Just how stupid does Melania Trump think we are? On Wednesday, my colleagues at the Guardian published a leaked excerpt of the former first lady’s memoir, in which the Slovenian-born former model and Donald Trump’s third wife claims to be passionately pro-choice. The leak comes just a month before November’s presidential election, a contest in which Trump’s hopes of returning to the White House are severely threatened by voter anger over the 2022 reversal of Roe v Wade, and the suffering of women caused by sadistic abortion bans across the country.
In her memoir, Mrs Trump speaks of abortion rights as a matter of women’s dignity and fundamental freedom. “It is imperative to guarantee that women have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government,” she wrote. She later reiterated the sentiment in a short video posted to Truth Social, her husband’s social media platform.
It could well be that these statements from Melania Trump are sincere. But that does not mean that her choice to make them now, at a moment when they are maximally politically beneficial to her husband, is not cynical. The Trump campaign, after all, has been frantically trying to project an image of moderation and reasonableness on abortion rights over the past few weeks, responding both to the overwhelming voter support for the issue in elections held since the Dobbs decision, and to a changed race in which their new Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, is dramatically more comfortable and effective at campaigning on abortion rights than her incumbent predecessor, Joe Biden.
The leak of Melania’s professed pro-choice sympathies comes, after all, just one day after the ex-president made his own post on Truth Social claiming that he would veto any national abortion ban. That post was made during Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate, in which Trump’s running mate JD Vance, a maniacally misogynistic and virulently anti-abortion politician, who has called for a national ban on abortion, as well as the limiting of citizenship rights for adults without children, spoke in gauzy, non-specific rhetoric about abortion rights while not actually backing away from his extremist views.
These gestures do not reflect a sincere change of Republican policy agendas: they reflect, instead, a self-interested change in Republicans’ vocabulary. The Trump campaign is trying to soften its rhetoric on abortion, to change the words they are using to talk about what they want to inflict on American women. They hope that this will convince voters, especially those in swing states like Nevada and Arizona, where abortion rights initiatives will also be on the ballot come November, that they will not restrict access to the procedure further once in office. As is so often the case with Trump’s public statements, the intent is not to inform, but to deceive. They have not actually changed their goals.
Take, for instance, Trump’s insistence that he will veto a national “ban” on abortion. The suggestion is that if Congress passed a bill outlawing abortion nationwide, that he would not allow that bill to become law. This sounds reasonable enough, until you account for the dishonest way that Republicans use the word “ban”: in their parlance, it refers only to an outright prohibition on abortions at all stages of pregnancy, with no exceptions – the kind that is now in effect in several Republican-controlled states. But to them, the term “ban” does not include a law that prohibits abortion at a certain gestational limit – like, say, 12 or 15 weeks, popular numbers among Republican politicians – or one that includes nominal exceptions for rape victims or those experiencing health emergencies. Such laws, in rightwing parlance, are not “bans”; they are referred to instead as “standards”. In this way, Trump can reassure his extremist anti-abortion backers that he will sign a 15- or 12-week ban into law, thus restricting access to abortion nationwide and cutting off care for thousands upon thousands of women, while still claiming to voters that he will not sign a national “ban”. He’s like a child telling you that the dog ate his homework while holding two fingers crossed behind his back: the bald-face duplicity of the semantic bait-and-switch would be funny, if it didn’t threaten to get people killed.
This kind of warped rhetoric also allows Trump to conceal just how many ways he and his movement have to ban abortion nationwide. Even if they do not capture enough seats in Congress to pass a national ban, for instance, they could still enforce a de facto national prohibition on abortion through enforcement of the long-dormant 1873 Comstock Act (as the Republican policy bible Project 2025 calls for them to do). Trump could also dramatically curtail abortion access nationwide by directing the FDA to rescind approval of the abortion drug mifepristone; he suggested he would do so just this past August. In another bit of laughably transparent dishonesty, Vance tried to walk back Trump’s vow to outlaw mifepristone by claiming that the former president hadn’t heard the question.
The clearest sign that Melania’s statements about abortion are meant to help her husband ascend to the political power he would need to ban it, is the timing. But another sign can be found on the memoir itself. The book features a blurb from the former president, praising what he calls his wife’s “commitment to excellence”. She might be similarly committed to her own status. We already know that her husband will say anything he thinks will further his own interests; we have no reason not to assume the same of his wife. Over the next few weeks, both Trumps will try to position themselves as moderates on abortion. But we do not have to pretend that we believe them.