David Remnick: The signal accomplishment of Donald Trumps term as president, in his terms, may be the end of Roe v. Wade. He promised conservative voters that he'd appoint anti abortion justices, and he delivered, all with the help of Mitch McConnell, who secured Trump a bonus judicial appointment but the rollback of abortion rights after more than half a century, came at a steep political cost inside the party.

Recently, a republican state legislator in Texas made news by pleading with her colleagues to stop talking about abortion. She said it's putting gas in the tank of Democrats. At the Republican National Convention, a longstanding plank supporting a national abortion ban was removed right when such a ban had actually become legally possible. Our Washington correspondent Susan Glasser has been looking at this emerging tension in the Republican Party. What's really obvious now, Susan, it seems to me, is that even Donald Trump, he's now out to tone down his rhetoric around abortion, saying, well, this will be a state matter and everybody will be happy.

President Donald Trump: What I did is I put three great Supreme Court justices on the court and they happened to vote in favor of killing Roe v. Wade and moving it back to the states. This is something that everybody wanted.

David Remnick: Is that effort gaining any traction?

Susan Glasser: It's not about principle for him. It's about politics. It's about votes. What's fascinating to me is the extent to which his own party hasnt challenged him as much as you might imagine on what they have defined as an issue of principle for the last five decades. Since the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, anti abortion policy and politics have been at the core of this evolving Republican Party ideology.

Donald Trump has basically said, yes, I would like to take credit for getting rid of Roe v. Wade, but also not pay a political price for it. That's what we saw at the Republican convention in Milwaukee when I was there, Trump essentially took over the Republican Party platform and a kind of a sleight of hand that's gotten less attention than you might think. They got rid of a platform plank that had been in there for decades calling for a national abortion ban.

David Remnick: Susan, you spoke with a congressman named Matt Rosendale representing Eastern Montana. He's very active on this issue. Let's listen to some of your conversation with him.

Matt Rosendale: I think that you had a platform committee that tried to accommodate a larger swath of the middle of the electorate is what I think. I will tell you that the base of the Republican Party is very disturbed by those very things that you just mentioned.

Susan Glasser: Do you think that it means that the Republican Party has given up on pursuing a national abortion ban or simply that they don't want to talk about it on the campaign trail.

Matt Rosendale: I can't speak for the whole party, Susan. I can speak for Matt Rosendale. I've always pursued the things that I hold very strongly in my beliefs and my principles. Where the entire party goes, that's an apparatus that I don't have a lot of control over.

David Remnick: Is Congressman Rosendale right?

Susan Glasser: Yes, of course he's right. Look, everybody who gets in bed with Donald Trump is making a deal. I think their deal is, let's get back to power, let's win in November. I personally don't have much doubt that they would pursue a national abortion ban in Congress if they have the votes to put it through.

David Remnick: You've also got Project 2025, the far right platform, which calls for essentially banning abortion pills and other restrictions on reproductive rights. Trump tried to distance himself from Project 2025. He claimed, "I don't know what it is." Now, this potrays, doesn't it, some nervousness on his part where the abortion issue is concerned and about the right wing in general?

Susan Glasser: Absolutely. I think he is very concerned about the power of the abortion issue. He's seen over the two years since the Dobbs decision that again and again and again, it has brought voters out even in otherwise red states such as Kansas. He knows that Harris has been almost constantly on the campaign trail in the two years since then focusing on reproductive rights. One of his unfortunate superpowers as a campaigner is his ability to look you right in the eye and lie to you and say things that are just patently absurd.

It is obviously absurd to say that Project 2025 has nothing to do with what a future Trump administration would look like, given how closely aligned the people who created this policy agenda for a second Trump term were with Trump's own administration, his own campaign, and now his own vice presidential running mate, it turns out, wrote the forward for the book from the Heritage foundation.

Donald Trump has this brazen power of not seeming to mind when he makes absurd statements because he somehow still implants the falsehood with people. He creates the plausible doubt. Kamala Harris, I thought she was really effective in campaigning on this when, in her debut as the presumptive nominee, David, when she went out there and she, I think it was her first rally in Wisconsin. Do you remember this?

Kamala Harris: He and his extreme Project 2025 agenda will weaken the middle class. Like, we know we got to take this serious thing. Can you believe they put that thing in writing?

David Remnick: Now, even without a real national abortion ban, there are ways to go slice by slice, state by state, and cut down on abortion in an even more radical way than we have now. Is that something you think we'll still see them try to do, or has the backlash to Roe v. Wade been so profound that a potential Trump administration would be much more cautious?

Susan Glasser: Well, look, let's obviously reconvene this conversation after November, but I would say absolutely not. That, in fact, the agenda is the agenda, and mission driven politicians aren't likely to stop, even if the public opinion numbers don't look good for them. I think that they've shown the ability to challenge majority public opinion on issues such as this for a long period of time and to unfold the campaign over decades. What they haven't always had is a political opposition from Democrats, from women who support reproductive rights that has been as fierce, determined, and long term as they themselves have been.

David Remnick: Congressman Matt Rosendale, who you spoke with, is certainly one of those mission driven politicians. He stands apart in his opposition to IVF, in vitro fertilization. He's challenging members of his party with a bill that would remove federal funding for IVF for military families. That issue blew up on Republicans in February when Alabama Supreme Court essentially banned IVF, saying that embryos created during the process should be considered children. IVF is a treatment used by nearly 100,000 people every year to get pregnant. Susan, how much of an outlier is Rosendale on this issue?

Susan Glasser: I think he's an example of the outlier who suggests the potential, at least, for where the extremes become the party's position. Right now, Rosendale is very disliked by many of his Republican colleagues in the House for essentially exposing, in his view, the hypocrisy of a lot of their positions. That he's exposed the craven political calculations in some ways behind this movement.

Matt Rosendale: After the Alabama decision came out, I started doing a lot more research because I could see that this was going to be something that Congress and state houses across the nation were going to be having to start to deal with. We're trying to get accurate information about how many embryos are truly being created each year, how many of them are being frozen, what kind of testing is being done on these embryos, how many of them are being destroyed, how many of them are being kept in a frozen state for how long, and we're not able to get this information.

That's where it all started. I see now my role is to help educate a lot more of the members of Congress who really weren't aware of this because they also, these same members, Susan, have co-sponsored legislation that says we believe that life begins at conception. We've had 131 members of Congress co sponsor legislation that says we believe life begins at conception. If you're going to sign off and sponsor legislation like that, then the natural path is to say if life begins in conception and we have all of these conceived children out there that are being kept in a frozen state, that are being destroyed or that are being experimented upon, we've got to address that.

David Remnick: I mean, there's an internal logic, I guess, in there. How are Republicans attempting to square these things?

Susan Glasser: That's right. Well, for now, of course, they're attempting to square by preferring not to talk about it, in part because whether it's consistent or not, it's bad politics or that's [crosstalk].

David Remnick: It ain't popular. Yes.

Susan Glasser: The reason that I think it's an important conversation is for a couple things. First of all, we know, courtesy of the Alabama Supreme Court, that Rosendale is not the only person in America who thinks that this is where the anti abortion movement is headed. You may have Republicans in Congress who don't want to talk about this. The Southern Baptist convention actually, in effect, endorsed Rosendale's position. That is a very large movement of American Christians.

It certainly represents a significant potential voting block. The last few years have taught us a lot of things about American politics we might not have assumed before. One of the things is that ideas and views that we once saw as so fringe and far from the mainstream that they couldn't possibly become law have actually come to dominate our politics and have been remarkably successful in some ways. I wouldn't discount something that to us looks like a fringe notion right now.

David Remnick: Well, he seems to think, Rosendale does, that some Republicans will come around on this issue. He told you that the majority of Republican politicians don't understand the issue. Why is he so confident that this is a political battle that Republicans can win when at the same time polling suggests that IVF is, in a sense, hugely popular. People want this option?

Susan Glasser: Well, in part because of Republican's own experience. Again and again and again in the last few years, David, they have taken positions that are very unpopular with the voters, and yet, they've continued to pursue them. Look at some gun control proposals, for example. Huge majorities of Americans support many gun control proposals, and yet, Republicans have essentially taken a minoritarian view and made that into the law of the land.

I think they've done that with their abortion policies, overturning Roe v. Wade is not supported. Something like two thirds of Americans now support the idea that abortion in some form should be legal. Republicans like Rosendale are not afraid to take minoritarian positions and use the system of our democracy quite successfully, it seems to me, to impose those minority views on majority of Americans.

David Remnick: You did ask Rosendale about the human issue here, how much he sympathizes with the many families trying to get pregnant. He told you this.

Matt Rosendale: My heart aches for folks that are having problems trying to start a family and conceive children naturally. God blessed me with three sons, and now I've been blessed with two granddaughters, and I have appreciated every phase of life that they have gone through. We need to invest more time and money in what are the causes of this infertility. When you start introducing young girls at the age of 13, 14 to birth control pills so that they can control their menstrual cycles and they utilize this for 20, 25 years, and then decide to start a family, that has a huge impact.

We have already seen and had documented that the COVID vaccination has caused young women problems with their menstrual cycles. We have seen men who have had terrible diets with a lot of preservatives and chemicals that have hurt their fertility. We need to start focusing on what can we do. Most folks, studies show, that if we focus on helping them address their fertility issues, that that is as successful as an IVF program.

Susan Glasser: Well, as you can hear there clearly, his mention here of the COVID vaccine in particular is not supported by science, but more broadly it's not that anyone is against doing research on infertility, but it's a very complex debate that he's opened up.

David Remnick: Now, what did you think when he said that? Is that enough for people to be convinced?

Susan Glasser: Short answer, no. No, it's not. I think that he is already trying to appeal to a relatively small fringe of Americans, but ones who exert disproportionate political power in our system. Already you've seen many Republicans in Congress, in the wake of that Alabama Supreme Court decision, come out, share stories, and this is Republicans as well as Democrats, share stories of their own struggles with fertility and relying on IVF to have a family.

David Remnick: Tim Walz has also talked in speeches about using IVF in his own family.

Susan Glasser: Yes, and that's very powerful stuff. It reminds me in some ways of the early discussions over support for gay marriage, for example, and LGBTQ rights. It's personal, and everyone in America at this point probably knows somebody who has struggled to start a family or back then who had a gay member of their family or lesbian member of their family. Remember when Dick Cheney, as hardline of a conservative as there could be, who finally came out in support of this and talked about his own family's experience. This is one thing, I think, where this hard edged right wing ideology comes into conflict with human experience.

David Remnick: Maybe this is a question that requires a daring short answer, and you're never anything less than daring in your honesty. Imagine a debate in September, October, and it comes to the abortion issue. Kamala Harris just forthrightly puts across what her position so obviously is. Donald Trump, forthrightly, you'll pardon the expression, puts forward his position as you've described it here. Politically, who's the winner for that exchange come November?

Susan Glasser: David, in our politics, if you're talking about the other persons issue, you're losing. Donald Trump doesn't want to talk about abortion. If he's talking about abortion, he's losing. If Kamala Harris is talking about immigration more than a sentence or two, she's losing. That's the race right now. It's who can turn to offense and hit their points again and again and again.

David Remnick: Susan Glasser, I always learn from talking to you every day. Thank you so much.

Susan Glasser: Oh, it's great to be with you. Thank you, David.

David Remnick: Susan Glasser is a Washington correspondent for the New Yorker, and she spoke with Representative Matt Rosendale of Montana's second congressional district. Susan's best selling book about Donald Trump's presidency is called The Divider.

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