While His Admin Delights In The Culture Wars, Trump Tiptoes Around Abortion. At Least For Now.

The White House creates AI slop of a weeping immigrant being deported, President Trump performs a mocking imitation of a trans weightlifter, the Pentagon wipes government webpages of the military achievements of nonwhite men — this is an administration that luxuriates in Fox News’ A block.

This attitude is so central to Trump’s presidency that his administration presses on with its mean-spirited jokes — including smearing the wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia — even as public sentiment seems to sour on the bit.

But this general embrace of the culture war stands in stark contrast to the administration’s low-key triangulation on abortion. That mutedness was a feature of the 2024 campaign and has, somewhat surprisingly, continued into the early months of Trump’s second term.

On Monday, Trump’s Justice Department slotted into a long-running, right-wing effort to get the abortion drug mifepristone restricted or yanked from the market altogether. Instead of joining forces with the red states challenging the drug, though, it largely picked up where the Biden administration had left off, arguing that the case should be dismissed. 

This case, initially brought by anti-abortion doctors who wanted the drug restricted, reached the Supreme Court last summer. The justices ruled that the doctors lacked standing, as they were unable to prove that they were hurt by the Food and Drug Administration’s current set of restrictions on mifepristone. A group of red states tried to take the doctors’ place back at District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s court, creating a glaring jurisdictional issue: None of the states had any connection to north Texas. 

“The three Intervenor-Plaintiff States — the States of Missouri, Idaho, and Kansas (“the States”) — do not dispute that their claims have no connection to the Northern District of Texas and that, if the States were to file their own suit in this District, that suit could not proceed due to improper venue,” the Trump DOJ wrote Monday. 

If that’s where the brief ended, it’d be a pretty paltry “win” for the abortion rights side. The case was only limping along because Kacsmaryk, a judge known for his extraordinary sympathy toward conservative causes, had control of it; the minute it reached another judge, it would likely be dismissed. 

But the administration went further, also poking holes in some of the states’ legal arguments. It raised an eyebrow at the very speculative theory of harm the states were pushing: that an earlier, more restrictive FDA regulatory regime should be put back into place to avoid some possible future conflict with state laws. It also echoed arguments made by the manufacturers of mifepristone that the window has elapsed for challenging the FDA’s 2016 loosening of regulations.

Some legal observers theorize that the administration’s unanticipated stance in the case boils down to its unwavering support for executive power, even when it creates odd bedfellows. It doesn’t want its FDA to be hamstrung — including, perhaps, when it gins up its own reason to restrict mifepristone in the future.

Others think it’s a gambit to create cover while it pursues other avenues of restriction, pointing to a suspect “study” published by a right-wing think tank last week.

“The Abortion Pill Harms Women: Insurance Data Reveals One in Ten Patients Experiences a Serious Adverse Event,” blares the headline of the paper from the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

It bears many of the hallmarks of anti-abortion junk science — no peer review, refusal to publish the underlying data, an ad hoc expansion of definitions (undefined “other, abortion-specific complications” for half the patients they claim experienced severe adverse effects). 

EPPC declined to publish its dataset when asked by HuffPost to do so, and told the outlet that the paper was not peer reviewed because “the extensive pro-abortion bias in the peer-review process” creates “no opportunities to publish peer-reviewed analysis that offer major substantive critiques of the abortion pill or abortion.”

Still, anti-abortion organizations and politicians glommed on. 

“The new reports uncovered today are disturbing. We urge the FDA under new leadership to take a fresh, hard look at the data and reinstate strong safeguards for women and girls,” Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America wrote in a statement.

“The science is clear: the abortion pill is not safe for women & never has been,” Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) tweeted. 

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), the tip of the spear for the anti-abortion movement in the Senate, wrote a Federalist op-ed citing the study as rationale to reimpose restrictions on mifepristone — specifically, to bring back the in-person dispensing requirements and to narrow who can dispense the medication and where. Hawley underscores in the piece how effective the Biden administration’s loosening of dispensing restrictions has been, now that patients can get prescribed through telehealth and have the medication mailed to them. Some abortion rights groups have crafted systems to get the medication mailed to women living in states with abortion bans too.

“We can stop this abortion-on-demand bonanza,” Hawley wrote. “At the very least, the Trump administration can, and should, reinstate the full complement of mifepristone safety regulations immediately.”

He also wrote a letter to FDA Commissioner Martin Makary after the paper’s release. 

“Just last week, you said that you had ‘no plans to take action’ on mifepristone. Yet during your confirmation hearing, you pledged to me that you would ‘review the totality of the data and ongoing data’ to inform action on the drug,” Hawley wrote. “I urge you to follow this new data and take all appropriate action to restore critical safeguards on the use of mifepristone.”

Makary earned headlines for the quote, though in his fuller remarks seemed to leave the door cracked to reimposing the restrictions a growing chorus of anti-abortion activists demand. 

“There is an ongoing set of data that is coming into the FDA on mifepristone,” he said. “So if the data suggests something or tells us that there’s a real signal, we can’t promise we’re not going to act on that data.”