When the Access Hollywood tape tore across the internet orders of magnitude faster than David Daleiden’s Planned Parenthood videos, Mike Pence went home to Indianapolis to talk with Karen and pray. Campaign aides wanted him to defend Donald Trump before Trump even said a word. Other Republicans were pressuring him to get off the ticket and disavow Trump, as they were doing. But this mess was not his to clean up, he thought. Trump was the one who said it:
“Grab ’em by the pussy.”
Trump bragged about assaulting women on an Access Hollywood video from 2005 that was suddenly playing on every channel. And at first, he refused to address the issue on video, releasing only a statement dismissing his words as “locker-room banter” and apologizing “if anyone was offended.”
If Pence could publicly grant Trump grace, he could show the way for their conservative Christian base to do so too. But Pence would not speak publicly until Trump did. And even then, Pence refused to defend or condone the remarks. His followers in the antiabortion movement were left to make their own peace with the deal they had struck.
For more than a year, the antiabortion movement had tried to skirt the moral choice on Trump. They found ways to justify his coarse behavior, his curses, botched Bible references, and insulting words. They were electing a president, not a preacher, and policy mattered most, went their argument. But the reckoning had come. It was not just the video. Multiple women had come forward accusing Trump of unsettling sexual advances, groping, and even sexual assault, charges Trump denied.
Marjorie Dannenfelser saw herself as a defender of women. In her mind, and in those of women like her, opposing abortion was a way to save women from what she saw as a choice that destroyed their lives and left them crippled with regret. She had made a calculation that Trump, with all his faults, would be better for their cause than Hillary Clinton. Even as she and others in her movement believed Trump would lose, they had planned for the courts and captured the vice presidential spot on the ticket, in hopes that somehow, if he did win, they would be in place to act. That was what it meant for them to act in faith. But now, all of that was at risk. The choice was suddenly so stark.
Some donors pressured her to back out. Trump was going to lose, they argued, and supporting him would ruin the future of the antiabortion movement as Todd Akin had threatened to do. But the Susan B. Anthony List had a single mission, and only Trump gave her a chance of achieving it. “Which of the two paths would result in overturning Roe v. Wade?” she asked herself. It would be at least a generation before they had another chance to turn the Supreme Court in their favor, she thought. One candidate would lock Roe in forever, and the other could overturn it.
The hardest cost was the most personal: her daughters. Dannenfelser’s oldest told her she could not support her if she continued to help Donald Trump. “My daughters saw a snapshot in time and were right to be appalled,” Dannenfelser later wrote. “But I saw the evil that had been wrought in the decades since Roe v. Wade, which had ended the lives of more than 50 million pre-born babies.” By the time she called into NPR’s Morning Edition, a few days after Trump’s apology, her answer was clear.
“It is not to be set aside, the assault and offense of women,” she said when the interview started. And then, “I am still with Trump.”
Top Republicans like Senator John McCain, the party’s 2008 nominee, withdrew their support. Some even called on Trump to leave the race. Dannenfelser stood by her man once again, committed to her strategy now as she had been with Akin, even if all signs pointed to Trump’s defeat.
The controversy over the tape focused on his history of assaulting women—not abortion rights. But in another sense, Trump’s words revealed exactly how far he would be willing to go.
THE FULL ABSOLUTION finally came under the bright lights of a debate stage twelve days later. When asked about the Supreme Court, Clinton said the country must not reverse marriage equality or Roe. Trump gave a very different response. Under his presidency, Roe would fall because he would appoint “pro-life” judges from the list. “If we put another two or perhaps three justices on, that is really what will happen. That will happen automatically in my opinion,” he said. Then he fired off a quote Dannenfelser could have only dreamed of when she was training the scores of Republican men. “If you go with what Hillary is saying, in the ninth month, you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby.”
In a viewing room backstage, Kellyanne Conway jumped out of her chair and squealed with delight. It was a “decades-in-the-making zinger,” she crowed. Trump’s “ripping” description didn’t account for the medically complicated and emotionally painful reality of late-term abortion procedures. But that didn’t matter. No one had ever heard a presidential nominee talk so graphically about abortion from the debate stage. They had always been too worried about alienating mainstream America, losing the moderate voters they needed to win a national election. Trump had turned the tables, and Clinton was now cast as the “extremist” in America’s culture wars, at least in Conway’s eyes.
In some ways, Trump’s comment about abortion was an outward sign of an inward, more invisible gift. His words were a message to white conservative Christian America, much bigger than Bush’s remark about Dred Scott. Trump’s opposition to abortion rights mattered to them, of course. But what mattered more was that Trump would be their weapon against an America fighting against them on a host of issues, from transgender rights to the place of religion in public life. It was another version of the message he delivered those months ago in Iowa, “Christianity will have power.” Trump would take up their language, their anger, and wield his power in their broader war.
In their own backstage room, Clinton’s campaign aides jotted down Trump’s prediction that he would overturn Roe on a large whiteboard, where they were tracking the key moments of the debate. They knew that the idea was out of step with the majority of Americans and offered an opportunity for a political attack.
But quickly, a different Trump line gained notoriety, overpowering the first. Asked whether he would accept the results of the election if he lost to Clinton, Trump refused to commit. “I will tell you at the time,” he said. “I’ll keep you in suspense.”
The Clinton aides had a frenzied discussion: What message should they elevate in the spin room to define the narrative of that final debate? The voters they most needed to pull from Trump—suburban women and moderate Republicans—weren’t worried about Roe, a legal ruling that seemed cemented in American life, they decided. There was little evidence the issue resonated beyond Clinton’s most ardent supporters. They chose his comments about the election results.
Yet as Stephanie Schriock, the president of EMILYs List, walked out of the debate, she couldn’t shake a sinking suspicion that they had witnessed a pivotal moment. The line about the babies “ripped from the womb” felt rehearsed to her. Clearly, it was a political tactic to boost his numbers with evangelical and conservative Catholic voters. But the donors around her buzzed with excitement over what they saw as Clinton’s killer performance. They were all but celebrating victory.
Schriock was right, even if no one understood precisely why yet. Democrats lasered in on Trump’s words about the election itself. But conservative Christians heard something else that night—the unchecked power Trump promised them.
A FEW WEEKS after the votes were counted, a missed call and voicemail popped up on Dannenfelser’s phone. She didn’t recognize the number. But the voice was unmistakable.
Hearing from Trump was an unfathomable turn from where she was just four years earlier, relegated to the sidelines of the party. It was a sign that her movement was now entrenched in the seat of political power. With the groundwork they had laid, antiabortion activists could go straight to the top. Against all odds, Trump had won with Pence as his vice president. Republicans had not just captured the White House but kept control of the Senate and the House. Trump would be the one to fill Antonin Scalia’s old seat.
The victories were an extraordinary stroke of luck. The antiabortion movement leaders had plotted and positioned where they could at every turn along the way, gotten their lists, pledges, and vice presidential pick from Trump. But even as they executed their plans, many of them didn’t think they would actually win the White House. Trump’s victory shocked not just them but the nation. He won by fewer than eighty thousand votes, combined from just three states. As liberal America reeled, the antiabortion activists celebrated. Now, they could hold the formerly pro-choice, soon-to-be president to a new set of promises.
In his first prime-time interview after the election, Trump reiterated the pledge he made from the debate stage. “I’m pro-life, the judges will be pro-life,” he told 60 Minutes. If Roe were ever overturned, he added, “it would go back to the states.” Women would “have to go to another state,” he said. “We’ll see what happens. It’s got a long way to go, just so you understand.”
Dannenfelser’s movement hadn’t changed Americans’ hearts and minds, which had long been what she said was the ultimate goal. Just as they had for decades, a majority of Americans still supported Roe, saying they did not want to see the court overturn the decision. White conservative Christians were becoming more of a minority in America with every passing year. But they had shown that it was not size that mattered—it was power. And now, with Trump about to move into the White House, political momentum was on their side. If they played it right, this was their opportunity to change generations of American life.
Dannenfelser listened to the familiar voice coming through her phone, the voice of the candidate she had stuck with for a larger prize. She could draw a line from her choices with Akin to Trump. Once again, many in the Republican establishment fled from a man her cause needed because of his controversial comments about sexual assault. But this time, the conservative grassroots boosted him to victory. It was a sign that Republican politics had changed. Dannenfelser believed back then that an energized conservative base could overpower the demographic trends working against them. And four years after the autopsy argued otherwise, she was proven right. Despite the early skepticism of elite Christian leaders, including Dannenfelser, when November came, her people had stood by Trump en masse. Eighty-one percent of white evangelical Christians voted for Trump in 2016, their highest support for a presidential candidate in at least a dozen years, if not longer. But Dannenfelser wasn’t correct about everything. She didn’t need the power of the party establishment. She just needed to find someone who could overtake it.
Dannenfelser and the antiabortion movement may have set out to reclaim power in the Republican Party, and they succeeded. Without their support, Trump wouldn’t have won. But their efforts did more than just elect a new president. They were at the forefront of reshaping the Republican Party into a new coalition, one that mirrored the more populist and radical priorities of the new president. And that shift would become a turning point for American Christianity itself, as the new conservative politics roiled and remade churches across the nation.
“I want to just thank you and thank all of the people that were with you, and we will never forget. You are incredible. Everybody’s talking about you,” the president-elect said in his voicemail. “You keep in touch.”
Of course, many of those in the conservative grassroots wanted to overturn Roe. It had been a goal of the religious right for decades. But in this race, abortion was revealed to be more than moral outrage over a medical procedure that they believed murdered babies. Abortion was a symbol of their place in America. To them, Trump and his slogan of “Make America Great Again” represented a promise to restore the country to a time before Roe, when the values of conservative Christians on the relationship between women and men were prevalent and powerful.
Most voters did not realize those potential consequences when they cast their ballots in 2016. When voters were asked to rank their top concerns, abortion rights were low on the list, below even the Supreme Court. Other topics—Trump’s fitness to serve, the economy, immigration—dominated the thinking of voters, strategists, and media observers. Young voters, who didn’t know a time before Roe and never imagined it was at risk, turned out in lower numbers for Clinton than just four years earlier, unmotivated to vote for either candidate. To some more moderate white women, Clinton was too divisive, even if they agreed with her that abortion rights should be protected. And to many Republicans who backed Trump, the contest was largely about immigration, economic concerns, and a desire to put their party back in the White House.
Clinton saw her defeat as inextricable from her gender. She blamed former FBI director James Comey’s last-minute reopening of the investigation of her private email server—after clearing her of wrongdoing—for her immediate defeat. “But once he did that to me, the people, the voters who left me were women,” she said. “They left me because they just couldn’t take a risk on me, because as a woman, I’m supposed to be perfect. They were willing to take a risk on Trump, who had a long list of, let’s call them flaws, to illustrate his imperfection, because he was a man, and they could envision a man as president and commander in chief.”
But it was more than just the old double standard. Clinton was shocked by how little impact the reports of Trump’s sexual misconduct and assault seemed to have on the race. They didn’t disqualify him from the presidency, at least not among most Republicans and conservative Christians. “I also saw the way women were devalued and ignored as the revelations about Trump came out,” she said “The belittling, the demeaning.”
That moment in the third debate, she realized, had been a “set-up,” a way to claim that she was “not just pro-choice but pro-abortion” in more conservative parts of key swing states. And it had succeeded. “Politically, he threw his lot in with the right on abortion and was richly rewarded,” she said.
Looking back, the story of the 2016 election was not just about a man who won an unexpected victory. It was a referendum about women and the debate over their place in a changing nation. The election had been a battle between liberal feminism and conservative Christianity—and the Christians won.
Republicans hadn’t just secured the White House. During Obama’s tenure, Democrats had failed to cement their power beyond Washington. They neglected state races, losing more than 1,030 seats in state legislatures, governors’ mansions, and Congress. Democrats were left holding total control in only five liberal states: Oregon, California, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Delaware. But Republicans had twenty-five, giving them power over much of the country. Their increasing state power allowed antiabortion legislators to continue passing a deluge of abortion restrictions as they gained full control of the federal government in Washington.
“This is the strongest the pro-life movement has been since 1973,” Dannenfelser said in the weeks after Trump won. “We are dealing now with a president who has not been playing the game in the way that other presidents, including Republicans, have.”
With Trump, their movement jumped on a bullet train. It didn’t travel on a predictable schedule. And it wasn’t the most reliable service. But it was powerful enough to defeat one of the most iconic figures in the history of American feminism. And now it was headed directly toward the White House.