Donald Trump was asked a simple question Tuesday during an interview with CBS Pittsburgh’s Jon Delano: “Do you support any restrictions on a person’s right to contraception.”
It should have been a gimme, a one-word response: No. Instead, Trump opened a Pandora’s box of possibility that anti-abortion zealots have been dreaming of for decades.
“We’re looking at that, and I’m going to have a policy on that very shortly,” he said. “And I think it’s something that you’ll find interesting.”
Delano observed that Trump’s response suggests he might “support some restrictions—like the morning-after pill,” but Trump defaulted to his “states’ rights” get out of jail free card on abortion and apparently contraception now, too.
“Things really do have a lot to do with the states and some states are going to have different policies than others,” he said.
Trump effectively turned what was intended to be a perfunctory interview in a key battleground state into a viral moment within hours of the video’s release. He put contraception on the table, and the Biden campaign ran with it.
One tweet from the campaign’s rapid response account, Biden-Harris HQ, featured a meme with the text of the initial question followed by Trump’s response, “Well, we’re looking at that.”
Another tweet stated, “Trump says he supports allowing bans on contraception, including the morning after pill,” along with a snippet of the interview.
Within hours of the interview, Trump wanted a mulligan, raging that the whole thing was “a Democrat fabricated lie” in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social.
“I HAVE NEVER, AND WILL NEVER ADVOCATE IMPOSING RESTRICTIONS ON BIRTH CONTROL, or other contraceptives,” he wrote. “This is a Democrat fabricated lie, MISINFORMATION/DISINFORMATION, because they have nothing else to run on except FAILURE, POVERTY, AND DEATH.”
Democrats had employed the dodgy campaign strategy of quoting Trump—how dare they.
But as notable as it is that Trump promised to release a policy on restricting contraception, his rapid disavowal of his own statement fits a familiar pattern, in which he does or says something outlandish and then takes it back if it draws too much attention.
In fact, at the very same time that Trump’s contraception gaffe was pulsing through social media, his campaign was in triage mode over another of his posts, which imagined the creation of “a unified Reich” under Trump. After the Nazi-esque language drew too much mainstream scrutiny, the campaign deleted it.
Once Trump floated the idea of regulating contraception, he thought leaving it to the states would render it a non-issue for him with voters—just like he’s trying to do with abortion.
The problem for Trump is that nearly 9 in 10 voters believe Americans should have the right to make their own decisions about when and how to use contraception, according to a recent poll conducted by Americans for Contraception. They don’t exactly care whether the regulations are federal or state-based; they simply don’t want contraception regulated.
And what Trump’s comments reveal is that he’s maniac enough to let the anti-abortion zealots stamp out all reproductive freedoms—from abortion to birth control to IVF. You name it, they’re coming for it. And Trump is just fine with that—so long as he can blame it on “states’ rights.”
Like many Republicans, Donald Trump has tried to sidestep the issue of abortion and reproductive rights. But he stumbled during an interview with a CBS affiliate in Pittsburgh this week, promising an “interesting” new policy that would let states restrict contraception..
