Donald Trump asks conservative Christians to vote but takes a stand on the issue of abortion

This Saturday, Donald Trump starred in the last rally before the televised debate that will pit him against his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, next Thursday. But before heading to Philadelphia, where he again claimed, falsely, that he won the elections in the State in 2020 – he lost them by seven million votes, of them about 80,000 in four decisive States – the former president held a meeting in Washington with representatives of a capital segment of their electorate: conservative Christians. At an event organized by the Faith and Freedom Coalition, the former president and Republican candidate for reelection presented himself as a champion of religious freedom and a martyr for believing Americans, while denouncing what he described as massive persecution of Christians. . “I have wounds everywhere,” he cried in reference to his legal problems, as if they were stigmas.

The candidate, however, ignored a key issue of the campaign, also in the Democratic ranks: the right to abortion. In front of the dedicated attendees at the Washington meeting, Trump, whose private life is not exactly a paragon of virtues – judging by the testimonies heard during the recent trial by the Stormy Daniels caseabout paying a bribe to the porn actress to silence an affair—reiterated his position that abortion restrictions should be decided by voters in each state, not at the federal level, which contradicts the opinion of the majority of conservative Christians.

“We have taken abortion out of the federal government and returned it to the states. The people will decide, and that is how it should be,” Trump said, quoted by the Reuters agency, before the Christian assembly. “As [el republicano] Ronald Reagan, I believe in exceptions for the life of the mother, such as rape and incest… You have to go with your heart,” added the Republican, earning the few reproaches of the session.

Trump has spoken on rare occasions during the campaign on the termination of pregnancy, aware of how sensitive the issue is for Republicans and, especially, for the evangelical niche of the electorate, with representatives as prominent as the president of the House of Representatives. , Mike Johnson.

Trump has repeatedly said that Republicans risk losing the election if they take too strong a stance against abortion. In fact, the modest result that the party achieved in the mid-term elections, in November 2022, has been attributed to the decision of the Supreme Court, which eliminated the constitutional guarantee of the procedure in June of that year. Since then, the defense of abortion rights by Biden, a recognized Catholic, has become one of the main points of his program.

While the Democrat spent the weekend preparing for Thursday’s debate, locked up in the Camp David summer residence, Trump did expand before the confessional hearing against immigration, denouncing and vilifying migrants again, who, he said, are “tough” and “they come from prisons, and from many other places,” stating that he has asked a friend of his, who runs the largest wrestling championship in the world, to create a group of migrants to beat each other.

The biggest round of applause was for his proposal to eliminate the Department of Education, in the crosshairs of the culture wars. Dismantling that ministry is not only among his measures to reduce the State, a purpose included in the transition program called Project 2025; It is also a vindication of the most conservative Christians, who accuse Washington of torpedoing faith-based education. Louisiana’s decision this week to display the Ten Commandments in all public classrooms indicates the sensitivity of this Republican current.

Hunting the black and Hispanic voter

That Trump is forced to court, like Biden, every last voter is demanded by the polls, as changeable as they are volatile. The last one published, from NPR/PBS, shows a tie of 49% of votes between the two candidates if the elections were held now. The national average of polls established by FiveThirtyEight has just given a slight advantage to the Democrat for the first time this year, ahead of his opponent for months. That is why in the afternoon Trump has changed the mostly white and evangelical audience for an African-American audience, at his rally at Temple University, a historically black area of ​​Philadelphia and a traditional Democratic fiefdom. According to the newspaper Philadelphia InquirerIn 2020, Trump achieved only 5% of the votes in the districts surrounding the campus, but black and Hispanic voters represent more than half of the population of Philadelphia, in the State of Pennsylvania — one of the swings or hinges — and the Republican needs to get votes. Although he has little chance of winning the city, where Biden swept four years ago, some polls now favor Trump among those two minorities. Biden has an advantage, in theory, among African Americans.

At the Temple campus rally, he lightly mocked Biden’s confinement at Camp David to prepare for Thursday’s debate; He gave no hint about his intervention and praised some independent or third-party presidential candidates, such as intellectual Cornell West and the Green Party’s Jill Stein, for taking votes away from Democrats. At the gates of the campus, dozens of anti-Trump protesters in union T-shirts chanted “Lock him up!”, in reference to the recent verdict for the Stormy Daniels case.

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