Was Trump ever "ardently pro-life" though? Iirc, this was one of the issues on which he was always treading carefully. And it was of course always evident that he's not a staunch moralist on the issue.

Well, I think it's fair to say he's doing a serious pivot on the issue, and Kari Lake is doing even more of one based on her previous statements.

Trump is pro-life for the votes, obviously. I think every Trump supporter here would acknowledge he doesn't have actual moral convictions on the issue. He's probably paid for abortions himself.

But the justification to vote Trump for so many Americans right of center, including many members of my family, who think Trump is an asshole but vote for him anyway, is that he is pro-life. So penetrating that belief is something the pro-democracy coalition needs to do.

More content on Trump and Christians in this post:
https://forums.d2jsp.org/topic.php?t=88181049&f=119&p=659949632

Dear Lord, I read that article again, and it's eviscerating. I'd be curious if any Trump supporter could engage with the content, rather than ignoring it, as you all have since I posted it.

whats in it?

I am also sad that De Santis lost the nomination.

Trump will have to be our used-car-salesman, boomer leader, I suppose. The Bible is exactly as the article says, a sales ploy that builds his cult (a benign one or otherwise).

Deep down, I think Trump wants to do the right thing, but 50 years of wheeling and dealing in the corporate sphere have stained him, I think. At least he won't be naive while extincting enemies like Hamas.

Doesn't really speak much to people who don't care about religion, does it?

Lake, yes, she's pivoting hard. With Trump, I don't think the pivot is as big as you make it seem. Trump has always been overtly cynical and transactional on the issue. His pitch to pro-life voters was always "I might be a crude and immoral man, but I will nominate pro-lifers to the courts". When the Christian right embraced Trump in 2016 - reluctantly, if I may add! - they made a proverbial deal with the devil. And it paid off for them big time, conservative judges is the issue on which Trump produced the clearest and strongest "wins" for his coalition.

Now, from a strategic perspective.... Roe is already overturned, there already is a conservative majority on the supreme court, so Trump nominating further conservative judges during his second term is a much weaker pitch this time around. The 5d gigabrain move for single-issue pro-life voters is probably to vote Biden plus downballot Republican, get rid of the "imperfect vessel" which has run its course, and essentially make a big bet that the conservative justices on the supreme court will make the next 4 years AND that a (better) Republican (than Trump) will win in 2028, after an agonizing second term of an inept and deeply unpopular Democrat.


Regarding your point about the """pro-democracy coalition""" needing to penetrate the belief of pro-life voters in Trump: that's kiiiiiinda hard to do while half the Democratic party is openly advocating for a right to no-questions-asked third trimester abortions, isn't it?






This. The conservatives/right-wingers presumably skew more secular on PaRD than among the general population.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Apr 13 2024 10:24pm

Reading just 5 min of this thread gave me an actual headache. I just hope there are enough mentally sane people in America that Trump 2024 won’t happen. But unfortunately Republicans have some quite clever tactics up their sleeves - like defunding education, leading to a lot of badly educated lower class Americans that feed right back into their base.