April 8, 2024 | What A Day Newsletter

What A Day: Abort in the storm

FILE - Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gestures during a speech at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., Jan. 18, 2016. For conservative, anti-abortion Christians, former President Donald Trump delivered in four years what no other Republican before him had been able to do. He transformed the U.S. Supreme Court into a conservative majority that would go on to overturn Roe v. Wade. (AP Photo/Steve Helber, File)

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Campaign And Gain

The Trump campaign is beginning to take its final form as we sprint to November.

After months of refusing to give a straight answer regarding his policy views on abortion, disgraced former president Donald Trump announced on Monday that abortion laws should be determined by the states, side-stepping calling for a national ban, which even Republican strategists know is politically toxic. This coward’s position is in line with the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe vs. Wade. Trump was, of course, personally responsible for installing three justices that form the Court’s conservative majority.

Anti-abortion groups and anti-choice Evangelicals who ensured Trump’s victory in 2016 had mixed reactions to Monday’s statement. Marjorie Dannefenfelser, president of notorious anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said she was “deeply disappointed” in Trump’s refusal to endorse a federal ban and that allowing the states to divide “cedes the national debate to the Democrats who are working relentlessly to enact legislation mandating abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy.” Mandating! All nine months! These people, and their batshit propaganda, man. Whew! Regardless, most anti-abortion groups (including SBA Pro-Life America) are still rallying around their guy despite Monday’s development, because they know he’s the one who delivered the Dobbs decision for them in the first place.

Abortion isn’t one of Trump’s strong suits, so he’s made sure to focus throughout the campaign on his favorite topic: immigration. Speaking at a multimillion-dollar fundraiser on Saturday night, he re-upped his old “shithole countries” talking point and complained that more people are not immigrating to the United States from “nice” countries like Denmark, Switzerland, and Norway. Wow, subtle! By “nice” he clearly means “overwhelmingly White.”

Meanwhile, at the RNC…

Over at the Republican National Committee, Trump’s newly-installed leadership team has faced a rocky first month. New chair Michael Whatley and co-chair Laura Trump—a close Trump ally and his literal daughter-in-law, respectively—have faced major staffing problems and operational obstacles in this pivotal election season, causing the Trump campaign to privately criticize the new leaders (again, the ones they installed) in recent weeks.

Just days after Whatley and Lara Trump took the helm, emails went out to entire RNC teams, according to the Guardian, informing staffers that they had to choose between resigning and reapplying for their jobs, or face termination: a not-so-subtle MAGA loyalty test. As a result, they lost a large pool of existing talent with institutional knowledge for basically no reason. In spite of all this, Trump hauled his best fundraising month of this campaign season in March, pulling in $65.6 million. Because the Trump campaign has a joint fundraising agreement with the RNC, the duo can accept donations as large as $814,600.

Trump is clearly playing to win. He has no real personal governing ideology other than saying anything that will get him in power and keep him there, so his statements on abortion today don’t mean much. If he thought a national ban were politically expedient, he would support it. Trump is the reason Roe was overturned, and the Biden campaign clearly intends to run that messaging ragged until Election Day. It still may not be enough to stave off a second Trump presidency.

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NEWS NEWS NEWS

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said on Friday she believes that officials could find “ample evidence” that Israel’s assault on Gaza constitutes a genocide at a speech at a Massachusetts mosque.

A group of former senior officials from bipartisan White House administrations is urging Congress to limit the scope of the Insurrection Act—which allows the president to deploy the military domestically.

A Supreme Court judge in Brazil is investigating Elon Musk for alleged obstruction of justice after the Tesla CEO and owner of X (Twitter) vowed to defy a court order from the country blocking certain accounts known to spread misinformation and hate speech on his platform.

An engine cover on a Boeing 737 Southwest Airlines flight came off during takeoff in Denver on Sunday and hit the wing flap, prompting a Federal Aviation Administration investigation.

Greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels hit a record-high in 2023 according to a new report from scientists at the Global Carbon Project, and overall levels of greenhouse gasses continued to increase sharply.

U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney in California gave White supremacist fight club member Tyler Laube a light sentence on Thursday despite Laube admitting to beating a journalist at a 2017 pro-Trump rally in southern California because Carney says prosecutors don’t go after members of “Antifa” enough. Cool justice system!

The Vatican issued a new document on Monday approved by Pope Francis stating that the Catholic Church believes that gender transition, gender fluidity, and surrogacy all amount to affronts to “human dignity.” Thanks for the update! We’d prefer you stick to your area of expertise: Really Big Hats.

Millions of people across North America gathered to view the solar eclipse on Monday. Here’s hoping we all viewed it safely and didn’t repeat Trump’s decision to stare directly at it in 2017.

Israeli ground troops withdrew from parts of the city of Khan Younis in Southern Gaza over the weekend, allowing some Palestinians to return. After months of bombings, the city is unrecognizable.