It’s a fresh week in the darkest timeline we’re all inhabiting together, and Donald Trump remains both deeply confused and a direct menace to women. In a 60 Minutes interview, he suggested that maybe his Supreme Court nominee will overturn Roe v. Wade: “They’ll have to go to another state.”
Overturning Roe altogether would be very difficult to do for a lot of reasons—the right case would have to come along that would directly challenge the law, and there are 40 years of legal precedent supporting it, which survived even previous very conservative administrations.
But there are plenty of scenarios where abortion could be so tightly regulated it becomes impossible to obtain (although, again, the current Supreme Court struck down a broad Texas law that could’ve created a dangerous template for other states if it had been upheld).
However, Trump has been clear that he’ll appoint anti-abortion judges, something he seems to think would overturn Roe automatically. We saw that again in his Sunday night interview with 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl, where he suggested abortion will somehow become a states’ rights issue.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” he told her. “I’m pro-life. The judges will be pro-life.”
Stahl: But what about overturning this law?
Trump: There are a couple things. They’ll be pro-life. In terms of the whole gun situation, we know the Second Amendment and everybody’s talking about the Second Amendment and they’re trying to dice it up and change it. They’re going to be very pro-Second Amendment. But having to do with abortion, if it ever were overturned, it would go back to the states.”
Stahl: “But then some women won’t be able to get an abortion.”
Trump: “No, it’ll go back to the states.”
Stahl: “No, some—”
Trump: Yeah, well, they’ll perhaps have to go—they’ll have to go to another state.”
Stahl: “And that’s OK?”
Trump: “Well, we’ll see what happens. It’s got a long way to go, just so you understand. That has a long, long way to go.”
To be clear: this is garbled nonsense, and yet another example of the ways in which Trump is utterly at sea, completely ill-suited for the job America just hired him for. But God knows that plenty of Trump appointees are smarter than he is, and willing to try their hardest to make outlawing abortion a reality. Make your donations to Planned Parenthood and the Center for Reproductive Rights today.