What to Make of Melania Trump’s Galling Abortion Rights Reveal

This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normal everything has become.

“Restricting a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is the same as denying her control over her own body. I have carried this belief with me throughout my entire adult life.” —Melania Trump, in her forthcoming memoir

For weeks, former first lady Melania Trump has been teasing a memoir titled Melania, which she says will reveal “her truth” after what she deems misrepresentation in the media. The rollout has included the requisite media appearances—even though she has barely campaigned with her husband, the GOP nominee—as well as a literal film trailer and other heavily produced videos posted to social media in which she discusses her nude modeling work and the 2022 raid of Mar-a-Lago. It appears to be some kind of photo book (we can’t entirely tell, though—it’s not out until Tuesday), but a week before its release, it turns out it has at least one real reveal: Melania supports abortion rights.

That’s right. The former first lady, whose husband brags about nominating the Supreme Court justices who ended the federal right to abortion, writes, “It is imperative to guarantee that women have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government.” Again, she is married to the man responsible for near-total abortion bans in almost 20 states and whose return to power could result in a federal ban. But OK!

The book comes out exactly four weeks before Election Day, and the Guardian obtained a copy in advance.

Melania acknowledges that she and Trump do have different political views, but she hasn’t openly shared them to date. “Occasional political disagreements between me and my husband,” she writes, are “part of our relationship, but I believed in addressing them privately rather than publicly challenging him.”

She even writes about abortions occurring later in pregnancy, which Trump has demonized, going so far as to accuse doctors who perform these procedures of infanticide. Melania says that later abortions that result from fetal abnormalities or threats to women’s health should remain legal. “These cases were extremely rare and typically occurred after several consultations between the woman and her doctor. As a community, we should embrace these common-sense standards,” she writes.

If these comments feel completely untethered from her husband’s campaign, well … maybe that’s the point? The Trump–Vance ticket continues to scramble its abortion position so much that swing voters may not be able to keep up. Earlier this week, Trump claimed he’d veto a national ban after twice refusing to do so during the September debate. In the VP debate, his running mate J.D. Vance notably denied saying he’s ever supported a federal ban, then claimed that a 15-week ban is not a ban but merely a “minimum standard.” (When running for Senate in 2022, Vance said he “certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally.”) Trump might veto a total abortion ban, but what about one at 15 or 20 weeks? What about enforcing the Comstock Act to ban pills or procedures? It’s hard for anyone to trust him, really, given that he claimed in September 2020 that “there’s nothing happening” with Roe v. Wade in the wake of his nomination of Amy Coney Barrett.

Women voters especially don’t trust Trump, which is why this book revelation feels less like the truth and more like a strategist’s attempt to reduce the staggering gender gap between him and Harris. In late September, NBC News found a 33-point gender gap: Trump is winning men by 12 points (52 percent to 40 percent), while Harris is winning women by 21 points (58 percent to 37 percent).

If Trump can narrow that gap even a little bit between now and Nov. 5, it could propel him to victory in a super close race. And in some sense, flinging a bunch of contradictory abortion information at voters means that people can choose to believe what they want about Trump and his running mate. As law professor Mary Ziegler wrote for Slate in August, “Trump has spent the election season giving muddy answers in the hope of keeping anti-abortion voters close without alienating everyone else.” In that way, it’s notable that Melania’s book is coming out days after Trump said he’d veto a ban.

Another explanation for this whole saga is that Melania is simply trying to cash in on the chance that Trump loses and she has less cultural capital. She reportedly renegotiated her prenup with Trump during his first term and was, strangely, paid more than $200,000 for appearing at a recent event for the Log Cabin Republicans, a conservative LGBTQ+ group. She’s banking money, as is Trump, who is selling everything from sneakers to NFTs to Bibles to watches to a coffee-table photo book. So, as with much of the Trump political experiment, they could be playing 4D chess—or are just grifting in every way they can.