What I'm really hoping in my NYT piece on Trump & Roe

Plus: A poll for you

Good afternoon!

I have a new piece up at The New York Times today and a few minutes on my hands, so I figured I’d send the article out here and make good on the underdelivered third promise of my Substack tagline: to share “thoughts I haven't written elsewhere.”

Here’s the thesis of the NYT piece, with a link that should get you past the paywall:

The end of Roe, the end of Trump

Conventional wisdom holds that this praise [around the SCOTUS decision] will translate to votes for Mr. Trump for the next Republican presidential nomination. This ruling “will likely be at the heart of his appeal to conservatives if/when he runs for president again in 2024,” argued CNN’s Chris Cillizza shortly after Dobbs dropped. Mr. Trump promptly took credit for the ruling while potential rivals were conspicuously silent.

Predicting voter behavior is often a fool’s errand, and conventional wisdom might prove correct. But it seems more likely that G.O.P. voters — or at least a critical mass of them — are saying thank you and moving on from Mr. Trump.

And here’s the specific part I’d like to expound on here:

This opportunity to change horses may be particularly attractive to the subset of Republicans who explicitly framed their support of Mr. Trump as a transactional arrangement to fill Supreme Court seats and thereby end Roe. “I voted for the Supreme Court. I didn’t want to vote for Trump,” a pro-life voter named Jim George told The Washington Post in 2017. “With Trump, you just hold your nose.” Dobbs gives George and Republicans like him occasion to reopen their nostrils to more conventionally appealing scents.

In case it wasn’t obvious: I’m writing in hope here as much as informed speculation. It’s not that I want Republican voters to change their allegiance to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or any other potential 2024 contender—as usual, I don’t have a dog in this fight. It’s that I want the reason Jim George and so many other American pro-lifers and evangelicals gave to explain their 2016 votes not to be a lie.

So much ink has been spilled on the subject of evangelical support for Trump, and I won’t rehash all that here. But one common argument—made in the popular press but also by scholars like Kristin Kobes Du Mez in Jesus and John Wayne (which I have not yet read) and Paul D. Miller in The Religion of American Greatness (which I reviewed at Christianity Today this week)—is that backing Trump was not a betrayal of evangelical values but a natural outgrowth of decades of evangelical politics and theology.

I think there’s truth to that—again, I haven’t read Du Mez’s book yet, but I found Miller’s case compelling. Yet I also know evangelicals whom I’m sure voted for Trump on exactly this rationale in 2016, and I don’t believe that argument is true of them. I believe they were sincerely conflicted about their votes … but I’ll increasingly struggle to believe it if, with a 6-3 court and Roe gone, they vote for Trump again in 2024.

Anyway, read the rest of the NYT piece here, and, as a bonus, this related column I wrote at The Week in 2020 in a more openly hopeful and prescriptive mode. And, beyond the Christian nationalism book review, two other new articles from me:

• Ron DeSantis and the rise of incoherent folk libertarianism | The Daily Beast

• Republican family policy has yet to reach the point of viability | Reason

Finally, a poll for you:

Looking forward to hearing what you think!

Best,
Bonnie