Former President Donald Trump returned to an influential gathering of evangelical conservatives in Washington on Saturday to stump for their support a year after taking credit for the fall of Roe v. Wade at the same conference.
His ninth address at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference came just days before the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the abortion doctrine, and Mr. Trump spent time reminding the crowd that he was the one who appointed the justices who were key in reversing the decades-old law.
Mr. Trump has spent the last year since his last appearance at the Christian organization’s annual gathering distancing himself from a nationwide federal ban on abortion, instead reaffirming that voters should ultimately decide.
“The big problem was it was caught up in the federal government,” Mr. Trump said. “The people will decide and that’s the way it should be, the people. Now some states are a little bit more conservative and some states are much more liberal.”
But his stance runs contrary to the Faith & Freedom Coalition, who have advocated for a nationwide abortion ban in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s fall, and have worked to elect state and federal lawmakers to enact stringent anti-abortion policies.
Despite the abortion policy divide, Ralph Reed, founder and chair of the Christian organization, lauded Mr. Trump’s appointment of “not one, not two, but three conservative justices to the Supreme Court” that led to the eventual fall of Roe v. Wade in 2021.
Mr. Reed told CNN that the former president’s policy stance was a reflection of the current political reality and noted that neither Democrats nor Republicans had enough votes to fully enact their abortion policy desires.
“The long-term political reality is whoever wins that battle at the state level will build the momentum and gain the votes to achieve what they want at the federal level,” Mr. Reed said.
Mr. Trump’s remarks also came a week after a pair of closed-door meetings with congressional Republicans where he urged them to change their messaging about abortion on the campaign trail and stick to the script of making it an issue that voters would weigh in on.
Nailing the rhetoric on abortion could make or break Republicans’ chances of winning majorities in the House and Senate while Democrats Democrats brand them as total-ban extremists.
Mr. Trump made sure to draw a sharp contrast between his position on abortion and Democrats, accusing President Biden of weaponizing the Justice Department to go after anti-abortion activists and labeling Democrats as the extremists in the abortion debate.
“If the radical Democratic extremists get their way they will have a federal law for abortion to rip the baby out of the womb in the seventh, eighth and ninth month and even execute the baby after birth,” said.
Mr. Trump was set to head a rally in Philadelphia later Saturday evening, again making the pilgrimage to the crucial battleground state that President Biden calls home. Since April, Mr. Trump has held a slim lead over the president in Pennsylvania.
The former president got a boost in polling after his historic conviction in his hush-money trial, and is now leading in all but one battleground state. Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden are dead even in Minnesota, according to a poll from Emerson College and the Hill released on Thursday.
Saturday’s address to the Faith & Freedom Coalition marked the second address in the Washington Hilton’s ballroom in less than a month.
The last time Mr. Trump was at the hotel in May, he was met by a largely hostile crowd at the Libertarian Party National Convention while he mixed insults with pleas for support from Libertarian voters. This time around, the occasional waft of liquor, marijuana and thunderous boos were replaced by a friendly crowd.
The crowd huddled in the cavernous ballroom greeted the former president with adulation and chants of “U.S.A, U.S.A,” often interrupting his speech to shower him with praise. At one point he urged the crowd to stop chanting and vote.
“Don’t give me any of the ’U.S.A.,’ go out and vote,” Mr. Trump said.
