the pro-choice case for trump.

A man can dream.

Let me begin with an apology for the sin I am about to commit.

Writing about contemporary politics is one of my least favorite things, because “politics” isn’t about the technical development or exercise of real power. “Politics” is astrology for incels, and equivalent to celebrity gossip. “OMG, did you hear what President Becky said? That was sooo ick! She is going down!” Alternatively, if you feel that metaphor is unfairly sexist, “politics” is professional wrestling. Instead of just two guys hitting each other with chairs, it’s the American public hitting each other with chairs en masse. The result is a slow-but-steady yearly increase in brain damage.

Trump and Kamala have different styles, and would appoint different sorts of judges. The former has immeasurable effects, while the latter is concrete and will be consequential over the next 10-15 years. We’re still talking about Bush-appointed judges, 16 years after the fact.

Promising political consequences over 10 years seems irrelevant to the masses who think that we’ll have a Civil War in 4 years (or even this November). Trying to explain how Trump and Kamala will affect politics in 10 years is irrelevant to Gribble voters on the right who think the options are Caesarism or Stalinism. A 10 year time-scale is also beyond relevance for liberals who think the options are Hitler or not Hitler, since there’s a chance that Trump will become dictator for life.

hysteric panics.

This hysterical approach to “politics” didn’t start all-of-a-sudden with Trump. Glenn Beck was claiming that Obama was a Communist Islamo-Fascist back in 2008. Liberals were calling Bush a war criminal back in 2004. Conservatives were trying to impeach Clinton for a blowjob in 1998.

Conservatives fired the first shot in the war of “hysterical political panics.” Former Republican strategist and popularizer of the Southern Strategy, Kevin Philips, argued this point in his 2006 book American Theocracy. Back in the day, JFK and his brother were double-teaming Marilyn Monroe in the White House, but Republicans had enough respect for the privacy of the bedroom to be discreet. To dig into these personal attacks is mutually assured destruction, and the American public loses.

I specifically accuse Newt Gingrich for breaking this “nuclear agreement” between Democrats and Republicans. Gingrich, like Clinton, was the son of divorced parents. Gingrich was just as much of a sexual “free spirit” as Clinton: in 1962, fresh out of high school, he married Jacqueline Battley, his geometry teacher. They first met when Gingrich was 14 and she was 21.

Gingrich divorced his teacher-wife, despite the fact that she tolerated his semi-public affairs with staffers. This is because she had cancer. According to L.H. Carter, his campaign treasurer, Gingrich felt his sick wife was a political liability. He then married Marianne Ginther, and also started an affair with Callista Bisek. He asked Marianne for an open marriage, and she still refused to leave him. Finally, after Marianne was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, he divorced her within months. He is also one of these Protestants who converted to Catholicism at the young and impressionable age of 66 for “theological” reasons.

Gingrich’s glass-house lifestyle should have prevented him from casting stones, but he still sought impeachment against Clinton. Gingrich would have argued that he was getting revenge for the Watergate scandal against Nixon, and it was Democrats who broke the “nuclear agreement.” Whoever is guilty, Democrats or Republicans, the veneer of civility was pierced. Both sides have engaged in an arms race to the bottom, accusing each other of war crimes and Satanic rituals. This rhetoric has the unfortunate consequence of lowering military recruitment, and it started before Trump. Trump is a consequence of incivility, not the cause of it. Michael Moore, “Bush did 9/11,” and Rush Limbaugh, “Democrats hate America,” came first.

This brings us to 2024, where I am being sucked downward into a vortex of hot-takes which expire as soon as they are written. The toilet bowl of “politics” is fit for banger Tweets and sweet memes, but it doesn’t favor long-form essays with substance. I am playing a losing game. But Trump lured me in with “BREAKING NEWS” on abortion. Now that I’ve written this thing, he’s backing off his position. I fell for the 24 hour news cycle.

With that apology out of the way, imagine that Trump was not a politician, and he stood by his positions for more than a day. If I am wrong (twice), and he back-tracks on back-tracking, then there is a pro-life case to be made for Trump.

A week before the election in November, I was planning to release a piece supporting Kamala and predicting her victory. Here’s the map as I see it:

Ignore the fact that it’s Biden instead of Kamala; ignore the fact that it shows Trump winning Hispanics. The point is to demonstrate the following formula:

• White men +1D

• Hispanics +5R

• Asians +5D

• and "Other" +5R

This results in 299 electoral votes for Harris. I expect her to exceed Biden in North Carolina, but to possibly lose Nevada, Arizona, and perhaps even New Mexico due to a shift in the Hispanic vote. I think this is a worst case scenario, and she might even take these three states as well, but I want to be conservative.

This is my preferred outcome, since MAGA Republicans are the greatest threat to Bretton Woods.

Bretton Woods for Kamala

The American economy is inextricably linked to the Bretton Woods system. Bretton Woods is the reason that the dollar has value. Without it, deficit spending results in hyperinflation. Bretton Woods, to put it bluntly, is the system where we use our military equipment to protect and defend our allies, arming Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, while simultaneously bullying our enemies. The result is that people trade in dollars, even if they would rather not, out of a mixture of fear and trust.

All policing is “force at the margins.” No police force can possibly watch or arrest every single citizen at the same time. Similarly, if China, Russia, and Iran simultaneously rose up against American hegemony, there would be no way to contain the threat using force alone. American soft power is a key component of why Bretton Woods works.

To continue the police analogy, people wouldn’t pull over when they see flashing blue and red lights if we didn’t have a strong and fair court system. If cops simply executed you on sight for speeding, people would try to outrun the cops. But because most cops are not Judge Dredd, people slow down and pull over. The fact that America is extremely stable, trustworthy, and reliable allows for Bretton Woods to operate. There is no other currency in the world as reliable as the USD (with the exception of crypto, but that is for another article, and Russia and China are fairly hostile to crypto anyway).

Russia, China, and Iran directly threaten Bretton Woods, not just militarily, but also through their attempts to ideologically undermine American soft power. Abroad, they inflame anti-Americanism, and domestically, they interfere in our political culture, boosting anyone seen as “radical” or “extreme,” either on the left or right. TikTok is a great example of how China sees wokism as a tool to undermine America’s political stability. China didn’t invent wokism, but it is happy to facilitate and boost the signal.

the MAGA threat.

Certain elements of the left (MAGA communists, RFK-Tulsi), Ron Paul libertarians, and the dissident right find themselves “opposed to the American regime.” They believe that America should stop fighting foreign wars and bring the troops home.

The problem with this idea is that America has built up stockpiles of military hardware. If we're never willing to use that hardware or at least threaten people with it, the only logical alternative is to sell it to the highest bidder (China) and let them take over the world. If we don’t sell our tech to China, it will rot in a warehouse, and the chickens will come home to roost on our multi-trillion dollar debt. At that point, we will be forced to sell it off, whether we want to or not.

China won’t necessarily replace Europeans with Han Chinese immigrants, because it prefers a neo-colonial model, emulating America. Chinese propaganda is busy denying this, by promoting the myth of a Chinese "anti-imperialism gene." This cultural gene supposedly prevents them from ever doing imperialism. I am skeptical that this gene exists, and I think it is more likely that the Chinese failure to expand over the last several thousand years (in comparison with the Indo-European and post-Columbian expansions) has little to do with a "lack of desire" and more to do with a "lack of competence." With competence, the desire will follow.

Following the dissident right logic of isolationism, MAGA Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz have led the charge against Ukraine. No Democrat has said anything remotely as harmful. Ukraine could have already been in NATO by now if it wasn't for Republicans dragging their feet and restricting funding. The success or failure of America's proxy war against China (since Russia has submitted itself to China) will determine the fate of the dollar.

China can't fight NATO without Russia: like Japan in WWII, it doesn't have enough food or fuel to survive NATO sanctions. Furthermore, Chinese tanks can never threaten Europe without Russia as an ally, rendering its "million man strong infantry" totally useless. In a purely naval war, America (plus Britain, France, Germany, Greece, Norway) smokes China. If a Chinese-Russian alliance creates a land war in Europe, the outcome is not as certain. A lot more people die.

It is for these reasons that Republicans should be punished. I appreciate Kamala's pragmatism on many issues. She has done everything that could have been asked of her: supported border security, named whites as a positive force in politics, promised a Republican cabinet member, and dropped the pressure campaign against Israeli. Tim Walz was probably a worse pick than Josh Shapiro, but her heart was in the right place in looking for a military veteran and football coach.

Unlike Hillary Clinton, she is not making the mistake of being a “sensible centrist” on economics. Her promise to place price controls on groceries will appeal to moderate economic populists in the rust belt. She needs to win whites without college degrees, and that is the way to do it. Such policies can be put in place for a year, or maybe a federal judge will shoot them down. Just like Biden’s promise to remove student debt, the idea isn’t to make America communist, but to strongly signal to working class voters that Kamala is trying to put money in their pockets. Whether or not the policy is actually implemented is less relevant.

I would gladly vote for Kamala even if she faced a more “moderate” Republican. A vote for DeSantis, Haley, Vivek and even Doug Burgum would have rewarded the Republicans for tolerating instead of expelling its isolationist members (as the Democrats have effectively done to RFK and Tulsi).¹ But for moderate, almost single issue pro-choice voters, Trump has something to offer. And surprisingly, there are a lot of these people.

A glimmer of hope!

Trump made a Truth Social post, saying "I will be great for women's reproductive rights." I was pleasantly surprised, but not convinced. Trump says a ton of contradictory things, and I almost expected him to follow up with, "PRANKED YOU! I will be the most pro-life president since Abraham Lincoln, believe me!"

But then the Trump campaign doubled down. JD Vance stated in an interview that Trump would veto a federal abortion ban. I waited for the retraction. The clarification. The backtracking. Crickets. What is going on? Am I dreaming?

Well, the retraction finally came, when he said he would vote against the Florida “Amendment to Limit Government Interference with Abortion.” This doesn’t technically contradict the earlier commitment to veto a federal abortion ban, but it is severely disappointing and goes in the wrong direction. We’ll see if Trump walks-back walking back and confuses voters more. At the very least, for a brief moment, there was a glimmer of hope that Trump could become America’s first pro-choice Republican since… Barry Goldwater?

Trump’s done it before.

In the days of 2012, the Republican Party was ruled by pro-life evangelical Christians. Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum were the candidates for the "base." Mitt Romney was the moderate. Mitt Romney had an almost identical platform to George Bush: strong military, free markets, and family values. "Family values" means no gay marriage and no abortion. I don't think the word "transgender" was mentioned either in the Democratic or Republican primaries. This was a long time ago, between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryas.

In 2014, the supreme court delivered a federal victory on gay marriage. It was not clear at that time what the Republican response would be. There were still murmurs about how "marriage is between a man and a woman." Then, Donald Trump became president.

In the last 9 years that he has dominated the Republican Party, the unthinkable happened: openly gay Republicans became a visible part of a Republican campaign. Scandalous! Milo Yiannopolous, Dave Rubin, Richard Grenell, and Scott Presler all played their part.

In August 2016, Presler "engaged in sexual activity inside a Virginia Beach office the RNC shared with the state party — and posted explicit pictures of the encounter on Craigslist." This ain’t your grandfather’s Republican Party.

On the more “straight-presenting” side of things, Charlie Kirk made a point of partnering with Rob Smith, a gay black veteran, during his college tour. But even then, Charlie Kirk was pro-life, as were most of these gay Republicans.

When Trump won in 2016, no one could have predicted then he would kill the pro-life movement. The radical far right "base" claimed that "Trump is just the first step. Then in 2024, we get Tucker. Then, we go even farther..." The idea was to forge a permanent Republican majority by making the Republicans the "white Christian" party, closing the border, and using economic populism to destroy the working-class appeal of Democrats. Instead, church attendance has decreased since 2016; whites have continued their demographic decline; Trump had more illegal immigration than Obama; and the trade deficit remained stagnant until COVID and Biden came along.

Source: https://www.axios.com/2023/10/06/us-trade-deficit-shrinking-august-2023

Ironically, instead of a white Christian demographic boost with mass deportations and industrial revival, Trump’s greatest legacy was to undermine cultural conservatives on gay marriage. In the same way that Reagan normalized “conservative divorce,” Trump normalized “conservative gays.” Even Qanon is full of queens and queers! Lady MAGA proved that drag queens are welcome in the Republican Party. The gay marriage issue is dead, and Trump killed it.

Imagine, now, a very special type of Republican, almost unheard of until now: a pro-choice Republican. Who has ever heard of such a thing? As it turns out, there are millions of these people all across the country. They want low taxes, less spending, less regulation, less immigration, a strong military, and harsher sentencing for violent crime. Their existence, once mythical, has been revealed by the end of Roe v. Wade.

Solid red states are voting for abortion, when the issue is disaggregated from the party platform. As it turns out, these pro-choice Republicans have been holding their nose and voting GOP for all these years just because they really hate taxes, immigrants, and crime. When Kansas voted in favor of abortion, opinion polls found that only 7 states stood against the Kansas decision, while 43 states supported it. In the electoral college, those are landslide numbers.

On the other hand, there is really no such thing as a "pro-life Democrat." Maybe there was back in the 1990s, but there aren't any blue states voting for abortion restrictions against party lines. While the end of Roe v. Wade has resulted in some abortion restriction in red states, it has also revealed the weakness of the pro-life position overall. The legislative effect has been troubling, but the cultural effect has been breathtaking.

When voters are given the choice, they vote for abortion. The charade of the pro-life mafia was to imply that all Trump voters were pro-life. That simply is not true, and the end of Roe proves it. This is a devastating moral blow. No longer can the fundamentalists, evangelicals, and "compassionate conservatives" claim that forced pregnancies are an American value. With or without Trump, the pro-life movement is moving into the same fringe corner as “traditional marriage” Republicans.

Now it's 2024, and Trump is running for a third time. Kamala is unquestionably better on abortion. She intends to enshrine Roe v. Wade into federal law, and will presumably appoint a liberal to the Supreme Court when Clarence Thomas gets too old. She might also implement Biden’s proposed reform of the Supreme Court and place term limits on justices to force early retirements.

But here's the question: if Trump loses, how will pro-lifers react? "I told you so! Don't betray your base!" Maybe this lie will work, maybe it won't. But there is a non-zero chance that a Trump loss will mean a temporary boost in morale for pro-lifers. Nick Fuentes has explicitly stated that he is willing to campaign against Trump and act as a "spoiler" in Michigan over the pro-life cause. If Trump loses, Fuentes will claim a "victory." If the goal is to demoralize the far right, a Trump victory might be preferable.

But if Trump loses, the Santorums will slither and the Huckabees will hustle their way back into the Republican coalition. "Trump isn't moral enough," they whine. "He was divorced! He supported abortion! It's time for a truly moral Republican, who will save black babies from genocide! We need more Down's Syndrome and rape babies! Incest babies are good for the birthrate!"

Maybe such radicals identify with the genetically defective, and want to force pregnancies for reasons of self-preservation. Maybe the thought of women having a choice to screen for genetic defects scares them, because it would eliminate “their kind of people” from the earth. From that perspective, it is understandable why they are willing to betray Trump on every other issue, out of fear, spite, and resentment.

On the other hand, imagine if Trump wins. He will probably continue claiming to be pro-life, but he would establish a new precedent: you can promise to veto an abortion ban and still win as a Republican. It would be a historic victory. All of the pro-lifers currently screaming about a "revolt of the base" would be rebuked and admonished. Who are they going to vote third party for? Greens? Libertarians? RFK? Write in Ron DeSantis? When there's not even a fake, fringe third-party candidate who represents your flailing moralism, that's crushing. Take your ball and go home.

Kamala would increase the legal accessibility of abortion in statistical terms by resurrecting Roe v. Wade, but a Trump presidency threatens to remove abortion from the Republican platform forever. Even among conservatives, abortion would become normalized. Qanon cultists, following Trump to their deaths, might open up to the idea of abortions. With the fall of Roe, the abortion pill will become normalized, and liberals can subsidize or lower the cost of these pills to work around state-based abortion laws. If Democrats take back the white house in 2028, they can replace Clarence Thomas and re-institute Roe. By this time, the Republican Party will lose the will to oppose it, just as they lost the will to oppose gay marriage.

The cost of polarization.

Blake Masters, despite being funded by a gay man, referred to abortion as “a religious sacrifice to these people, I think it’s demonic.” That kind of Qanon rhetoric is not very productive for trying to bring the country together. Ironically, Masters is supposed to represent the “tech right,” which is supposedly an alternative to the old fuddy-duddies like Santorum and Huckabee. Someone needs to update his software. Maybe Trump is the one who can do it.

There are two aspects to abortion: the good that it immediately provides, and the polarized meta-conflict surrounding it.

Conservatives see abortion as a tragedy (or a demonic sacrifice), but they don’t see the tragedy that occurs before and afterwards. If abortion is viewed in the light of these tragedies, then it can be seen as the lesser of two evils, and a net moral positive. The “sperm donors” of women who seek abortions are disproportionately lazy, criminal, and mentally incapable. Women who seek abortions have above average rates of poverty, mental illness, and substance abuse issues. In other words, mothers who seek abortions, more often than not, are the result of a long series of tragedies, likely beginning in early childhood. If pregnancies are forced to term, as pro-lifers demand, the result will be a perpetuation of cycles of criminality, poverty, declining intelligence, and mental illness. If you want a dysfunctional third world country, millions of forced pregnancies are a great way to achieve that.

Some pro-lifers embrace this vision of dysfunctional theocracy. They imply that Mexican immigrants are morally superior to Americans on account of their family values. Even if Mexico is run by cartels, murder, kidnapping, and drug trafficking is a lesser sin compared with abortion, in their view. No Catholic majority country would allow abortion! Oh wait. Mexico permits abortions, and just elected its first pro-abortion Jewish president. As Ben Franklin said, "Those who would give up essential Abortion Rights to purchase a little temporary Trad Catholicism deserve drug cartels and feminist presidents."

Given the fact that Kamala is better than Trump on this issue, how can a pro-choice argument be made for Trump? The best argument is made from the “meta-conflict” of polarization surrounding abortion.

For example: how could such a sensible and handsome man like Blake Masters say something so divisive and alienating to the vast majority of Americans? Am I a demonic Moloch worshipper just because I don’t want the country to be flooded with mentally ill drug-babies? Or what’s more: what if I didn’t want blue haired feminists having kids? Wouldn’t abortion rights be the best way to prevent these types from breeding? And you know what? Let’s give the whole thing to Blake: let’s say that abortionists actually are Satanists. Why would you want Satanists giving birth, passing on their Satanist genes and values, when they could otherwise be allowed to have abortions and not reproduce?

I have given up on trying to convince conservatives of basic logic, but in theory, some moderates can agree that polarization is bad. Polarization weakens our military, our global soft power, and destroys trust in institutions. Polarization results in Republican candidates calling Democrats “demonic satanists,” and Democrats calling Republicans “literally Hitler.” If we want to heal this divide, we’re going to have to put some issues to bed.

One of those issues was homosexuality. Whether or not you want your son to be gay, there is a social cost to having a constant political debate over the issue at a federal level. Idealogues believe the social cost is worth it, because they are engaged in a holy struggle. I’m willing to reach across the aisle and say, “Kamala might be better for my ideology, but Trump is better for putting it to bed and healing the country.”

But that argument only holds up on abortion. On pretty much everything else, Trump is extremely divisive. Trump leans into polarization and conspiracy theories even when there is little to be gained. Outside of abortion, Kamala is better for the country on polarization, given that she supports border security and throwing a symbolic bone to the disaffected working class, who make up the majority of Gribble voters.

Trump’s style of “bringing the country together” is to recruit pro-Russian former Democrats like RFK and Tulsi Gabbard to promote vaccine skepticism and abandoning NATO. Bipartisan Gribblism is only going to increase division between educated and uneducated, rural and urban, rich and poor. Despite Kamala’s best efforts, polarization will increase under her as well, but at a slower pace than it did under Trump.

But hey, I still appreciate the abortion thing. Thanks, Trump.

1. RFK and Tulsi said, “you can’t fire me, because I quit!” but this was in response to Democrats denying them a seat at the table, and Republicans preparing them a seat. Israel is not as clear of an issue, because the Democrats aren’t asking to be “less involved in Israel,” but are advocating a two-state solution. In this way, Democrats are again more interventionist, whereas Republicans say, “just throw them some weapons and cash and let them do whatever!” Wherever there is an option to be lazy or negligent, Republicans take it, even in their limited support for America’s (only?) ally.