trump's secret abortion ban won't work

and might cost him the election.

Trump’s new abortion ban just dropped, and the reviews are in: it’s bad.

Despite the end of Roe continuing to be the worst thing to ever happen to the GOP’s electability, the former president continues to boast about it, and secretly plan to double-down on it with a federal abortion ban. Instead of journaling about his fear of women, he’s planning a 16-week abortion ban, because it’s an “even” number. “Know what I like about 16?” Mr. Trump unironically told someone who spoke to The New York Times on condition of anonymity. “It's even.” I love when my life is in the hands of an credibly accused senile criminal who uses toddler logic to make up rules about what happens to my body.

As a proven sexual abuser himself, Trump is looking out for his own kind, by applying a rape and incest exception to his ban, a provision that’s been well-documented to absolutely not work. Just ask the 65,000 women who were raped and forced to carry their rapist’s baby in the states with abortion bans since Dobbs, where many of these so-called rape exceptions are etched into law.

It’s hard to convey just how ineffectual these abortion exceptions are. In a world where most women can’t report their rapist, and that doing so wouldn’t even work given the gestational math, rape exceptions are a mascot for men’s culpability and proof they know the’re denying women rights they would never take away to themselves. Banning abortion, means forcing women and girls who are abused to have their rapists babies, period. It has always meant that, and fake exceptions are just a self-congratulatory tools designed to distract us from it.

Rape and incest exceptions are like the land acknowledgments of abortion policies. They’re virtue signaling, on acid. Posing as policy, they’re nothing but a feckless maneuver meant to exculpate the interlocutor of any wrongdoing. Rape and incest exceptions are a trick designed to coddle the men who create abortion bans, and shield them from experiencing the guilt or responsibility of the very actions they wish to be absolved from. It’s the moral equivalent of witnessing a woman getting attacked in public, and putting in earplugs to shield yourself from the noise. It gives you something to do, but does nothing to save her.

There’s nothing weaker than a man who fails to protect women, and Trump knows that. It’s why he’s vetting vice-presidential candidates based on whether they support “the three exceptions,” which includes the life of the mother, another bogus claim. Like other ring-wing extremists before him, he’s using these provisions to manipulate the public into believing that preventing women from receiving the health care they need, isn’t going to injure them, either physically, psychologically, or most likely both.

That’s why we must begin to frame these so-called exceptions for what they are— weaponized incompetence. The men who come up with these exceptions know they’re useless, but they feign ignorance so that someone else has to clean up their mess. Abortion exceptions are a sophisticated tool in the misogynist conservative male arsenal. They’re a confession, an incontestable admission that the men passing these laws know how barbaric they are, but that they will willfully encode into law, pretending not to know it. These unworkable policies allow feeble men, to pose as strong ones. Abortion exceptions allow men who are impotent in their ability to protect women, to cosplay as men who do.

While Trump being in charge of the bodies of millions of women is a spooky thought, I cannot reiterate how poorly these draconian laws do with the public. As I’ve said as nauseam, abortion has such a high approval rating that it would beat Trump in a popularity contest. Every attempt at trying to take it away, only makes its chockhold more intact. Only 9% of Americans support banning abortion without exceptions, so the left’s job is to show that the GOP’s mainstream position is actually the radical position that most Americans do not want.

Trump’s abortion exceptions are but an accessory, an aesthetic if you will, to distract and deflect from the real harm that his sexist policies pose to the women who will be punished (his words, not mine) unless they submit to them. Exceptions are fake, and so is Trump’s concern for the women who will be hurt by not having access to a right that he has most likely benefited from. While there’s no proof the former president has been involved in an abortion, the way he answered Maureen Dowd’s question about it in 2016 sure seems to suggest that he has. “Such an interesting question,” he said evading the issue. So what’s your next question?” If Trump hadn’t paid for an abortion, wouldn’t he want to just say it?

Trump singlehandedly being responsible for overturning Roe is not a flex. In fact, in a deeply divided country, support for abortion has become one of the most unifying forces in a generation. The more progressives focus on this losing issue for him, the more chinks will inevitably accumulate on his once believed teflon armor.