“See if that works”

The states’ rights dodge the anti-abortion lobby is running on abortion is a lie — as Michelle Goldberg points out, just ask them! Jonathan Mitchell, standing on the trail of slime he leaves everywhere, reaffirms the belief of this particular branch of the American semifascist movement that a national abortion ban already exists in the US Code:

Key to these plans is the Comstock Act, the 19th-century anti-vice law named for the crusading bluenose Anthony Comstock, who persecuted Margaret Sanger, arrested thousands, and boasted of driving 15 of his targets to suicide. Passed in 1873, the Comstock Act banned the mailing of every “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile article,” including “every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine or thing” intended for “producing abortion.” Until quite recently, the Comstock Act was thought to be moot, made irrelevant by a series of Supreme Court decisions on the First Amendment, contraception and abortion. But it was never actually repealed, and now that Trump’s justices have scrapped Roe, his allies believe they can use Comstock to go after abortion nationwide.

“We don’t need a federal ban when we have Comstock on the books,” Jonathan F. Mitchell, Texas’ former solicitor general and the legal mind behind the state’s abortion bounty law, told The New York Times in February. Mitchell is very much a MAGA insider; he represented Trump in the Supreme Court case arising from Colorado’s attempt to boot the ex-president off the ballot as an insurrectionist. As The Times has reported, Mitchell is on a list of lawyers vetted by America First Legal, a nonprofit led by the Trump consigliere Stephen Miller, as having the “spine” to serve in a second Trump administration.

Mitchell is far from the only Trumpist dreaming of bringing Comstock back from the dead. The 2025 Presidential Transition Project, a coalition of major right-wing think tanks, has published a 920-page plan for a new Trump administration, “Mandate for Leadership.” In it, Gene Hamilton, America First Legal’s vice president and a former Trump Department of Justice official, lays out an agenda for the department to target abortion medication.

“Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, there is now no federal prohibition on the enforcement of this statute,” he wrote of Comstock. “The Department of Justice in the next conservative administration should therefore announce its intent to enforce federal law against providers and distributors of such pills.” (“Mandate for Leadership” also says that a Trump F.D.A. should repeal approval for medication abortion.)

I dunno, this doesn’t sound like a group of people willing to live and let live to me. And it’s not like they’re keeping it a secret:

Some anti-abortion leaders, knowing that their schemes are unpopular, don’t want Trump to talk about them before he’s in office. Speaking of Comstock, a movement attorney told The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey: “It’s obviously a political loser, so just keep your mouth shut. Say you oppose a federal ban, and see if that works.”

That is clearly what Trump is trying to do. Whether it works is up to all of us.

Journalists covering Trump’s abortion interview as if he disavowed a national abortion ban (which he very clearly did not) aren’t even being played; they’re just part of a con-in-plain-sight.