Trump Accuses Pro-Life Movement of Being ‘Some Kind of Business’: ‘Everybody’s Raising Money All the Time’
Former President Donald Trump wondered aloud if the pro-life movement was “some kind of business” during a recent interview with the National Pulse’s Raheem Kassam.
During a conversation about abortion, Kassam asserted that “the country is sick of having this argument all the time” and “actually want a solution to it.”
“But if the Democrats come back to you and say ‘No, we’re not interested in a deal with you,’ are you willing to then say ‘Well, look, we tried. Now these Republicans are going to do what they should do?”
Trump replied by telling Kassam that elected Democrats “are the radicals” because of their support for abortion “in the seventh, eighth, ninth month” and asserting that rank-and-file Democratic voters don’t support such permissive policies.
He went on to tout his own accomplishment of appointing three Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade and make an implicit critique of the broader pro-life movement, which he characterized as a kind of business:
This is an issue that’s been going on for 52 years. I was able to end it. That gave tremendous negotiating power to the pro-life movement, tremendous negotiating power because they can’t do the things that they used to be able to do. The pro-life was fighting it. We have these groups fighting this thing for so many decades, but it’s exactly 52 years, as of a date in the not too distant future. And that’s a long time. Everybody’s raising money all the time. Everybody. I don’t know, maybe it’s some kind of a business. I don’t know what’s going on.
“It is a lot of money,” concurred Kassam.
“Everybody was amazed that I was able to do this and I put them in a great negotiating position and we don’t want to blow it,” continued Trump. “This is an incredible thing that happened, and we also bring it back to the states, which everybody, all legal scholars, both sides wanted it brought back to the states. We did a lot of things. We’re in a tremendous position to negotiate something very good right now. And we’ll see what that is.”
Trump has found himself at odds with pro-life activists this year as he’s refused to commit to supporting a national ban on abortion and recently said that six-week abortion bans signed by Republican governors such as Florida’s Ron DeSantis and Iowa’s Kim Reynolds are “terrible.”
In April, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Marjorie Dannenfelser, said in a statement that “President Trump’s assertion that the Supreme Court returned the issue of abortion solely to the states is a completely inaccurate reading of the Dobbs decision and is a morally indefensible position for a self-proclaimed pro-life presidential candidate to hold.”
Dannenfelser also defended DeSantis and Reynolds after Trump attacked them, arguing that he was “criticizing a law and lawmaker that acted, following the will of the people, on what he made possible through the Dobbs decision.”
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