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Item one: For Trump, backing a 15-week ban would have been the smart play.

It’s been pathetic over these recent years to watch people impute certain skills to Donald Trump. Oh, he’s very smart politically. He’s charismatic. It’s all nonsense. It’s political commentators trying to assess him in normal political terms, which only ends up presenting him as a normal politician, which he decidedly is not.

He isn’t smart. In fact, about politics, he’s quite dumb. He has precisely one skill: He knows how to sniff out people’s worst qualities—weakness, envy, anger—and bring them to the fore. That’s it. I’ll grant that this skill got him elected president once and may again. But that doesn’t make it admirable, and it doesn’t mean we should ascribe to him qualities he doesn’t remotely have.

He proved again this week how dumb he is about politics with his new abortion rights position. Earlier this week, I published a column based on the assumption that he was going to back a national 15-week ban. I wrote it on Sunday. It posted Monday at 6 a.m. Then, at around 7:20 a.m., he released his video that made my column moot: no 15-week ban from Trump, but an announcement that it should be up to the states.

Backing a 15-week ban would have been smart politics. He could have sold that as a "moderate" position, even though it isn’t. But fifteen weeks polls well. A February survey showed 48 percent of people backing a 16-week ban, with only 36 percent opposed. And more generally, of course, about two-thirds of Americans in poll after poll say abortion should be generally available with some restrictions. 

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The embrace of a 15- or 16-week ban would have left plenty of space between Trump and his party’s anti-abortion extremists. It would have enabled him to say, when some deep-red state passed some draconian ban, "No, I don’t agree with that at all; here’s my position, 15 weeks."

But now? I remember thinking Monday morning that hypothetically, his new "states’ rights" position meant that any extremist position adopted by any state could now be hung around his neck. 

The gods sure have a sense of drama because barely 24 hours passed before we went from hypothetical to all too real, when the Arizona state Supreme Court turned the clock back to General Sherman’s march to Atlanta. The decision, reinstating a near-total abortion ban passed in 1864, nearly a half-century before Arizona became a state, was politically shocking and morally repulsive to millions of Americans and Arizonans.

A Trump who’d come out for a 15-week ban could have credibly distanced himself from the decision. Everyone would have bought it. But a Trump who says, as he did on Monday, let’s let the states decide it, owns what the Arizona court did. He later tried to insist, in speaking to reporters Wednesday on the Atlanta tarmac, that he found the position too extreme. But he had just said two days before that states should set their own laws.

So he’s going to get absolutely pounded on this, and deservedly so. Vice President Kamala Harris is headed to Arizona today for a campaign event. According to Playbook, here’s what she is expected to say: "We all must understand who is to blame. It is the former president, Donald Trump. It is Donald Trump who, during his campaign in 2016, said women should be punished for seeking an abortion."

Boom. Trump just made a huge target of himself—especially with that part of the video where he bragged about putting the justices on the Supreme Court who overturned Roe. 

With his position, Trump has tacitly endorsed every severe anti-abortion law in the country. Fourteen states have made abortion illegal since the Dobbs decision. Trump owns every one of those laws. Suppose between now and November, a doctor in Texas is prosecuted for having performed an abortion—a felony punishable by up to life in prison. That will be Trump’s creation every bit as much as the prosecutor who brought the case.

And paradoxically, Trump also owns the positions of the 10 or so states that have liberalized their positions since Dobbs. Some states have enshrined reproductive freedom in their state constitutions. Trump owns that now too.

His pathetic tarmac performance this week showed that he barely knows what he’s talking about. My guess is that the position he took came from two imperatives. One, he heard from abortion rights foes in the GOP and the evangelical world that a 15-week ban was squishy and RINO-ish. Two, someone told him to say "states’ rights" because the phrase lands gently on the conservative ear, and a substanceless person like Trump just thinks that saying a phrase takes care of everything.

He is going to get slaughtered on this issue because of this new position. He says he won’t sign a federal ban. Fine. But that’s not much comfort to the large majorities who want reasonable abortion laws. And there are all those film clips of him bragging about ending Roe. And he’s a liar, so his word is as dependable as a share of Truth Social stock. He has spent his life contradicting himself, saying one thing Tuesday and the other thing Wednesday, and denying he ever said things he said a hundred times. But he’ll learn this year that people have memories.

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Item two: MAGA Mike Johnson’s horrible week

Well, it seems as if the week might end on a favorable note for Speaker Mike Johnson, who appears poised to get the national intelligence surveillance bill passed. The opposition on the hard right is strong, but evidently he has the votes.

And when that wraps? He’s flying down to Mar-a-Lago. He and Donald Trump are going to talk up a bill to make it illegal for noncitizens to vote. Of course, that’s already illegal. It can’t be made more illegal. But Johnson needs to suck up to Trump in the hopes of holding onto the support of his caucus so they don’t give him the boot as speaker. 

The big issue is Ukraine funding. Russia’s arms advantage is overwhelming. According to The New York Times, Russia is quadrupling its arms production in round-the-clock operations. Ukraine is trying to expand its production, but it’s going to take a lot of time, and in any case, Ukraine is way behind and (obviously) a much smaller country. It needs outside arms to fight this war to some kind of draw. Johnson has apparently been talking with the White House about trying to work something out, but the GOP House will not pass the Ukraine bill the Senate passed. And of course one word from Trump could kill the whole thing.

Meanwhile, according to Punchbowl News, here are the bills Republicans are going to introduce next week, and this is not a joke:

These are anti–energy conservation measures. Nice to see they’re on the front lines of keeping the globalists out of the laundry room.

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Quiz time!

Last week’s quiz: "Span"ning the globe: In the wake of the Baltimore tragedy, I’ve been thinking about bridges. So here we go.

1. The two towers of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge in New York are:

A. Coated with a very hard vulcanized rubber to reduce vibration.

B. Not the same height, but are the same weight.

C. Exactly 1 5/8 inches farther apart at the top than the bottom, to account for the curvature of the earth.

D. Four degrees away from being parallel, the better to bear the weight of the traffic.

Answer: C. Mind-blowing, right? And they’re almost 700 feet tall. How’d they do that?

2. The world’s oldest known bridge, dating to 1,300 BCE and still used by pedestrians and agricultural traffic, is in what country?

A. Greece

B. China

C. Iraq

D. Peru

Answer: A, Greece. It’s called the Arkadiko Bridge, and it’s on the Peloponnesian peninsula.

3. The Ponte dei Sospiri in Venice was nicknamed the Bridge of Sighs because it was the bridge convicts walked across on their way to prison; it was said that this last look at Venice made them sigh. Who came up with the name?

A. Thomas Mann

B. Rainer Maria Rilke

C. Henry James

D. Lord Byron

Answer: D, Lord Byron. From the poem "I Stood in Venice."

4. What city is said to have the most bridges in the world?

A. Taipei, Taiwan

B. Hamburg, Germany

C. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

D. Panama City, Panama

Answer: B, Hamburg. Somewhere around 2,400 bridges. I knew that Pittsburgh is called the City of Bridges, what with the three rivers and all, but the Steel City has only about 500.

5. Match the well-known U.S. bridge to the city it serves.

Answer: Brent Spence = Cincinnati, Ambassador = Detroit, Betsy Ross = Philadelphia, Peace = Buffalo. I’m not sure I’ve crossed any of them, sadly.

6. The famous "bridge too far" in World War II, which the Allies failed to capture in their ambitious Operation Market Garden, is located where?

A. Arnhem, Netherlands

B. Antwerp, Belgium

C. Bremen, Germany

D. Rotterdam, Netherlands

Answer: A, Arnhem. A not very swift military move, but it made for a good Richard Attenborough movie.

This week’s quiz: "If it doesn’t fit.…" Thinking of the O.J. Simpson trial, a quiz about famous crimes in the United States.

1. If I tell you the names Evelyn Nesbit and Harry K. Thaw, what would you say is the third name in that infamous early twentieth-century love triangle?

A. Stanford White

B. Jack Johnson

C. Smedley Butler

D. Alice Roosevelt Longworth

2. Why did Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb kidnap and kill 14-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924?

A. They meant only to kidnap him and get a ransom from his wealthy father; the killing part was an accident.

B. Franks had stolen Loeb’s bicycle.

C. They wanted to prove they could commit the perfect crime.

D. Franks’s father had sold Leopold a lemon of a car.

3. This man’s last words were: "I am glad that my life in a world which has not understood me has ended. Soon I will be at home with my Lord, so I am dying an innocent man. Should, however, my death serve for the purpose of abolishing capital punishment—such a punishment being arrived at only by circumstantial evidence—I feel that my death has not been in vain. I am at peace with God. I repeat, I protest my innocence of the crime for which I was convicted. However, I die with no malice or hatred in my heart."

A. Dick Hickock 

B. Charles Weems

C. Bruno Richard Hauptmann

D. Bartolomeo Vanzetti

4. True or false: The JonBenét Ramsey case has never been solved.

5. Complete the famous quote from Perry Smith: "I thought [Mr. Clutter] was a very nice gentleman. Softspoken. I thought so right up to the moment I …"

A. stole his money.

B. left his house.

C. killed his dog.

D. slit his throat.

6. Match the Simpson trial figure to the post-trial fact about his or her life.

I tried to work in Christopher Darden and Lance Ito, but it looks like they’ve lived fairly normal lives. Answers next week. Feedback to fightingwords@tnr.com.

—Michael Tomasky, editor 

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