Former President Donald Trump said during a phone interview Monday that his restructuring of the Supreme Court was instrumental in overturning Roe v. Wade and giving pro-life activists "the upper hand" in fighting abortion, and that if reelected, he will focus on incentivizing adoptions to reduce abortions, Just the News reported.
"I think it's very important that if I win, and I hope I'm going to win, we're winning by a lot right now, we'll be pressing the adoption option," Trump told "Just the News - No Noise" during the opening night of the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) convention in Orlando, Fla.
During the phone interview, the former president — who currently holds more than a 32-point lead in the Republican nomination primary over Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis, according to FiveThirtyEight's latest polling average — discussed the Durham report, the border crisis, the weaponization of the federal government, and the failures of the news media.
With numerous Republican-led states in the process of restricting access to abortions — including Florida, where DeSantis last month signed into law a ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy — Trump's thoughts on the subject in the post-Roe era were particularly noteworthy.
According to Just the News, Trump said that although he opposes abortion, he also believes that women who are victims with extenuating circumstances, such as rape or incest, should have the option to end a pregnancy now that the issue has been returned by the justices to the states.
Trump said that he is a person who feels that the exceptions "are very important for a lot of reasons. But they're also important from the standpoint of an election. … If you don't have the exceptions, it's very, very hard. I think that's been proven. It's very, very hard to win an election.
"Now, I don't say you do it for that. You do it for other reasons, moral reasons," he added. "You do it for what you really believe. But it still is a very, very difficult thing to overcome, I would say from the standpoint of an election."
The former president also pointed out that DeSantis, who delivered the keynote at Monday's NRB convention Monday, could never have established his Florida abortion policy had Trump not added three new conservative justices to the Supreme Court during his presidency — a move that was pivotal in reversing the half-century-old Roe v. Wade decision to legalize abortion throughout the U.S.
Reiterating some of what he told Newsmax's "Rob Schmitt Tonight" on May 16, Trump said during Monday's interview: "I did something that nobody else in 52 years was able to do. I got rid of Roe v. Wade. … But what it really did is it gave pro-life people the right to negotiate and a tremendous power to negotiate. Before, they had no chance of doing anything. You could kill a baby after nine months in the womb, you could kill a baby after birth."
"Before, [pro-life activists] had no power in negotiation," he continued. "Now, the pro-life group actually has the upper hand, and they can negotiate something that will be very fair, and very good."
According to Trump, he and his team have done a lot of policy thinking after the overturning of Roe, and he said he'd embrace the creation of an adoption corps that would get parents pre-approved to adopt babies from women who were considering whether or not to have an abortion.
He also believed that tax breaks could create incentives for both the birth mother and the prospective adoptive parents.
"I think the incentive is great. And I think the concept of adoption is fantastic," Trump said. "And it could go a long way. And it's something that I would be supportive of, very supportive of. And we'd get that done. I don't even think that would be a very difficult thing to get done."
Trump was not so effusive, however, about President Joe Biden or his administration's recent decision to end familial DNA testing of children crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. The testing was a key tool used by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to prevent migrants from posing as families to enter the country and to thwart child trafficking by drug cartels.
The former president said that the administration's decision was part of a larger policy initiative to weaken border security, and it may result in dire consequences for the U.S.
"I think you know, there's going to be 15 million people by the end of the year," Trump said, "And they don't know who they are, where they're from. They don't know where they're coming from. They come from prisons. They come from mental institutions, insane asylums. They're dumping everybody all over the world."
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