The big takeaway: The Beltway press is all afroth over supposed abortion policy acrimony between the Trump campaign and Republican Party stalwarts. Trump reportedly wants to strike a fetal personhood plank from the GOP’s national platform, and both the Trump camp and anti-abortion leaders are being performatively pissy about it.
I’ll get into why this is bullshit in a sec, but first let’s look at the coverage itself.
From the New York Times:
A group of some of the most powerful social conservatives in the country, fearful that Donald J. Trump may push to water down the Republican Party’s official position on abortion, sent a pointed letter to the former president this month imploring him to keep strong anti-abortion language in the party platform. The letter, which has not previously been reported but was reviewed by The New York Times, is the latest sign of the fierce behind-the-scenes lobbying underway over the language that will officially outline the party’s principles.
And from a Washington Post report:
The escalating behind-the-scenes disagreement over the abortion language has become so tense and acrimonious in recent weeks that some social conservative leaders have issued public warnings of a coming split within Trump’s coalition. Others have started to discuss an effort to issue a “minority report” to the platform at the convention, according to the people involved, who like others for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
Despite the cloak-and-dagger framing, none of this reads to me as if intrepid reporters have exposed a GOP rift and managed to air the party players’ dirty laundry against their will. To the contrary, it’s much more likely that coverage is being manipulated by the GOP and the Trump campaign themselves, seeding the story and juicing the headlines by leaking documents and agreeing to give out all these top-secret ~ anonymous ~ quotes about this oh no, terrible, just awful, big, big fight to national news outlets.
There’s a now-mainstreamed word for this, “kayfabe,” which comes from the world of professional wrestling:
… the portrayal of staged events within the industry as ‘real’ or ‘true’, specifically the portrayal of competition, rivalries, and relationships between participants as being genuine and not staged. The term kayfabe has evolved to also become a code word of sorts for maintaining this ‘reality’ within the direct or indirect presence of the general public.
“Mom and Dad are fighting over abortion again :(” is a story that Trump and the GOP very badly want to keep in front of the American public. Staging internal party vs. Trump turmoil over abortion policy works on a bunch of fronts:
Voters who like Trump’s “leave it to the states” bullshitting can find room to believe that Trump is driving abortion policy, despite abundant evidence to the contrary.
Voters who want a national abortion ban understand that Trump is lying to court votes (he said as much during the debate).
Republican politicians and candidates can pretend toward holding “moderate” abortion policy stances (there is no such thing) in order to lull otherwise concerned voters into complacency in advance of the election.
Anti-abortion policymakers aren’t bothered in the least, because they know that Trump’s anti-abortion Supreme Court has a variety of avenues through which it can legitimize and implement nationwide abortion restrictions and bans, and potentially even fetal personhood, extra-legislatively.
As one savvy BlueSky user put it: “This is like watching a fight scene in a movie and thinking, ‘Wow, one of those guys is going to get hurt.’”
They’d love to keep coverage centered on internal squabbling over the personhood platform plank, because it takes the heat off of the bigger threat: SCOTUS, the Comstock Act, Project 2025, and the aforementioned variety of means through which we could see a nationwide abortion ban with or without it. Which is not to discount how appalling the plank itself is in the first place, it’s certifiably awful! But it’s immaterial to the plan of banning abortion nationwide; the GOP and Trump know they’ve got an abortion-hostile Supreme Court ready to move against the will of voters and against the public writ large.
It’s easy to spot the difference between the kind of story that Trump and the GOP actually don’t want out there — Pro Publica‘s excellent coverage of SCOTUS and Leonard Leo comes to mind — and the kind of story that Trump and the GOP are actively looking to get placed in mainstream and legacy outlets in the hope of swaying public opinion and voter behavior. The former kind of story usually requires deep-dives and document digging, robust cross-sourcing, and a bevy of “no comment” responses from key players. The latter kind of story involves a bunch of he-said-she-said quotes from high ranking officials speaking on conditions of anonymity to multiple outlets running with the same framing.
Seems pretty clear to me which kind we’re getting here.
https://homewiththearmadillo.blog/2024/07/08/beltway-press-eats-up-abortion-kayfabe-from-the-gop/
