What are we to make of Donald Trump’s statement on abortion? In a recent post on Truth Social, he adopted a 100% states-rights approach, opposing any federal legislation to allow or regulate it.

Cold hard fact: Any federal legislation that could actually pass would leave unborn babies unprotected all the way through birth — and overturn good state laws like Florida’s. So there’s a sense in which Trump’s stance is the best we can hope for, the least bad outcome considering the GOP’s failure to profit electorally from Joe Biden’s disastrous presidency.

And its refusal to tackle rampant voter fraud. And the GOP leadership’s incessant sellouts to leftist and nutcase globalist priorities, such as funding the slaughter in Ukraine and the Deep State’s persecution of conservatives. Remember that this is a party where Mitch McConnell still leads in the Senate, and Ronna McDaniel was until recently chairwoman of the Republican National Committee. We can’t even get the House GOP to withhold funding for a new FBI headquarters while its employees are infiltrating our churches.

Do we really think RINOs would even vote for a pro-life federal law? If not, then don’t blame Trump (whom those people hate) for not immolating himself politically on our behalf.

Here’s Trump’s statement, complete with his predictable and unfortunate embrace of IVF, which few pro-life Christians even seem to understand as evil.

In a new video released on his social media platform Truth Social, Donald Trump says abortion policy should be up to the states. https://t.co/Ty1GmYwKqu pic.twitter.com/AmFfQDxAlT

— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) April 8, 2024

Our Face Getting Rubbed in Our Failures

There are weights on the other side of the scales, however. It’s dispiriting to have your leader announce that he doesn’t fully favor an issue you consider to be a matter of life and death. It seems to be a kind of preemptive surrender, a piece of appeasement or a trail of blood in the water. It’s humiliating to watch the left successfully demand that the White House jump through every flaming hoop of demonic insanity, from open borders to child castration — while the best we conservatives can get from our leader is a promise of federal neutrality.

Imagine if multiple states had legalized concealed carry, or covenant marriage, or teaching the Bible in public schools … and the best the Democrats could muster was a candidate who promised that the feds wouldn’t mandate such policies nationally. They would find that intensely degrading.

And that’s what’s really driving pro-lifers who rage at Donald Trump: shame and bitterness. He picked us last for the dodgeball team. He has recognized how weak we are, how far we have failed to evangelize the culture, or even to keep our own churches honest on biblical sexual morality.

Abortion Is a Sex Issue More than a Life Issue

Make no mistake: Abortion is not purely a life issue, like euthanasia or the death penalty; it’s really an issue of sexual ethics, and whether killing babies for sexual convenience should be legal. It’s all about sex, and anyone who links it to immigration or climate change or “poverty” is just a pro-abortion shill — whether he has the IQ points to realize it or not. The “Seamless Garment” was invented by gay Jesuits as a loincloth for pro-abortion Democrats with Irish or Italian last names. It serves no other purpose. But the Vatican just put out yet another pompous word salad endorsing this crass Utopian poison pill. (For detailed analyses of that document, see Stream coverage in upcoming days.)

If you go by what the Vatican says and does, my own Catholic Church can barely be described as pro-life anymore — having smothered the rights of unborn children not to be killed in the womb under a whole box full of Styrofoam peanuts, such as the alleged right of foreigners to crash through our borders and squat in our homes while collecting welfare.

Meanwhile, more and more evangelical groups and churches are offering “pronoun hospitality” and other squalid compromises with Caesar, Mammon, and Sodom. You know what that tells politicians like Donald Trump? We’re weak and unserious. We’ll settle for scraps and like it.

If the Church had been like this in Constantine’s day, he would never have bothered converting. We seem more at the moment like the dying pagan cults of Greece and Rome, legacy religions gradually running out of steam. That’s our fault, not Donald Trump’s.

We’re Allowed to Be Wise as Serpents

From the real-world perspective of possible politics, leaving aside our egos and our simmering, impotent rage, Trump’s position is the best we could possibly hope for in the short term. No, it’s not what we ultimately want, any more than “civil unions” actually satisfied the gay lobby when Barack Obama endorsed them. That didn’t stop gay activists from backing him, though; they knew how to work by increments. They knew that it’s hugely important to seize the reins of power, and steer the lumbering elephant of state in their own direction at the most prudent speed they can manage.

It’s natural for spirited citizens to resent the fact that they have been abandoned by their churches, sidelined by the culture, and reduced to political impotence — one or two stolen elections away from outright persecution. But the answer isn’t to become chest-thumping wannabe Elijahs calling down fire from Heaven.

Will We Even Fight Where We Can?

Within the states-rights reality created by the Dobbs decision, which Trump endorses, we have major battles ahead in states like Arizona and Florida. We had a major battle in Ohio, and few major pro-life groups even bothered to spend any money fighting a wicked, deceptive ballot initiative that went far beyond Roe v. Wade. But some of those groups’ leaders are now bashing Donald Trump. Why? Because it covers their shame, makes them seem like they’re doing something.

But let’s take this on the merits: Pro-lifers are right that Trump should do better on this issue. He should make clear that a Trump presidency will deal with the stealth attack on states’ rights that is chemical abortion — a dangerous, untested, polluting means for abortion companies to kill babies in Texas and Florida. In return, those pro-life groups should speak out about the voter fraud that hands elections to the abortion industry, the mass immigration that empowers the radical left with endless welfare clients for generations, and the other threats — not just to unborn life but our whole American system.

I said many years ago, “Immigration decides whether America will survive, and abortion whether it deserves to.” I unpacked that in a 2011 article, “Amnesty Equals Abortion,” that helped to decontaminate my Rolodex.  

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His upcoming book is No Second Amendment, No First.