Via Becket Adams, the key bit starts at around 4:00 of the clip below. Over to you, Ian Tuttle:
Which of us supported the GOP primary candidate who once described himself as “very pro-choice,” even “pro-choice in every respect“?
Which of us supported the primary candidate who once said that he would not support a ban on partial-birth abortions?
Which of us supported the primary candidate who recommended his pro-abortion sister as a Supreme Court justice?
Which of us supported the primary candidate who parroted the false talking point that abortion is a “small part” of Planned Parenthood’s operation, and claimed that the organization helps “millions and millions of women“?
Which of us supported the primary candidate who said that maybe Planned Parenthood shouldn’t actually be defunded?
I’ll play too. Which of us supported the primary candidate whose national favorable rating has been smoldering garbage since the day he got into the race, providing a strong early clue that he’d be steamrolled by abortion shill Hillary Clinton in the general election?
I hate to remind them, but it wasn’t a #NeverTrumper who famous and explicitly absolved their favored candidate of any obligation to the pro-life cause just because he’s better on their pet issue:
I don't care if @realDonaldTrump wants to perform abortions in White House after this immigration policy paper. http://t.co/l7nq8gN7i5
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) August 16, 2015
I was a Cruz guy in the primaries but I admit that no one in the party speaks more effectively on life than Marco Rubio. Rubio was pure poison to nationalists like Coulter and Ingraham, though, because of his Gang of Eight work. The guy who babbled semi-coherently about immigration was super while the guy who spoke eloquently against abortion was disqualified. (Cruz could speak effectively about both, which is why I was a Cruz guy.) Trump’s pro-life position is so transparently expedient that he somehow managed to veer from wanting to lock women up if Roe was overturned to calling for abortion laws to be left alone in the span of four days earlier this year. That’s what happens when you have no core beliefs about a subject and are simply trying to “feel” your way rhetorically to a position that’ll get people off your back. And all of this is obvious to his media superfans like Ingraham, Hannity, and Huckabee, but we’re waaaay into the blame-shifting phase on all of this. They let Trump off the hook on abortion, they let him off the hook on electability, and now they demand to know from #NeverTrumpers why they don’t seem to care about abortion or electoral outcomes. Thought experiment: If President Trump decided the day after his inauguration that he was okay with Roe after all and wouldn’t make overturning it a litmus test for his judges, how much heat would he take for it on “Hannity” or “The Laura Ingraham Show”? Can anyone imagine either of them withdrawing their support in protest over it? W-w-w-what about the wall?
The funny part is that the vast majority of #NeverTrumpers, I suspect, aren’t voting for Clinton either for precisely this reason, because they do care about abortion and would never support someone whose position is as loathsome as Hillary’s. By the way, a new advertising survey out this week finds that Fox News’s brand, which used to be the 10th most respected among Republican consumers, fell to 20th most respected in 2015 and 50th most respected in 2016. I’d love to tell you that that’s a backlash to people like Hannity shilling endlessly for a deeply compromised pseudo-conservative instead of for Cruz or Rubio, but my strong suspicion is that it’s mostly a backlash to people like Megyn Kelly and Bret Baier for not shilling enough. Good luck with the party after November 9th.
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