to use the levers of the federal government to restrict abortion.

Still, in his spasmodic abortion positioning, Trump has annihilated the expectation that Republicans show deference to the social conservatives who’ve been crusading against abortion for a generation. On his vanity social media site, Truth Social, he wrote that he would be “great for women and their reproductive rights.” He’s come out against six-week abortion bans. He removed a plank from the Republican Party platform calling for an anti-abortion amendment to the Constitution. He’s promised that his administration would provide free in vitro fertilization, a procedure that the Southern Baptist Convention voted to oppose in June.

In doing all this without losing significant support among Christian conservatives, he’s demonstrated how little leverage the anti-abortion movement has over him.

Part of the reason Trump is less constrained on this issue than his predecessors is that he’s transformed the Christian right just as he has the broader conservative movement, dethroning serious-seeming figures while promoting those once regarded as flamboyant cranks. In Republican politics, Steve Bannon and Alex Jones now have far more influence than erstwhile conservative stalwarts such as Paul Ryan and Dick Cheney. Similarly, in the religious realm, the ex-president has elevated a class of faith healers, prosperity gospel preachers and roadshow revivalists over the kind of respectable evangelicals who clustered around George W. Bush. “Independent charismatic leaders, who 20 years ago would have been mocked by mainstream religious right leaders, are now frontline captains in the American culture wars,” writes scholar Matthew D. Taylor in his fascinating new book, “The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy.”

The churches Taylor is writing about exist outside the structures and doctrines of denominations like the Southern Baptists. They’re led by flashy spiritual entrepreneurs who fashion themselves as modern apostles and prophets with supernatural spiritual gifts, and they represent one of the fastest-growing movements in American Christianity. Among many of these churches, Trump remains the anointed one, chosen by God to restore Christian rule to the United States. These Christians care a great deal about abortion, but they appear to care at least as much about Trump. Many of them see him as a modern-day version of the Persian emperor Cyrus, a heathen who, in the sixth century BC, rescued God’s chosen people from Babylonian captivity. In this framework, Trump’s piety is irrelevant; all that matters is his strength.

A key figure in the development of this Christian Trumpism is the evangelical influencer and self-proclaimed prophet Lance Wallnau. As Taylor writes, Wallnau claims that God told him to throw his support behind Trump after meeting him at Trump Tower in 2015. “No evangelical leader has done more to theologically backstop the presidency of Donald Trump than Lance Wallnau,” writes Taylor.

Wallnau is not concerned about Trump’s shifting abortion positions and is dismissive of those who are. “So all the Christians out there going, ‘He’s waffling on abortion’ — it’s because we suck at political stuff,” Wallnau said on his podcast in July. “Let’s just admit it.” As he sees it, if the ex-president is distancing himself from abortion opponents, the fault lies with Christians who failed to make anti-abortion views popular enough to campaign on. Trump doesn’t need to offer concessions to the voters Wallnau represents. All they require of him is that he win.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.