Harris Does What Biden Couldn’t at Debate, Destroys Trump on Abortion
When Donald Trump debated President Joe Biden in June, one of the most cringe-inducing moments was when Trump announced, unchallenged, the batshit insane lie that Democrats want to “kill” babies. “They will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month, and even after birth — after birth — if you look at the former governor of Virginia, he was willing to do this,” Trump said. “He said, ‘We’ll put the baby aside, and will determine what we do with the baby,’ meaning: We’ll kill the baby.’”
Biden couldn’t choke out a coherent sentence in response. On Tuesday in Philadelphia, Kamala Harris had the chance for a re-do after Trump again pushed the same lie. But even before she opened her mouth, ABC’s Linsey Davis — moderating the debate with her colleague David Muir — corrected Trump: “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill the baby after it’s born.”
Harris went on to slam Trump for packing the Supreme Court with conservative justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, and detailed the horrific experiences of women living in states that have implemented strict abortion restrictions in the aftermath.
The vice president spoke of “Trump abortion bans that make no exception even for rape and incest, calling on viewers to “understand what that means: A survivor of a crime of violation to their body does not have the right to make a decision about what happens to their body next. That is immoral.”
She spoke of women bleeding out after miscarriages, afraid to get medical help, and children who are victims of incest being forced to carry pregnancies to term. She pledged, as she has repeatedly since becoming the Democratic nominee, to restore the protections of Roe v. Wade if she is elected with a Democratic majority. “If Donald Trump were to be reelected, he will sign a national abortion ban,” she added.
A representative for Harris campaign, which said it was monitoring the reactions of groups of undecided voters via dial groups in battleground states, said those voters had a strong response during the debate when Harris talked about abortion: “This really was off the charts, we rarely see dials go this high.” The represented added that in the 9 p.m. hour during the debate, 71 percent of their grassroots donors were women.
Trump flailed in his response, attempting, unsuccessfully, to pivot away from abortion and toward Harris and Biden’s efforts to win student loan forgiveness. Pressed by the moderator about whether or not he would actually sign a federal ban on abortion, Trump refused to say. “I won’t have to,” he offered. When asked about his running mate, J.D. Vance’s assertion that he would veto such a ban, Trump again refused to confirm: “I didn’t discuss it with JD,” he said.
Kamala Harris’ full response on abortion pic.twitter.com/QEVkM5WjkR
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 11, 2024
Trump’s record on abortion has become a political problem — a fact he has long recognized, even if he hasn’t quite settled on a fix. Since a Supreme Court majority — including three justices he appointed — struck down the federal right to abortion in 2022, the former president has both downplayed his role, and bragged about it.
As he’s struggled to land on a position that preserves enough of his anti-abortion coalition without turning off normies, Trump has toyed with branding, discussing, for example, whether a national ban at 16 weeks, a nice “round,” “even number,” would have wider appeal than a 15-week ban.
Most recently, Trump reversed himself, within a day, on the subject of whether he would be voting for a ballot measure that proposes codifying the right to abortion in his home state of Florida. (Florida currently enforces a ban on most abortions that take place after six weeks gestation, before many women know they are pregnant.) “I think the six weeks is too short,” Trump told NBC News on August 29. “I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks,” he said, when pressed on how he would vote on the pro-choice measure. The next day — following vocal backlash from anti-abortion Republicans — Trump told a Fox News reporter that, actually, he would be voting against the proposal.
As the moderators mentioned, his running mate has added to the confusion by promoting the dubious claim that he would “veto” a national abortion ban. “No Republican with any reasonable power is saying that we should have a complete national abortion ban,” Vance told Meet the Press — which was interesting since Vance himself has said that he would like to see about “be illegal nationally.” Project 2025 — written by Trump’s former and current advisers to be the playbook for his next term in office — also fantasizes of enforcing the Comstock Act, which Trump’s own lawyer has identified as a de facto federal abortion ban already “on the books.”
Trump’s refusal to take a position at Tuesday’s debate reinforces the idea that the equivocation is less about an unwillingness to take a position, and more a transparent attempt to muddy the waters so thoroughly that voters can’t figure out what his position actually is.
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