“It’s lonely over here in the pro-life camp,” Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, writes in an op-ed in today’s Washington Post. Indeed, Hawkins is very, very lonely, just hoping and waiting by her phone for Donald Trump to just give her a call and maybe ask her to dinner, she writes.
Since the Supreme Court issued their ruling in Whole Woman’s Health vs. Hellerstedt, Trump hasn’t said a single word about the decision, one which Hawkins describes as “a big win for abortion advocates and truly a loss for those of us who saw the law as something meant to protect women.” Instead, Hawkins laments that her candidate of choice spent the day “making fun of Elizabeth Warren and lamenting how CNN has gone negative on him.” Hawkins’ heart is broken.
She continues:
Two days later, his campaign has yet to issue a statement or so much as a tweet about the ruling. Even though he is not [the] president and cannot nominate anyone to the bench now, actions speak louder than words.
[...]
Right now in the pro-life movement people are wondering if Mr. Trump’s staff is uninformed or frankly, if he just doesn’t care about the topic of life.
So, here we are, a long and painful 131 days before the election and it’s just occurred to some of the staunchest anti-choice advocates that Trump might not have an actual position on abortion. This apparently wasn’t clear when Trump, truly known as a man of principle and ill-fitting hats, changed his position on abortion and “punishment” three times in a single day.
Now, Hawkins worries that Trump might not be taking the nomination seriously. It’s equally surprising and comical that it took his silence on Hellerstedt to arrive at that conclusion. It seems that Trump, who said nothing about any of the Supreme Court’s recent decisions, is content to be a tabula rasa for middle-aged dudes like this guy who, in another Washington Post op-ed, laments the “bygone era when you didn’t need ‘safe spaces’ on college campuses.” Ah yes, the halcyon days of a mythical pastoral, where the “silent majority” (not actually silent or the majority) wasn’t forced into non-silence by invisible social forces aligning against them; where no one was asked to vote for an “entitled progressive” like Hillary Clinton.
It’s almost as if the Trump campaign is running a campaign based solely on the amorphous shape of a certain demographic’s hurt and anger rather than one engaged with politically complicated issues like reproductive rights. It’s almost as if that a man who once said he was “just joking” about his long and public abuse of women from Megyn Kelly to Heidi Cruz isn’t actually running a campaign concerned with appealing to any women at all, regardless of political persuasion.
Maybe.
But maybe Trump will respond to Hawkins’ op-ed and call her up and ask her out for dinner. But maybe Trump has already missed his chance to woo the anti-choice right:
After last week’s meeting with Donald Trump, I felt like someone who was a member of the dating site “It’s Just Lunch.” It felt like we pro-lifers and Mr. Trump were just opening a conversation, getting to know each other. But after this week, I feel like if I was asked to dinner, I’m not sure I’d go.
A woman waiting around for Trump to call her after a perfectly fine lunch date, pretending that she’d have to think about dinner, is truly the terrible analogy this election deserves.
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