Anti-abortion and pro-Trump are two sides of the same coin

Last week, Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama signed the strictest abortion bill in the country, which bans the procedure except in circumstances where the pregnant person’s life is at risk. Missouri followed suit, with an eight-week ban with no exceptions for rape or incest that’s now awaiting the governor’s signature.

All of the measures, as well as the “heartbeat” bill signed in April by Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, are designed to bring fetal personhood to the Supreme Court, where a conservative majority can overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark decision that established a woman’s right to abortion. Will Ainsworth, the lieutenant governor of Alabama, made this explicit: “It is important that we pass this statewide abortion ban legislation and begin a long overdue effort to directly challenge Roe v. Wade.”

Ainsworth didn’t stop there. He went on about why this particular bill is happening at this particular time. “Now that President Donald Trump has supercharged the effort to remake the federal court system by appointing conservative jurists who will strictly interpret the Constitution,” he said, “I feel confident that the U.S. Supreme Court will overturn Roe and finally correct its 46-year-old mistake.”

In 2016, anti-abortion conservatives — and white evangelicals in particular — supported Donald Trump on the expectation that he would nominate anti-abortion judges to the Supreme Court. He has. But the story of that support, which is also the story of these new laws, isn’t purely transactional. It is about a shared commitment to the same overarching goal.

The animating impulse of Trump’s campaign — the beating heart of “Make America Great Again” — was a defense of traditional hierarchies. Trump promised, explicitly, to weaken America’s commitment to principles of fairness and equality to strengthen privileges of race, gender and wealth. His personal life was defined by its hedonism, excess and contempt for conservative morality. But he pitched himself as a bulwark against cultural and demographic change, a symbol of white patriarchal manhood aligned against immigrants, feminists and racial minorities. A bulwark against cultural and demographic change, despite his stated tolerance for same-sex marriage.

“If we don’t win this election, you’ll never see another Republican, and you’ll have a whole different church structure,” Trump said in an interview on the Christian Broadcasting Network in September 2016. He continued, “I think this will be the last election that the Republicans have a chance of winning because you’re going to have people flowing across the border, you’re going to have illegal immigrants coming in, and they’re going to be legalized, and they’re going to be able to vote, and once that all happens you can forget it.”

At the same time, white evangelicals came to Trump’s campaign of their own accord, backing him from the start of the Republican primaries through the general election, where they supported Trump more than any previous Republican presidential candidate (81% versus 78% for George W. Bush in 2004, the previous high-water mark).

The underlying dynamic is straightforward, explains Robert P. Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute, in his book “The End of White Christian America”: “Trump’s promise to restore a mythical past golden age — where factory jobs paid the bills and white Protestant churches were the dominant cultural hubs — powerfully tapped evangelical anxieties about an uncertain future.”

There’s no restoring that past. But with his nomination of conservative judges — and Mitch McConnell’s successful drive to confirm them in the Senate — Trump has given white evangelicals and their Republican representatives the opportunity to pass the laws and measures that reflect their ultra-traditionalist ideals.

So even if Trump distances himself from any particular law, that’s how one should understand the new wave of abortion restrictions — as direct attacks on the social and economic autonomy of people who can become pregnant designed to strengthen strict hierarchies of gender. A world where predatory men are practically empowered to commit sexual violence.

It’s also a world with even more avenues to enforce racial hierarchy. The criminal justice system is already weighted against black and brown communities, which bear the brunt of police violence and mass incarceration. And when it comes to medical care and reproductive health, black women are particularly disadvantaged, with far worse outcomes than their white counterparts. There’s no question that these laws will lead to the criminalization of black and brown women above and beyond what already exists.

Never mind the jobs or economic growth, what “Make America Great Again” looks like in practice is the imposition of social control on groups that threaten a regressive, hierarchical vision of the country. MAGA is the Muslim ban; MAGA is child separation; MAGA is a woman in handcuffs for thinking she had the right to her own body.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.