A disciplined and well-informed pro-life presidential nominee could easily expose Vice President Kamala Harris, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), and the rest of their party as dishonest extremists on abortion.

Former President Donald Trump is not that nominee. He harps on the wrong issues and lacks command of the facts. Thus, he turns winning points and apt defenses into a word salad easily dismissed by the liberal media.

In the Trump-Harris debate, the only question the debate moderators asked from a remotely conservative perspective was on abortion. “Would you support any restrictions on a woman’s right to an abortion?” ABC’s Linsey Davis asked Harris.

Harris refused to grant an inch. This is what she does every time she is asked this question, and this is what every single Democratic senator does these days. They will not tolerate even the slightest legal protection for the unborn, at any stage of development, in any circumstance. Democrats, as a party, believe in abortion on demand.

Harris tries to wave away the problem of late-term abortions by saying that they just don’t happen. “Nowhere in America is a woman carrying a pregnancy to term and asking for an abortion,” she said when Trump mentioned later abortions.

Harris’s answer is somewhere between a dodge and a lie. While 40-week abortions of viable babies probably don’t happen, third-trimester abortions do happen, and many of them are elective abortions. Anyone familiar with the literature knows that abortion providers do end the lives of healthy babies in their third trimester who would be viable outside the womb.

A well-versed and disciplined pro-life candidate could deftly expose the extremism of Harris’s position.

The script isn’t hard to write: “Kamala just refused to grant any limits on abortion. That’s because she believes abortion is fine up until the moment of birth. Think about that: Imagine a baby, in the eighth month of pregnancy — a baby that could be delivered healthy and could be sucking her thumb, crying, rubbing her eyes in a nursery. Kamala thinks it is fine to abort that baby for any reason whatsoever. Most Americans don’t believe that. That’s extreme, but it’s the only position Democrats tolerate these days.”

Trump could say the same thing about Florida’s Amendment 4, which would prohibit all regulation of abortion, including parental consent and informed consent laws, before viability and thanks to an intentionally massive “health of the mother” carveout, effectively leave abortion legal for all nine months.

Trump could cite abortion provider Warren Hern explaining that he performs third-trimester abortions, the ones Harris says don’t happen, and that this abortion provider deems every single pregnancy in human history to be a threat to the health of the mother.

Instead, when abortion and Amendment 4 came up, Trump focused on Ralph Northam, a former Virginia governor whose name and former job Trump can’t even remember.

Here was Trump’s stab at abortion in his debate against Harris:

“They have abortion in the ninth month. They even have, and you can look at the governor of West Virginia, the previous governor of West Virginia, not the current governor, who’s doing an excellent job, but the governor before. He said the baby will be born and we will decide what to do with the baby. In other words, we’ll execute the baby.”

It’s true that Northam articulated an ambiguous and indefensible position in 2019, siding with a state lawmaker who sponsored a bill intended to legalize abortion even when the mother was in labor. Northam went on, seeming to advocate either post-birth abortion or, at best, leaving an unwanted baby to die.

This is abhorrent and extreme. But that doesn’t mean it’s helpful for Trump to focus on it. First, Trump doesn’t seem to know the details of the Virginia bill or Northam’s comments. Second, Northam is a disgraced former politician nowhere on the Democratic scene. Third, Trump is treading into arguable territory by claiming Northam was defending the execution of these babies. Finally, that Virginia bill never became law.

If Trump wanted to talk about babies who survive abortion, he could instead talk about Minnesota under Walz, where eight babies who were born after failed abortions didn’t survive — and this was after Walz removed the requirement that hospitals care for such babies.

Likewise, Trump tries and fails to expose just how bad a decision Roe v. Wade was. “We’ve gotten what everybody wanted,” he said in his debate with Harris. “Democrats, Republicans, and everybody else, and every legal scholar wanted it to be brought back into the states.

Back in his June debate against Biden, Trump made similar remarks about overturning Roe: “This is something that everybody wanted. … Every legal scholar throughout the world, the most respected, wanted it brought back to the states. I did that.”

Trump was trying to make a true and important point: Legal scholars, including pro-choice legal scholars and even the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, have stated that Roe was embarrassing jurisprudence and the worst sort of legislation from the bench. Ginsburg called Roe “heavy-handed judicial intervention” that “was difficult to justify.”

“As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible,” argued Ed Lazarus, an Obama administration appointee who clerked for the decision’s author, former Justice Harry Blackmun.

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The shoddiness of Roe is an important point, but it’s a point Trump failed to make because he lacks command of facts and control of himself.

Trump advanced the cause of the unborn by appointing the judges who overturned Roe. But the fight over abortion requires pro-life leadership and persuasion. Trump is not the man for that job.