The Second Trump Admin Has Not Yet Gone All-Out in Attacking Abortion. That May Soon Change.

Good morning! I am back, and excited to get back into it.

The Next Trump Attack on Abortion?

President Donald Trump on Wednesday nominated a top administration health policy official and conservative activist, Heidi Overton, to head the Food and Drug Administration. Overton spent the Biden administration at the America First Policy Institute, one of a few competing policy incubators that emerged in anticipation of a second Trump term, where she was outspoken about abortion and, specifically, against the abortion medications she will now regulate if confirmed.

“America First policies should focus on immediately halting the effort to normalize abortion-on-demand and on broadly recognizing the evidence of the risk posed to women,” she wrote in one policy brief, which I first saw flagged by the Guardian. “In the upcoming state legislative sessions and the 118th Congress, policymakers should prioritize providing greater protection for the two lives involved—the mother and the baby—especially with safeguards to protect women and children from the dangers of teleabortion.” In another AFPI statement, she celebrated the fall of Roe v. Wade in the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision.

One of the themes we’ve been tracking since the second Trump administration began to take shape is the way in which it has been forced to speak out of both sides of its mouth on abortion, appeasing anti-abortion activists while seemingly fearful of electoral backlash. In November 2022’s elections, which came only months after Dobbs was handed down, voters’ fury at states’ rapid moves to rip away abortion rights, which they now had the greenlight to do, helped buoy Democrats, somewhat holding in check the usual phenomenon where a president’s party loses ground in Congress in the midterm. Americans’ anger about the decision continued to loom over the 2024 presidential campaign.

As a result, the radicalism with which, in 2025, the administration pushed to enact a reactionary agenda was not as clear-cut on this issue. The question is whether that will begin to change. Conservatives have been particularly incensed about the way in which doctors in blue states, through telehealth, have been able to prescribe the abortion drug mifepristone in red states. They want the FDA to step in and restrict access to drugs it has long held to be safe. Trump’s first FDA head, Marty Makary, promised a review of the drug. Then nothing happened. Conservatives were furious. It was a factor in Makary’s ultimate ouster. Soon after he stepped aside, the review went forward. But notably, the review, launched in June, was expected to take six months, “meaning it likely won’t be completed before the midterm elections,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

Overton’s nomination could be seen as laying the groundwork for what will happen after the review — and the elections — are complete.

The position requires Senate confirmation. Democrats have indicated they will oppose her nomination; to successfully block her, they will need some Republicans to join them. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a doctor, has voiced skepticism, citing Overton’s role in a recent administration order to split up childhood vaccine schedules. But Cassidy has been easily swayed before.

Trump’s Attack on the Census Takes a New Form

The Census Bureau is claiming in a short report with no listed author that 24,000 non-citizens voted in the 2020 election, a dubious assertion Trump immediately and predictably seized on on social media.

• “[O]ne of the red flags in the report is that the Census Bureau, when they start to use a new data source, typically goes through a very extensive process of trying to understand the data quality,” one expert told TPM’s Layla A. Jones Wednesday. “And I don’t see any evidence that they did that.”
• NPR reported Wednesday that the analysis was not conducted by career civil servants and that the team behind it “included individuals affiliated with the America First Policy Institute, a think tank started by officials from Trump’s first administration.”
• The AFPI and other Trump-aligned think tanks, including America First Legal and the Center for Renewing America, have appeared to be behind many of the Census’ most controversial moves recently, TPM has reported, including an effort to change how the bureau anonymizes respondents that has experts scratching their heads.
• The latest developments are an additional ominous data point about how the administration might seek to use the census to further its own agenda. TPM has reported on a plan being passed around within the administration that would restrict the bureau from counting many immigrants in apportionment, stripping political power away from blue states and giving it to red states.

Tabs

• White nationalists at a recent conference celebrated that “local media has been dying all over America, which means that there’s essentially no real way to hold local governments accountable — and they can do whatever they want,” concluding “this is a good thing.” Investigative journalist Phil Williams flagged the statement.
• Asked a fairly standard question during a debate Wednesday about U.S. national security interest in Taiwan, Sen. Darline Graham (R-SC), the sister of and interim replacement for Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), delivered a fairly shocking cop out. “I’m just going to be honest here,” she said. “I’m not that informed on national security.” Graham is running against Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC), a right-wing member of Congress, in a primary to become Graham’s permanent replacement. “National security is not my thing,” she added later, “not my area of expertise, but I do support the military.”

Woman of the Hour

It’s Natalie Harp, who, MS NOW reported Wednesday, managed to remain omnipresent around Trump — following him everywhere and even drafting his Truth posts — without obtaining a security clearance for more than a year. “After concerns mounted among the White House counsel’s office and security officials, the president himself intervened, and Harp in recent months filled out the forms to launch a formal federal background investigation and received the clearance,” the network reported.

Are We at War?

It is now time for the “MOST CRUSHING ECONOMIC OPERATION EVER TAKEN AGAINST ANY COUNTRY.”