At the age of 53, in a 1999 interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Donald J. Trump described himself as “very pro-choice.”
In 2011, without any explanation about the change, he informed a packed room at a conservative conference that he was now “pro-life.”
In 2016, as a Republican candidate for president, he told the MSNBC host Chris Matthews that he had become so ardently opposed to abortion rights that he would even support punishments for women who got abortions. He did not realize that this position went too far even for the social conservatives to whom he was trying to pander, and he quickly reversed himself.
The 2024 version of Mr. Trump is once again tying himself in knots — but this time the stakes could not be higher.
The latest example came on Friday, when Mr. Trump — nearly a full day after his campaign had to clean up his suggestion that he might support a Florida ballot measure allowing abortion up to 24 weeks following backlash from social conservatives — told Fox News that he would vote against it.
Back in 2022, the former president had told allies — as the Supreme Court was preparing to overturn Roe v. Wade — that the move would hurt his party. Since that year, when Republicans underperformed expectations in the midterm elections, Mr. Trump has been privately emphatic with advisers that in his view the abortion issue alone could kill their chances of victory in November. And he is willing to make as many rhetorical and policy contortions as he deems necessary to win.
It is through that narrow political lens that Mr. Trump has been weighing the subject, despite his role in reshaping the Supreme Court that overturned the landmark 1973 abortion decision.
The results have been confusing and fluid, a contradictory mess of policy statements as he has once again tried to rebrand himself on an issue that many of his supporters view in strict moral terms, and had come to believe that he did, too.
Mr. Trump’s shifting views have been especially difficult for social conservatives to navigate. Some anti-abortion leaders in his orbit have tried lobbying him to align his public position with theirs. Many others are staying quiet and sticking by him, hoping that what he is saying now is just an act to get elected and that, if he does get elected, he will again govern as “the most pro-life president” in American history.
“I don’t think he’s losing support, but no question, his acquiescence is confusing to people,” said Chad Connelly, a former chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party who leads the nonprofit Faith Wins and has a following of hundreds of pastors.
However, he added that the contrast between Vice President Kamala Harris’s actions “versus Trump’s words” meant social conservatives would “look back and see the most pro-life president in American history.”
Still, even by Mr. Trump’s standards, the past few weeks have been head-spinning for people trying to keep track of his slippery social conservatism.
In 2016, Mr. Trump won with the help of a socially conservative running mate, Mike Pence, and with a promise that he would appoint justices who would end Roe. Publicly, Mr. Trump has repeatedly bragged about doing just that, and has falsely claimed that Democrats wanted it as much as Republicans did.
In private, Mr. Trump was agitated by the speeches at the Democratic National Convention, according to a person close to him, many of which tied him to Project 2025, an effort by people supportive of Mr. Trump to develop policy proposals for him if he wins that include restrictive ideas for reproductive measures. He was especially bothered by Ms. Harris’s assertions that a second Trump term would further imperil abortion rights.
He felt so defensive about the subject that on the morning of Aug. 23, the day after Ms. Harris’s speech, Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social a sentence that sounded as if it could have come from the head of Planned Parenthood rather than a Republican candidate for president.
“My Administration,” he wrote, “will be great for women and their reproductive rights.”
Asked to comment, Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, maintained in an emailed statement that Mr. Trump “has long been consistent in supporting the rights of states to make decisions on abortion and has been very clear that he will not sign a federal ban when he is back in the White House.”
Privately, Mr. Trump has been all over the place. He told advisers in the spring that he was inclined to come out in favor of a 16-week national abortion ban with exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother, but that he was waiting until the Republican presidential primaries were over. After reviewing polling, he backtracked and said abortion should be left to the states, adding that he was “proud” to have overturned Roe.
But he has not left it to the states.
He has intervened repeatedly in opposition to social conservatives. He has criticized various state abortion measures as overly harsh. In 2023, he condemned Florida’s six-week abortion ban, signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis, as a “terrible mistake.” This year, he said an Arizona high court ruling that outlawed abortion went too far, and he successfully pressured Republicans in the State Legislature to address it.
And on Thursday, he said in an interview with NBC News that women in Florida needed to be given more time than just six weeks to decide whether they want to have an abortion, and that he still could not say how he would vote in that state’s referendum on abortion in November.
In response to Mr. Trump’s most recent criticism of the Florida ban, the conservative National Review published an article titled, “Trump Stabs Florida Pro-Lifers in the Front.”
Tim Chapman, a conservative who leads Advancing American Freedom, a group created by Mr. Pence, posted a memo to the website X on Friday about the Florida amendment, which would protect abortion up to 24 weeks.
In the memo, Mr. Chapman said, “Sadly, President Trump has said that six weeks is ‘too short,’” adding that Mr. Trump misunderstood how the measure would increase abortion access.
“It almost seems to me like this is improvisational politics,” said Erick Erickson, the founder of the conservative website RedState, of Mr. Trump’s spate of recent statements. “There’s not really a plan — he’s ‘Live at the Improv,’ which is a problem for this.”
Mr. Trump has felt emboldened to cast aside the leaders of the social conservative movement, confident in the knowledge that they have no place else to go, and that evangelical voters increasingly self-identify on cultural grounds these days. He is further helped by the fact that his criminal prosecutions have bonded the evangelical base to him even tighter — a bond that may survive any policy transgression.
At the Republican National Convention in July, Mr. Trump ordered the watering-down of the abortion language in the party’s platform. And recently his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, went on “Meet the Press” and said Mr. Trump would veto any national abortion ban that came to his desk. And Mr. Trump has added Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, both former Democrats who have supported abortion rights in the past, as honorary co-chairs of his transition team.
Mr. Trump has tried to maintain a strategic ambiguity on abortion-related issues. He told Time magazine in April that he had “pretty strong views” on how a second-term Trump administration would regulate the abortion pill mifepristone and said he would announce his policy “probably over the next week.” Four months have passed, and he still has not clarified his position.
He had little understanding of in vitro fertilization, but when the issue was explained to him, he decided he would brand himself as a champion of I.V.F., again in opposition to some social conservatives who object to the destruction of human embryos. This week, Mr. Trump went even further, declaring without any policy detail that as president he would make the expensive I.V.F. treatments free for all Americans — an initiative that would put him to the left of many Democrats and would add billions to the national debt.
Because of his efforts to appeal to all sides, Mr. Trump’s campaign has often had to clean up his statements. After his interview with NBC News on Thursday, his spokeswoman, Ms. Leavitt, issued a statement saying that Mr. Trump had not yet said how he would vote on Florida’s abortion measure.
