opinion
Overturned abortion rights
The Triumph of Donald Trump
© Mark Humphrey/AP/DPA
With their historic decision on abortion rights, judges appointed by Trump ensure his biggest victory. The verdict will continue to tear America apart – and make the world shiver.
You have to imagine Donald Trump as a happy person this Friday. As a very lucky person. Because he is no longer in the White House (although he believes he should still be in the White House). But three judges he appointed remain on the US Supreme Court for life. This week, they ensured that Trump can celebrate what is perhaps his greatest legacy – first, despite the recent massacres in America’s schools, the right to own guns was not restricted, but rather expanded. The judges then overturned the right to an abortion, which had previously been unpunished in the USA for up to 24 weeks. Republican states in particular will soon be passing their own much stricter abortion laws, even including a ban (which Missouri has already passed).
With this, America’s radical right achieves two triumphs on its most important causes: gun ownership and abortion. To call the judgment on abortion historical is almost an understatement. Because the division of the country, it will reach new historical dimensions according to this verdict, even if this seems hardly imaginable.
Needless to say, the details of what this decision by what is possibly the world’s most dangerous court will entail will mean that the most vulnerable now have to trek across the country to get a legal abortion (and many can’t afford it). . That even taxi drivers who drive women to abortion clinics face penalties in some states, that backyard clinics and botched doctors will experience boom times. And that the reference to the original constitutional text, created in 1776, can hardly be the guide for today’s decisions on weapons or abortions.
“No, Trump is not history”
There is no need to expand on all this because facts no longer play a role in American trench warfare anyway. You have the right to your own opinion AND the right to your own facts. Because the ardent Trumpists have long since said goodbye to facts, and old-school Republicans are stunned by this development. Perhaps no one embodies this dilemma quite like John Roberts, chairman of the Supreme Court. For a long time he campaigned for a compromise that would at least allow impunity in the first phase of pregnancy. But Roberts could do nothing against Trump’s religious warriors in court. They were cheered on by Trump’s ex-vice president Mike Pence, for example, saying that abortion rights “belong on the garbage heap of history.”
Henry Kissinger, the doyen of republican realism, told stern in an interview this week that the division in the USA could become so great that no political leader could control it, and that it was also much greater than it was during the Vietnam War. Of course, America’s allies are also noticing this. You will meet US President Joe Biden at the G7 summit on Sunday at Schloss Elmau and will ask yourself one question: How long will America’s aversion to Trumpism be valid in foreign policy, especially if Biden crashes out of the midterm elections in November? One looks at America’s domestic political struggles – and one shivers at the potential foreign policy unpredictability of a deeply torn country. No, Trump is not history. Maybe he’s not even gone.