BLAME GAME: Donald Trump attacks anti-abortion movement over midterms

To the delight of anti-abortion activists, Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to install Supreme Court Justices who would help overturn the precedent of Roe v. Wade.

When midterm elections went badly for the anti-choice party, at least partly as a result of that stance, he wasn’t ready to shoulder his share of the blame.

The 2022 elections were a time of vengeance for Trump — he took the opportunity to support primary challenges to incumbent Republicans who had hurt his feelings by voting in favor of his impeachment after January 6th, and, seeming to think himself invulnerable even after his own loss two years before, endorsed candidates that his party clearly did not like.

At the same time, voters showed their concerns about granting too much power to election-deniers and anti-choicers — and the result was that, while Republicans took control of the House, they didn’t have the ‘red wave’ they had built up.

Of course, Trump has never indicated that he has any opposition to causing chaos, only to being held responsible for it, so now he’s lashing out in his social media safe space, blaming the same anti-abortion activists he courted in his first campaign.

He started the new year with “it wasn’t my fault,” and kept it up with lists carefully curated to claim every right-wing win as his own while disavowing every loss.

The ousted, twice-impeached, former president is running for office again, having already declared his 2024 candidacy, although so far, he hasn’t done much in the way of campaigning, and hasn’t been holding his self-aggrandizing, ego-inflating rallies.

Even with almost two years to go before election day, though, alienating the evangelical extremists seems like a risky move for a Republican candidate.

He posted, in part (random capitalization intact):

“It wasn’t my fault that the Republicans didn’t live up to expectations in the MidTerms…It was the “abortion issue,” poorly handled by many Republicans, especially those that firmly insisted on No Exceptions, even in the case of Rape, Incest, or Life of the Mother, that lost large numbers of Voters.”

He complained that “people that pushed so hard…against abortion” had “just plain disappeared” after the Supreme Court granted “their wish,” neglecting to mention his own role in seeing that “wish” granted and, by extension, stirring up a lot of women’s concerns about their ability to access healthcare under a right-wing-controlled government.

You can see the full post below:

In subsequent posts, he claimed his “wins” — including a list of candidates and incumbents who he opposed and who then retired or lost their elections, including Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.

He followed this with a list of candidates he endorsed who won their elections. (No, there aren’t 233 of them.)

Notably, he doesn’t list the candidates he endorsed who did not prevail — Senate candidates including Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and Don Bolduc in New Hampshire; House candidates including Sandy Smith in North Carolina and Sarah Palin in Alaska, and gubernatorial candidates in ten states, according to Newsweek‘s election tracking.