“DONALD TRUMP IS RIGHT”
Video transcript
With that, we bring in Mark Tieson, former chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush, American Enterprise Institute senior fellow and Washington Post columnist and a Fox News contributor. Mark, always good to have you with us. What do you make of this clear dividing line between the current lead candidate for the GOP in the presidential election and his former ally, Senator Lindsey Graham? Well, I don't think he's his former ally, and I think Donald Trump tends to use this. Looks like Mark's shot is freezing up there. All right. Do we have Mark back? All right. Can you hear me? Coming in a little bit in and out there, Mark. Let's try it one more time. Go ahead. Okay. Yeah, sure. So, I mean, look, Lindsey Graham has his heart in the right place, but he is wrong and Donald Trump is right. And here's why. Donald Trump is being honest with pro-life voters in saying there is no chance that a 15-week abortion ban is going to get passed by the United States Senate because you need 60 votes to do that, to overcome a filibuster. And there's no way that the Republican Party is going to have a 60-vote filibuster-proof majority anytime soon. We don't even have the majority at all right now, and we're trying to get it back. So, it would be an empty promise to say we're going to pass a 15-week abortion ban at the federal level. But that has not stopped Democrats from demagoguing the issue. Joe Biden has said that Donald Trump wants a federal ban on abortion nationwide. And Biden served in the Senate for decades. He knows that's not true. He knows how the filibuster works, but he's trying to do it anyway because that's the only issue he has. So, what Donald Trump has done is he's being honest with the voters. He has defanged the issue from Democrats. They can no longer say that he wants a federal abortion ban because he's taken that off the table. And he's enabled Republicans to now go after Democrats and point out that they are the abortion extremists. The Democratic orthodoxy used to be abortion should be safe, legal, and rare, and there was a necessary evil. Now their policy is federal taxpayer-funded abortion on demand up until the moment of birth. That is way out of step with the American people. So, Republicans can now focus on that rather than defending a ban at the federal level that is never going to happen that most Americans don't want to happen at that time. Yeah. I mean, we've heard a lot of things along the way and the evolution of former President Trump's stance on this. And I think it's fair to say that a lot of politicians have evolved on this issue over time to the position. It's very, very difficult to navigate in this country. Here's the former GOP candidate, Nikki Haley, and what she said during the campaign on this. Watch. I think that there is a place for a federal law, but they need to tell the American people the truth on how you get there. The only way you get a federal law is if you have a majority of the House, 60 Senate votes, and a signature by a president. So no Republican president can ban any state law, can ban abortions any more than Democrats can ban state laws. So what should we do? I think we find consensus. You know, your thoughts on her stance, which sounds fairly similar to former President Trump's stance right now. Yeah, it sounds like everyone was hailing Nikki Haley for saying that. But when Donald Trump says something similar, all of a sudden he's a pro-choice radical of some kind. I mean, look, first of all, the only reason we can ban abortion in any level is because of Donald Trump, because of the Supreme Court. He's the only president in six decades, Republican, that had a perfect record of Supreme Court appointments, which gave us this right. And second of all, he's right. We have to fight this out of the states and we have to do it in an incremental way. We have to end of Roe was not the end of the fight. It was the beginning. We have to convince Americans over time of the sanctity of unborn life. And that's going to take incremental progress at the state level. And if you do it the opposite way, they're going to elect pro-choice Democrats and it'll set back the pro-life cause even more. Yeah. In some ways, a lot of the same people who were fighting to overturn Roe v. Wade and say this is a state issue. It has to be decided by people closer to the issue in their own state. Some states will be very conservative on it. Some states will be more liberal. And they claim that that was exactly what they felt should happen now that they got what they wanted. They want to go back to some sort of blanket federal decision on all of this. So we'll see where it goes. Mark, thank you very much. Good to see you as always. Take care.
Transcribed automatically. Expect errors in names and numbers.
