A Republican Group Just Found the Most Cynical Message Possible on Abortion. It Involves RBG.

During this exhausting presidential campaign, Donald Trump has been talking out of both sides of his mouth about abortion, an issue that could cost him the election. He’s been trying to convince voters that he—the person most responsible for the end of Roe v. Wade—won’t restrict abortion nationwide, while also leaving Easter eggs for anti-abortion voters and activists. And now, at the eleventh hour, a shadowy group is barging in to muddy the waters even further.

A political action committee called RBG PAC—yes, after the former Supreme Court justice—started spending $20 million Friday on a campaign claiming that Trump has been clear that he opposes a national abortion ban (he hasn’t) and that Ruth Bader Ginsburg believed that the federal government shouldn’t dictate state abortion laws (far from it). Yet the group’s website has the gall to show both their photos, along with the phrase “Great minds think alike.”

The super PAC’s Federal Election Commission paperwork was signed by May Mailman, a former Trump legal adviser and current director of the Independent Women’s Law Center, part of an umbrella organization that slaps a feminist gloss on its opposition to both abortion and transgender rights. (Mailman also served as president of the Harvard Law School chapter of the Federalist Society.) It’s a so-called pop-up PAC that started spending money only after the last financial-disclosure deadline before Election Day, meaning that we won’t know who funded it until after the election. How convenient!

RBG PAC reported spending $17.3 million on digital media, $1.6 million on text messages, and $1 million on printing and postage.

It’s running two 30-second ads, both featuring an Oct. 1 Truth Social post in which Trump claims he would veto a national ban, a statement he made only after evading the question for months. The ads also show footage from the September debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, during which Trump twice declined to say he’d veto such legislation. But what viewers hear in the ads is Trump saying “I’m not signing a ban.”

An internal Independent Women’s network fundraising document for the 2024 campaign obtained by True North Research says the group will “debunk the fear-mongering” on abortion. This mirrors the group’s 2022 midterms strategy of trying to downplay the impact of Dobbs. One memorable ad from that cycle depicted a grandmother telling her concerned granddaughter that abortion isn’t the only important issue and that they will keep fighting for women’s rights. But that ad came directly from the Independent Women’s network, not a PAC named for a feminist-icon jurist.

This is far and away the most cynical abortion messaging I’ve seen this cycle, which is really saying something.

First, there’s the RBG of it all. Ginsburg’s criticism of Roe was that it should’ve been based in gender equality as opposed to a right to privacy—it wasn’t that she believed that the federal government had no role in abortion. The PAC website includes headline screenshots of stories in the New York Times and NBC News that explain how Ginsburg criticized Roe’s reasoning, but importantly, it does not link to them. If it did, readers could see that the justice was concerned not only that the ruling was prone to attacks, but that it also blunted the drive to pass protective federal legislation. Ginsburg’s granddaughter Clara Spera, an abortion rights lawyer, told the Times that the campaign is “nothing short of appalling.”

The larger goal of the PAC appears to be cleaning up Trump’s chaotic messaging on reproductive rights. Trump has said that abortion should be left to the states—emphasis on should, less declarative than will—but in the same breath he’ll argue that the issue isn’t as important as winning the election. We have seen Trump simultaneously say that abortion is no longer a top concern for voters, while also feeling the need to tell women that they “will no longer be thinking about abortion” if he wins. (What is he, a hypnotist?) Then, exactly one month before the election, when he’s polling terribly with women, former first lady Melania Trump claims that she supports abortion rights.

It has been rhetorical gymnastics all year long, but the PAC hilariously argues that Trump has been clear about his position and that “pro-choice” voters can feel secure in casting their ballot for him.

Crucially, the ads omit the Project 2025 plan of Trump’s banning abortions nationwide without Congress. The playbook urges him to direct the Food and Drug Administration to revoke approval of the abortion drug mifepristone and to enforce the 19^th-century Comstock Act to prohibit the mailing of drugs or devices used for abortion. Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, but architects from a different think tank are now advising his campaign, and their group, the America First Policy Institute, calls for ending telemedicine abortion nationwide by mandating patient ultrasounds. A ban could also result from a lawsuit giving the Trump-stacked Supreme Court an opportunity to establish fetal personhood, an idea espoused in the GOP platform. (No, contrary to headlines, it was not “softened” this year.)

An optimist might say the existence of this truly nauseating PAC suggests that Trump’s allies are afraid abortion will cost him the election and they’re doing whatever they can to salvage his campaign. A pessimistic view is that uninformed voters will fall for the idea that Trump is “pro-choice”—even though he nominated the justice who replaced RBG, creating the fifth vote to overturn Roe.

After all, there are Trump voters who believe that having him back in the White House won’t affect abortion access. They’ve perhaps been buoyed by misleading media coverage of Trump’s empty pledges not to sign an abortion ban—reports that gloss over what exactly Trump considers to be a “ban” versus a “national minimum standard.”

It’s all the more striking, then, that a particular Trump comment from earlier this month didn’t get as much traction as previous statements.

Speaking on Oct. 13 about a national abortion ban, Trump said: “I think that it’s something that’s off the table now, because I did something that everybody has wanted to do, I was able to get it back to the states.” But then he added, ominously: “Now, we’ll see what happens.”