Former President Donald Trump, who ardently sought right-wing evangelical support by railing against abortion rights and choosing Supreme Court justices with an eye to overturning Roe v. Wade, has been uncharacteristically quiet about the leak early this month of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion gutting the landmark ruling. The reason? He reportedly fears “the wrath of suburban women.”
According to Rolling Stone, Trump is anxious about his political future because suburban women are furious about the expected reversal of Roe v. Wade by conservative Supreme Court justices, The Rolling Stone reported.
Trump views suburban women as more pro-choice than conservative and even as mainstream Republicans, and has told associates that if he goes too hard on overturning Roe that it would give his foes the chance to “use it against” him, Rolling Stone reported.
“Suburban women have been a recurring concern” for Trump, including during the 2020 campaign, when his “smarter advisers were sounding the alarm to him about how he was losing suburbs,” said a person familiar with the issue, sources have told the magazine.
“He is … worried women in the suburbs could punish him for this one day,” the source added, referring to the Supreme Court’s move to strike down the landmark ruling that has safeguarded reproductive rights for five decades.
As noted by Huffington Post, “Trump fared well with suburban voters in 2016, the areas shifted toward Biden in 2020, contributing to Trump’s loss.”
CIting Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s book “Peril,” HuffPost reported that former Attorney General William Barr warned Trump several months before the 2020 election that he was alienating suburban voters (not just women).
“There are a lot of people out there, Independents and Republicans in the suburbs of the critical states that think you’re an asshole,” Barr explained, according to Peril. “They think you act like an asshole and you got to, you got to start taking that into account.”
Read more at Rolling Stone.
