'Devil, we've had enough'

Why the anti-abortionists are a thorn in Trump’s campaign

- ALEX WOODWARD

In 2016, Donald Trump pledged to appoint justices to the Supreme Court who would overturn Roe v Wade.

Eight years later, voted out of office and campaigning to return to the White House, and buoyed by his fulfilled prophecy of a Supreme Court that revoked a constitutional right to abortion,

Trump returned to a crowd of right-wing evangelical Christians to once again ask for their vote.

“You have to go with your heart,” Trump told the crowd at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s June conference. “But you have to also remember: you have to get elected.”

Four months later, powerful figures within America’s far-right evangelical movement and the architects of the modern Christian nationalist movement are wrestling with his position on abortion.

Christian nationalists spent nearly 45 years steering Republican politics into this moment, but the movement’s crowning achievement is now a political liability. Trump won’t publicly endorse a national abortion ban, pivoting instead to saying that those decisions are now up to individual states.

Trump repeatedly lies that doctors are killing babies to perform “after birth” abortions and tells his supporters to stand for “innocent life”. Those words come straight from the language of anti-abortion activists and a right-wing evangelical movement that has looked to Trump to continue what they see as a biblical call to arms to defend the “unborn”.

Yet the Supreme Court’s decision is overwhelmingly unpopular, and a vast majority of Americans don’t want the government interfering in their reproductive healthcare.

Meanwhile, the Christian nationalist movement – driven by a belief the US was, is, and forever should be a Christian nation, with Christianity embedded in all aspects of law and society – has a foothold in federal, state and local governments and a home within Republican politics.