Opinion | Why Trump's abortion announcement is completely worthless

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

49% : By Molly Jong-Fast, special correspondent for Vanity Fair and host of the podcast "Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast."Last week, when Donald Trump started teasing a big abortion announcement, it felt similar to what he used to do with the famous "infrastructure week" -- but about women's bodies.
48% : "In the October 2016 presidential debates, Trump said, "Well, if we put another two or perhaps three justices on, that's really what's going to be -- that will happen, And that'll happen automatically, in my opinion, because I am putting pro-life justices on the court.
42% : One of the major Trump supporting think tanks, the Heritage Foundation, is working on both a national abortion ban and federal regulation for IVF.
37% : For one, his statements contradict earlier lines from Trump, when he at times indicated that he would support a national abortion ban.
36% : Trump added in his video that he is "strongly in favor of exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother," and that "many states will be different, many will have a different number of weeks, or some will have more conservative than others, and that's what they will be.
31% : His latest comments over the weekend, in which he suggested that abortion is a state's rights issue, indicate that perhaps Trump knows abortion is not shaping up to be the winning ticket Republicans thought it would be.
28% : "Now that it's unpopular, it seems Trump wants voters to forget about all of that.
27% : Trump is no idle observer of the strife now occurring in America under Republican efforts to restrict abortion.
26% : Fresh off Democrat Marilyn Lands flipping an Alabama state house seat running on abortion and IVF, Trump seems to have realized that overturning Roe might not actually help him get re-elected.
25% : "It's clear that in his consistently unreliable stance on abortion rights, Trump is once again trying to use headlines to spin himself as a more favorable general election candidate.
24% : On Monday morning, after an "Apprentice"-style build up, Trump released his Truth Social video, in which he stated abortion issues should be left up to the states.
12% : "And if one were to go deeper into what Trump actually said, it doesn't quite match the headlines either, a point Semafor Washington editor Jordan Weissman explains well, pointing out that "Trump actually doesn't say what these headlines are repeating.
8% : Media critic Oliver Willis made a salient point here about Trump using mainstream media headlines to launder his destructively disparate abortion rights claims: "Laid bare here is the media's habit of cleaning up for Trump, presenting an image of a malevolent force in America that bares [sic] little resemblance to the man and the movement behind him.

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