Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado raised eyebrows and generated headlines when she gave President Donald Trump her Nobel Peace Prize. Whether she gets anything out of this gesture remains to be seen. But it speaks to a political dilemma closer to home.
Two groups of voters who cast their ballots for Trump in 2024 have begun to wonder if they got what they were hoping for and expecting: pro-life activists opposed to abortion and those who hoped Trump would be a different kind of Republican on foreign policy than we have seen for most of the past quarter century, avoiding forever wars.
This disappointment weighs heavily on both somewhat overlapping but largely distinct camps as both the March for Life and whatever is going to happen next in Iran fast approach.
Nuts to that, Trump’s lieutenants would surely say. Trump has been more deliberative about the use of force than the post-9/11 Republicans who preceded him and has hardly started another forever war. He has issued some pro-life orders and helped build the conservative majority on the Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade. While he wasn’t alone in these accomplishments, every single Trump appointee to that court voted for Roe’s reversal—something that isn’t true of any other Republican president.
But after a campaign in which Trump successfully triangulated on abortion, even watering down the longstanding pro-life plank in the Republican platform, he has been weaker on the issue than your average post-Roe GOP president. He has been soft on the abortion pill mifepristone. He has even urged Republican lawmakers to be “flexible” on the Hyde Amendment, which bans taxpayer funding for most abortions, when it comes to passing legislation dealing with the expired Obamacare subsidies.
To put this in perspective, Joe Biden supported the Hyde Amendment as currently written as recently as 2019.
On foreign policy, Trump has gotten all regime change-y after avoiding such entanglements in his first term. He hasn’t quite gone all the way in Venezuela or Iran, and in both places there is certainly organic local support for the ouster of these governments. He has learned at least some of the lessons of Iraq, a war he has long acknowledged was a mistake. But who at this point can be confident where things are headed next?
Trump is probably right on some of the narrow short-term political questions on abortion. There has been a backlash against the pro-life movement since Roe fell. Restricting the abortion pill would risk elevating this issue in the midterm elections, to the Democrats’ benefit. Similarly, Republicans need to be seen as having done something on skyrocketing Obamacare premiums. Democrats would be content to say on the campaign trail they did not do so because Trump and the congressional GOP tied up any legislative fixes over abortion language.
It’s less clear that Trump’s outward focus will do anything for Republicans even if he engages in successful military operations or diplomacy. The polling on Greenland, for example, has been dismal. And Trump has been pithier about why America needs Greenland than he has about explaining other things he is attempting to do overseas.
Trump remains unmistakably better from a pro-life perspective on abortion than Kamala Harris would have been and preferable to the way-too-influential Lindsey Graham on foreign policy. Is that good enough?
A larger question is how to influence Trump. Right now, pro-life leaders and foreign-policy restrainers have a place at the table. With a lesser political figure, perhaps threats and demands might be the way to go. With Trump, Machado likely had the right idea.
Playing the access game rightly feels gross to principled people, even if it is part of the reality of politics. These intracoalitional fights matter more under Trump. Skeptics of hyperinterventionism have real jobs in his administration. And because Roe is gone, pro-life policies are less about messaging and symbolism than they were under previous Republican presidents.
For his part, Trump has displayed exceptional judgment for the past decade over which factions of the GOP and broader conservative movement he must heed versus those he can safely marginalize or ignore.
Trump has set up Vice President J.D. Vance, who is likely more of a true believer on both issues, to be his successor. (Plan B, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, is better on one than the other.) But depending on how things progress, it could be Vance who pays the consequences for any backsliding in Trump 2.0.
In the meantime, defenders of life in the womb and on questions of war and peace need to keep their eyes on the prize.
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