A campaign manager and advisor for President-elect Donald Trump has spoken about the moment Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, as the pair sat in the Republican's office.
Chris LaCivita, who has worked in and around Trump's campaigns over the past eight years, was speaking on David Axelrod's podcast The Axe Files, with the former advisor to President Barack Obama asking about the GOP's slump in the 2022 midterms.
LaCivita agreed with Axelrod that the election that year was seen as a repudiation of Trump, but said it was important to look at the U.S. Supreme Court's Dobbs decision earlier that summer.
The strategist was sitting in Trump's office at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, when the news broke that the right to an abortion had been swept aside.
"My phone went off, the alert went off and I went 'Oh boy!' and he's like 'What?' and I read it to him, he just looked at me and said: 'Well we're going to have a problem'," LaCivita said. "He instinctively knew immediately the political issue that was going to pose."
While Trump took credit for the overturning of Roe v. Wade during his 2024 campaign, having appointed three conservative judges during his presidency, LaCivita's account of his initial reaction suggests he understood there could be backlash against the Republican Party in the midterms.
Axelrod and LaCivita discussed the polling ahead of that November 2022 vote, along with the results, which despite the GOP's takeback of the House of Representatives was seen as somewhat of a loss for the party.
"It was viewed as an immediate repudiation of Trump and it was because of the Dobbs decision, in part, it was because the party was ready to move on," he said, adding that the rising stock of former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis also threatened Trump's 2024 chances.
A few weeks later, Trump was embroiled in more controversy when right-wing podcaster Nick Fuentes and Ye, formerly known as Kanye, showed up at Mar-a-Lago.
"That was a rough part, it was a low part," LaCivita told Axelrod.
The advisor said the Trump campaign machine's ability to move through controversies and "survive it" marked it out as something different to other campaigns that had come before.
He said there was also confidence going into the primaries earlier in 2024 that Trump would sweep through them, and that Haley and DeSantis would not be as much of a problem as they perhaps felt in 2022.
As for the issue of abortion, while it did play a major role for voters in the 2024 election, Trump's ties to the Dobbs decision did not appear to have had such a negative effect as it perhaps did two years ago.
English (US) ·