Trump Wants an Abortion Ban Based on the Weirdest Logic Ever

Donald Trump has decided on an answer to one of the signature policy questions of the 2024 election cycle. It’s simple arithmetic, at least in the former president’s eyes.

On Friday, The New York Times reported that Trump has privately settled on a 16-week national abortion ban. The reason why, according to sources close to Trump? Sixteen is a “round number.”

“Know what I like about 16? It’s even. It’s four months,” Trump said.

Politically sensible as it may sound to Trump, a 16-week ban is not founded in medical science. Abortion is currently banned outright in 14 states, and Trump’s “round-number” ban would represent a rollback of abortion rights in the remaining 36 states.

It would also represent Trump’s most clearly staked-out position on an issue on which he’s been intentionally vague, an electoral strategy born out of the unpopularity of Republicans’ extreme anti-abortion stances post-Dobbs. He has, until now, avoided publicly endorsing a federal abortion ban but has taken credit for abortion bans passed by red states. This fence-sitting act, whereby Trump presents as a moderate while winking at the party’s rabid anti-abortion base, was already tenuous. After all, it was Trump who secured the conservative Supreme Court majority needed to reverse Roe v. Wade.

The 16-week national ban was not Trump’s idea. Republicans have been pushing for it since Dobbs, but the former president’s arbitrary reasoning is by far the cruelest, most ridiculous explanation for a policy that would strip reproductive rights from millions of women and gender minorities across the country.