What Trump has been up to while Dems are obsessing over Biden

You're not going to like it: A national ban on abortion, "Freedom Cities," and concentration camps for undocumented immigrants

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While Democrats have busied themselves arguing whether they should stick with the presidential candidate they’ve already got, the current president, or try to anoint someone – anyone—else, the Republican candidate has been playing a shell game trying to hide his support of the most extreme positions of (his) Republican Party. 

Where’s the abortion pea?  Is it under the cup hiding the Supreme Court, which after Donald Trump’s three right-wing appointments overturned Roe v. Wade?  Is it under the cup hiding the nationwide ban on abortion evangelicals support and House Republicans voted for?  Or is it under the cup hiding the most extreme state laws on abortion which ban the procedure even for women who have been raped or suffered incest by a member of their own family?

See why he’s playing a shell game?  Trump is shifting the cups all over the table because you can smell his guilt on the abortion issue every time he opens his mouth.  Everywhere he goes, at every rally, Trump brags that “his” justices overturned Roe v. Wade.  But pressed for specifics on the issue, not even the words, all over the map, are adequate to describe Donald Trump on abortion laws.  He’s for a 15-week national ban.  No, he’s for a 16-week national ban.  Ooops!  He’s against a national ban on abortion.  Ooops again!  When the evangelicals attacked him on that one, he declined to endorse a national ban on abortion, putting out a video on Truth Social saying, “My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint, the states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both. And whatever they decide must be the law of the land — in this case, the law of the state.”

Got that gobbledegook?  That’s Trump’s idea of how to sound “moderate” on the issue that most women consider the defining issue of our time:  whether a woman is in control of her own body, or the state is.  Trump keeps moving the cups around for the same reason the sharks won’t lift the cup a mark has chosen until his $20 is on the table:  because there is no pea under any of the cups.  The issue of abortion is as black and white as any issue could possibly be.  Either you are for a woman’s right to have an abortion, or you’re not.  Trump is trying to find a middle ground when there is no middle ground.

But not this year, which is probably why Trump found it necessary to back away from Project 2025, the radical proposal by the Heritage Foundation for what a new Trump administration would look like and what its goals would be.  Project 2025’s position on abortion, put forward in a 920-page “Mandate” that was written or contributed to by dozens of former Trump administration officials, is straightforward:  Life begins at conception, a position that would mandate every nightmare you can imagine.

This is my weekly column in Salon. To read the full column, follow the link below.

Project 2025 has a friend called Agenda 47