The Trump Theocracy

On Trump's second-term agenda: Rolling back access to contraception, abortion, divorce, same-sex marriage, welfare, LGBT rights, and sex ed.

Donald Trump learned some important lessons from his first term. Chief among them: Don’t cater to or staff your team with moderates or “reasonable” Republicans; and find people with the ability and inclination to carry out your desires, no matter who objects or what it costs the nation.

The people who have stepped up to the plate: Christian Nationalists.

Some of the country’s most extreme anti-abortion groups are already working with Trump to map out how his administration might swiftly and thoroughly strip abortion access from all Americans. These groups are clear that on day one of a Trump presidency, they will end the Biden administration’s directive that medical workers have to save pregnant women’s lives, even if doing so requires offering those women abortions. A Trump Environmental Protection Agency will be told to reclassify abortion pills as “forever chemicals,” which will subject them to even tighter regulation. A proposal from one anti-abortion group would mandate that any doctor who prescribes the pills will be tasked with retrieving and disposing of the embryo or fetus post-abortion — an absolutely insane, disgusting, outrageous rule that is wholly impossible to carry out in practice. Some of the groups with Trump’s ear just want him to ban the pills entirely, rolling back FDA approval of one of the safest prescription medications on the market. I don’t see any universe in which Trump would not sign a national abortion ban if one were delivered to him.

Contraception is on the chopping block, too. The first Trump administration cut off Title X funding, the federal dollars for low-income family planning services, to any clinic that so much as told women they had the legal option to end their pregnancies. That will no doubt be repeated if we get Trump II. But the administration may go farther. Anti-abortion groups, including two of the country’s (and a future Trump administration’s) most influential — the Alliance Defending Freedom and Students for Life — have long been laying the groundwork for the argument that the most effective contraceptive methods are actually abortifacients, and that “conscience” rules should allow any person the right to refuse contraception services. That would include doctors and pharmacists, but also employers who provide health insurance plans, an argument that was already affirmed by the Supreme Court. As law professor Mary Ziegler lays out, a core argument in the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe was an originalist one that abortion rights do not have a long history of recognition and protection in the United States. Well, the same is true of contraception. And the Supreme Court case that enshrined the right to contraception into law was based on essentially the same legal reasoning as Roe. I have a really, really difficult time seeing how this conservative Supreme Court could or would uphold the contraception cases after demolishing the entire premise of them.