When Donald Trump released his closely watched video announcement on abortion policy this week, he took care to include an utterly bonkers claim: Democrats, the former president said while reading from his script, want babies “executed after birth.”
Alas, this was not new. During the Republican’s appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last fall, he similarly insisted that Democrats support, among other things, “the killing of babies ... even after birth.” It was a lie Trump kept repeating to multiple audiences, pointing to advocates of “after-birth” abortion who do not exist.
Making matters worse, of course, is the fact that Trump’s line is being echoed by his partisan allies. The New Republic noted yesterday, for example:
North Carolina Representative Greg Murphy continued Tuesday to weave the yarn on Fox Business, telling host Maria Bartiromo that Democrats want to kill kids when they’re “coming out of the birth canal.”
The GOP congressman specifically said on the air, “[Abortion is] going to be a big issue every time, because you have folks really on both sides, really probably more Democrat, that want abortion literally when the child is coming out of the birth canal, always to force the issue.”
To be sure, I don’t generally expect much from Murphy. The North Carolinian has pushed for President Joe Biden’s impeachment and suggested that there’s a secret “progressive left committee,” led by Barack Obama, who might be controlling the White House.
After Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020, Murphy was also among the Republicans sending messages to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, flagging radical ideas about how Trump could claim illegitimate power despite the election results.
The congressman is not, in other words, a go-to source for sensible commentary and policy analysis.
But there’s a larger context to all of this. Republicans like Trump and Murphy seriously expect voters to believe that there are women, medical professionals, and Democratic policymakers who “want abortion literally when the child is coming out of the birth canal.” That’s insane. There are no such people.
This, in turn, helps set the stage for a debate over the future of reproductive rights in the United States, with the presumptive GOP nominee and his cohorts apparently convinced they need to peddle outrageous falsehoods, not just to smear their opponents, but also to distract from the fact that most Americans simply don’t agree with the Republican Party’s regressive position.
The problem, in other words, isn’t just that guys like Trump and Murphy are lying. The problem is made worse by the fact that they feel like they need to lie in order to prevent more election defeats.