Trump: Whether Women Are People or Property Is States’ Rights Issue

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By Robert McElvaine

“I was proudly the person responsible for ending something that all legal scholars, both sides, wanted and in fact demanded be ended, Roe v Wade. … My view is that now that we have abortion where EVERYBODY wanted it from a legal standpoint … You must follow your heart or, in many cases, your religion or your faith.”  
– Donald J. Trump, April 8, 2024 

Rather than focusing their reporting about the video on abortion that Donald Trump posted on social media Monday on its one truth (that he is proud and responsible for taking away women’s ownership of their bodies), its outrageous lies (everyone on both sides was demanding that Roe be ended; “we now have abortion law where everybody wanted it”; “Democrats … support abortion up to and even beyond the ninth month … and even execution after birth”), and its nonsensical statement that everyone should follow their heart or faith when he was endorsing making that impossible), the mainstream media were unanimous in headlining another key point about his position: that he said it is a matter of states’ rights. I’ll return in a moment to why that is critically important in a way that neither the media nor Democrats have so far pointed out, but here are a few headlines used by various mainstream media outlets to characterize what Trump said: 

New York Times: Trump says abortion law should be left to the states 
Washington Post: Trump says abortion should be left to states, declines to endorse national limit 
Wall Street Journal: Trump Says States Should Chart Their Own Path on Abortion 
NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, NPR, Politico, and many others also focused on the “states’ rights” argument.

Here’s how I think what he said should have been reported: 

Trump Says, in essence: In their great wisdom, our Founding Fathers left who should be enslaved up to the states, and it worked well until that Lincoln guy came along. Let’s make America great again by going back to having slave states and free states for women! 


On Monday morning, as part of his “Make America Gilead” campaign, with his face makeup looking even more outlandishly orange than usual against the pale gray portions of his face his cosmetologist missed, Donald J. Trump (Fascist, FL), the presumptive presidential nominee of the Anti-Republic Party, came out foursquare in favor of women being categorized as property, not people, though only in states that choose to enslave them. 

In a lie-laced video on his social media platform, Untruth Antisocial, which became part of DJT more than a week ago and debuted with a valuation of $11 billion (roughly $15 billion more than the company’s actual value), the former occupant of the White House indicated that the question of whether women are property or people should, as was the similar question of whether people of African ancestry are human beings or should be enslaved, be left to each state to determine. 

Here is a properly annotated quotation from his statement: 

“I was proudly the person responsible for ending [true] something that all legal scholars, both sides, wanted [lie] and in fact demanded be ended [lie], Roe v Wade. … My view is that now that we have abortion where EVERYBODY wanted it from a legal standpoint [absurd lie] … Democrats … support abortion up to and even beyond the ninth month … and even execution after birth” [absurd lie] … You must follow your heart or, in many cases, your religion or your faith [except in states that agree with my wholly owned political party’s conviction that women must be put back in their proper place and they take away your human rights].” 

With his Monday statement, Mr. Trump has tied himself to the most extreme abortion bans in the most anti-women states. He will be pressed on whether he agrees with the draconian 6-week ban that will go into effect soon in his now home state, Florida. He will also be pressed to answer the question of how he will vote on the referendum in Florida.  

Maybe he will move his official residence back to New York or to New Jersey to avoid answering that question. 

The Biden campaign’s rapid response team reacted quickly, posting on X: “Donald Trump is endorsing every single abortion ban in the states, including abortion bans with no exceptions. And he’s bragging about his role in creating this hellscape.” 

“States’ Rights” Has Always Been a Cover for States’ Wrongs 

It took only a little more than 24 hours after Trump’s statement for a full view of what the hellscape of leaving the decision over whether women should be free citizens or enslaved property to the states to come into focus. 

 On Tuesday, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that, because the United States Supreme Court, with three Trump appointees, overturned the protections of Roe, an 1864 law criminalizing all abortions except when a woman’s life is still enforceable. There are no exceptions for rape or incest. 
“Because the federal constitutional right to abortion that overrode § 13-3603 [the 1864 Arizona territorial law prohibiting abortion] no longer exists, the statute is now enforceable,” the court majority wrote. 

The law that may now be enforced in Arizona, making women and doctors criminals facing imprisonment for receiving or providing needed healthcare, dates to 48 years before Arizona became the 48th state. That was 56 years before women secured the right to vote through the Nineteenth Amendment. 

And 1864 was a year before the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery. 

For all the headlines about Trump saying, “leave it up to the states,” there has been little or no focus on how his stance on the “question” of whether human beings with ovaries and uteruses are people or property parallels the pre-Civil War South’s “question” of whether human beings with dark skin are people or property to use as they saw fit. 

Abraham Lincoln’s famous words at the 1858 Illinois state convention of the new Republican Party should be repurposed by Democrats in 2024:  

“A house divided against itself cannot stand." 

I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. 

I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -- I do not expect the house to fall -- but I do expect it will cease to be divided.  

It will become all one thing or all the other.”  

Today slave or free applies to women. Compare these maps of the United States in 1860 and 2024. (They are simplified in that of course in the non-slave states in 1860 African Americans were far less than free and equal and some of the states in red in the 2024 map do allow abortion up to from 6 to 18 weeks.) 

I have argued for months that the colors the media uses to identify the parties should be changed from blue and red to blue and gray: 

Democrats need to drive home this point and what it means for women and Americans whose ancestors came from what Trump considers “shithole countries” rather than “Nice countries, you know like Denmark, Norway, and Switzerland.” By “nice,” he obviously means “Aryan.” 

“Take America Back” means take America back to the days before Robert E. Lee and the traitors of the Enslavers’ Rebellion surrendered 159 years ago this week (a year after Arizona enslaved women): 

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