The March for Life was but a flash in the lightning storm of the new administration. Within hours, it was practically forgotten by the wider public, when Trump announced that he was banning immigration into the United States from several majority-Muslim countries. Lawyers rushed to airports to defend incoming travelers, trailed by media covering the extraordinary scene.
America was unprepared for the intensity of Trump’s early days. The president picked fights over the size of his inauguration crowd, railed against the “fake news media,” and criticized his predecessor, Obama. He watched a steady stream of cable news, offering a bitter play-by-play of the coverage. He hired senior staff and ousted them. Protests erupted with rapid speed as liberals demonstrated weekly against everything from Trump’s plans for a wall at the southern border to his denial of climate change. “Protesting is the new brunch” became a liberal mantra, invoked on podcasts and printed on T-shirts.
Yet just as in Texas, when protesters descended to support Wendy Davis, the most effective actions were happening not outside the halls of power but within them. Amid the chaos of Trump’s Washington, one strategy was systematic and behind-the-scenes: the effort to make his administration the most airtight against abortion since Reagan.
Most of the effort had very little to do with the president. Instead, it had everything to do with Pence, the most powerful antiabortion advocate in the White House, who had a singular advantage—he was the only official whom Trump could not fire. What mattered, as Pence’s team quickly realized, was not organizing mass protests but having the right people in the right slots on the organizational chart.
It was an extraordinary opportunity, a president who came into power with no political orbit of his own. Trump had few requirements for his staff beyond loyalty to Trump. There was a power vacuum, and abortion opponents filled it. Three days after the election, Trump fired the head of his transition team, Chris Christie, and asked Pence to run it instead. As the US attorney for New Jersey, Christie had successfully prosecuted the father of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, more than a dozen years earlier, sending him to jail for fourteen months. Now, as Christie saw it, Kushner got his revenge. And the antiabortion movement got one of its most stalwart champions as the new man in charge.
Pence saw his role as to surround the president with staff who opposed abortion. His team staffed the new administration in its image, reaching into the antiabortion ranks to fill roles deep in federal agencies with movement loyalists. Groups like the Susan B. Anthony List and the Heritage Foundation sent lists of staff recommendations for all sorts of positions, as is common for interest groups to offer incoming administrations, but in many cases, they didn’t need to. The decision-makers had been in the movement for years. Everybody already knew everybody. And abortion opponents were among the earliest to take the professional risk of joining Trump’s team.
In an administration that would be known for larger-than-life characters—people like incoming White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, Jared Kushner, and Ivanka Trump—the antiabortion cause would be moved forward largely by bureaucrats most Americans had never heard of who were ready for the moment. For these new staffers, it felt like everywhere they turned were former colleagues, friends, and mentors from the movement. They spread across nearly every part of the new administration from the White House to the Department of Justice to the State Department. They were delegates to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women and populated the “spiritual advisory board” to the president.
It was not just staffing. In a campaign notably short on policy, allies of the antiabortion movement pushed forward plans before Trump even won his surprise victory. Aides like Andrew Bremberg, a Catholic lawyer who was policy director for the 2016 Republican Party platform before he joined the Trump team, sketched out language for executive orders against abortion before Trump won, giving them a significant head start compared to other interest groups. No one seemed to pay much attention—until the morning Trump won the White House, when they finally got their calls returned. To quote the old Latin proverb, they realized, fortune favors the bold.
Trump’s abortion restrictions immediately went further than his Republican predecessors. Bremberg was hired to lead the Domestic Policy Council, making him responsible for coordinating and implementing all domestic policy inside the White House and across the administration. The Mexico City policy, which banned foreign aid to nonprofits that mentioned abortion as an option to pregnant women, was rescinded and reinstated by administrations for decades as control of the White House flipped. But Trump’s version expanded the list of groups that would be ineligible—affecting fifteen times more funding than George W. Bush’s policy did. The new administration repealed Obama-era protections for Planned Parenthood and began plans to defund the organization by changing Title X, the federal program that funds health care for poorer women. They readied “conscience protections” to make it easier for doctors and nurses to refuse to perform health services, like abortion, that conflicted with their beliefs. They canceled the grants to the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program that the Obama administration had issued, forcing some school districts with high teen pregnancy rates to shutter their sex education programs.
To ensure those policies survived the inevitable legal challenges, the courts were another target. Under the leadership of Don McGahn and with help from Leonard Leo’s Federalist Society network, allies would methodically stack the 120 openings on the federal bench, sending waves of conservative scholars and judges to the Republican-controlled Senate for confirmation. They were cranking out a wholesale reform of the federal judiciary to instill conservative ideology.
Few voters knew how to follow the complicated language of abortion policy—phrases such as “Mexico City policy,” “Title X,” and “conscience protections.” Those policy terms had long served as a code that obscured the reality of abortion restrictions for nonexperts. Few voters were paying attention to those details in this new administration anyway, because there was just so much else to focus on amid the chaos of those earliest days. And antiabortion leaders had long benefited from that kind of widespread confusion and an overwhelming crush of action through the hundreds of abortion restrictions enacted in state legislatures. The deluge, whether intentional or not, amounted to a strategy of distraction that worked to their advantage.
The drama Trump created became a sort of cover, allowing them to remake the government into an antiabortion machine, embedding their people at all levels of power and influence. Later in his term, Trump would frequently deride the “deep state,” a moniker for the forces in government and law enforcement arrayed against him. But it was Pence, and the movement that had championed his political rise, that created their own deep state, a government apparatus with a shared goal: ending abortion in America.
At the highest levels, the cabinet was stacked with people—mostly men—who had made opposition to abortion central to their political careers. Conway became a senior White House aide. Marc Short, the former Pence aide who helped Marjorie Dannenfelser procure that crucial donation from the Koch brothers, became the director of legislative affairs. McGahn was picked as White House counsel.
Certain departments became power centers, like the Department of Health and Human Services, the nation’s health department. It soon resembled a mini-Indiana, with leaders arriving from Pence’s former orbit. Trump’s first health secretary was Tom Price, a Republican congressman from Georgia who cosponsored bills in Congress that would have granted rights to zygotes and banned abortion at twenty weeks, and pushed to defund Planned Parenthood. A former lobbyist for National Right to Life, who criticized contraception methods and opposed mifepristone and the morning-after pill, came in to lead family-planning programs and oversee Title X. Matthew Bowman, a lawyer for the Alliance Defending Freedom who had a history of arrests at abortion protests, joined Health and Human Services as deputy general counsel. The department became like a “pro-life family,” Dannenfelser told EWTN, a Catholic news network.
Roger Severino, a former lawyer with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, was named director of the department’s Office for Civil Rights. His wife, Carrie, was a former Clarence Thomas clerk and the long-serving head of the Judicial Crisis Network, which was the front line of Leo’s network to push conservative judicial nominees. The man who led the Republican congressional investigation into Planned Parenthood became Severino’s chief of staff. They created a new entity—the new Conscience and Religious Freedom Division in 2018—that could protect doctors who refused to perform abortions or provide gender-affirming care on religious grounds. Severino saw their work as “institutionalizing” a change in government culture, where religious belief received equal protection along with race, age, sex, and national origin. “I knew how important civil rights were, and I noticed that the most important one, recognizing the right of unborn human beings to have protection, was not recognized,” he said.
Their antiabortion options for cabinet posts were sometimes stacked three deep. Trump’s first nominee for secretary of labor, Andy Puzder, whose company ran Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr., had helped write the Missouri law that the Supreme Court upheld in its 1989 Webster decision, which allowed states to impose abortion restrictions after Roe. When Puzder’s nomination collapsed after old domestic abuse allegations resurfaced, Alex Acosta, a former Samuel Alito clerk on the Third Circuit, was confirmed. And when Acosta later stepped down following questions of how he had previously handled a sex crimes case involving Jeffrey Epstein, Eugene Scalia—the late justice’s son—took the job.
The cohort’s opposition to abortion was often part of a broader package of beliefs about marriage and sexuality. A primary goal was to eventually end abortion. But their larger mission was to shape the unit that governs most people’s day-to-day lives: the family. For many, it was a way of carrying out Trump’s promise to “make America great again.”
They were evangelical and Catholic, a merging of two conservative religious movements that were growing stronger. There were so many observant Catholics in the new White House that Father Charles Trullols, an Opus Dei priest who led the Catholic Information Center two blocks away, quickly became an administration insider who regularly hosted a private Mass in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Other powerful Catholic legal players who once served on the Catholic Information Center board alongside Leonard Leo took top roles in the administration—William Barr eventually became attorney general, and Pat Cipollone would replace McGahn as White House counsel in December 2018.
For those on the inside of the antiabortion movement, everything felt different from the Obama years—and even the George W. Bush years—as their cohort reached new political maturity. Days after the inauguration, Pence invited their movement leaders into his ceremonial office for cheese and crackers. To Dannenfelser, it felt like a homecoming and a beginning: she was in the White House seven times in Trump’s first three months. At a dinner in the Blue Room with Trump and conservative leaders largely discussing tax reform, Dannenfelser sat between Leo and Short, one of three women in the room, the other two being Conway and Penny Nance. Evangelical pastors like Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church in Dallas and Jentezen Franklin of Free Chapel outside Atlanta frequented the White House for photo ops and prayer meetings.
Younger staff of antiabortion organizations, who had never worked in Washington with a Republican in the White House, had their first taste of real influence. David Daleiden had meetings with Bremberg’s team about policies to end “fetal experimentation” as a follow-up from his videos, he said. Emily Buchanan, SBA’s vice president, could not get over what it felt like to walk into the White House for a meeting, amazed that the place had a bowling alley, that they would get White House candies and tickets to garden tours.
There were more significant—and more unusual—perks too. SBA held a briefing for donors in the Indian Treaty Room, the ornate hall in the East Wing of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, in which Pence touted all the administration was doing for their cause. Donors remembered being especially moved in one such meeting when Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the first mother ever to be White House press secretary, grew emotional talking about her personal opposition to abortion.
They did not always get the allies they wanted in key spots in agencies like the National Institutes of Health or the Food and Drug Administration, which oversaw things like abortion medication. Trump, with the support of Ivanka, asked Francis Collins, Obama’s director at the NIH who supported fetal stem cell research, to stay on, frustrating Dannenfelser and others. But out in the states, conservative lawmakers saw that this new regime meant Roe could go. Weeks after Trump’s inauguration, a Texas state senator introduced a “trigger ban,” a law that would automatically institute a state abortion ban if Roe were overturned.
Onstage at the SBA banquet nearly four months into the administration, where Leo was the honoree, Pence ran through the list of high-level officials who shared their ambitions. “Folks, this is the A-Team,” he told the ballroom. “For the first time in a long time, America has an administration that’s filled top to bottom with people who stand without apology for life.”
Many of those at the bottom were part of the movement’s newer flank, the rising, more radical post-Roe generation of activists. With Trump’s victory, they were empowered like never before, placed in positions of great authority and control. True believers in the administration could implement the antiabortion mission, with enormous reach and effect.
One striking example was Scott Lloyd, a Catholic lawyer tapped early to lead an obscure office buried within the Administration for Children and Families at HHS. The Office of Refugee Resettlement appeared to have little influence over abortion policy. Its most high-profile purpose was to resettle child refugees seeking safe haven in the United States. Even Lloyd was surprised when he got the call tapping him for the position. He had worked his contacts, including Bremberg, for a job in the administration—but not this one. “It sounded very unexpected, but in the way that God does unexpected things,” he said. He started the position within days.
Lloyd had no experience managing tens of thousands of migrant children being held in government custody. His most relevant work was as a lawyer for the Knights of Columbus, an antiabortion Catholic fraternal organization, where he focused on protecting Christians and Yazidis in the Middle East. What Lloyd knew better was abortion, and he brought that vision with intensity. Lloyd described his upbringing as that of a cultural Catholic and a political liberal. At nineteen, he impregnated his college girlfriend and she got an abortion. Even all these years later, he found the experience almost impossible to talk about. He found absolution in the forgiveness of the Catholic Church, he said. He later married, had eight children, and came to share orthodox Catholic views on abortion and birth control. He argued against contraception, writing that the pills and devices were “causing early abortions.”
He crusaded against abortion, which he, like many other abortion opponents, described as a tragedy equivalent to the Holocaust—a fraught analogy that equated aborted fetuses with, or even elevated them above, adults and children who were murdered by the Nazi state. “The Jews who died in the Holocaust had a chance to laugh, play, sing, dance, learn, and love each other,” he wrote in a paper for a course on Catholic social teaching during law school at Catholic University. “The victims of abortion do not, simply because people have decided this is the way it should be, not through any proper discernment of their humanity. Neither type of murder is more or less tragic, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that they are not both tragedies, and they are not both murder.”
During the Bush administration, Lloyd helped craft the “conscience protection” regulations that allowed medical personnel to refuse to provide abortions and contraception if it violated their beliefs. After Obama took office, Lloyd opened a “legal apostolate,” a law firm and ministry in Front Royal, Virginia. He opened the firm officially on March 25, coinciding with the Feast of the Annunciation, a Catholic holy day sometimes called the Day of the Unborn Child. Exactly nine months before Christmas, it remembers the day that the angel Gabriel informed the Virgin Mary that she would become pregnant—reminding Christians that even Jesus was once an unborn child.
His views also represented the radical edge of the antiabortion movement that Trump had elevated to power. Lloyd saw his legal work as part of a much bigger religious project to enact God’s kingdom on earth, a way to use the law to reshape the country around the tenets of Christianity. “Let’s be blunt. The law is pagan territory. It is, in fact, one of the least Christian elements of our society,” Scott said in a speech celebrating his apostolate’s one-year anniversary. “Christ has already won for us victory over the culture we find in the law, the Culture of Death. It is ours to claim, but it will be a question not of our talents, our resources, our diligence, or our knowledge of the law, but of our faith.”
Soon after starting the job, Lloyd reviewed what he saw as a critical piece of information: the number of pregnant migrant girls currently being held by the government. “The unborn child,” he emailed his staff, “is a child [in] our care.”
His office would keep spreadsheets tracking how far along the girls were in their pregnancies. A new policy was put in place: all requests for abortions would go directly to his desk—and he would work to block them. “It was a pro-life administration,” Lloyd said, explaining his actions. “As a political appointee you feel an obligation to achieve what you think people are expecting out of an administration when they voted the way they did.”
THAT PASSION FOR the antiabortion cause was not matched by the man at the top. Trump remained a lukewarm ally, with “pro-life” positions that seemed incidental at best. He mentioned abortion just once in speeches during his first year in office, a passing reference at a Republican retreat in Philadelphia.
In a meeting during those hectic first few months with Conway and Pence, Trump questioned whether to defund Planned Parenthood. His skepticism undercut a yearslong campaign waged by Pence, House Republicans, and the antiabortion movement—and echoed his comments that upset Dannenfelser during the Daleiden video sting in the earliest days of Trump’s campaign. “I recognized immediately where that was coming from,” Conway later wrote about the incident. “He had to be hearing from some of the registered Democrats on the senior White House staff. My guess was that some of them who had voted for Hillary over him months before doubted the sincerity of his pro-life conversion.”
Pence and Conway closed ranks and made the case they knew could convince Trump: it would help him politically. They showed him state-by-state charts of Planned Parenthood centers, noting that most were in urban areas—where Mr. Trump’s supporters were not. He pivoted back. “If anything, I think it could be a positive,” he said, according to Conway’s account.
That was how they worked in the new administration. The antiabortion faction would push its agenda and praise the president, appealing to his ego while also reminding him that this is what he owed his most loyal supporters. When they planned to make changes to Title X, a policy that would strip $60 million from Planned Parenthood annually, advisers reminded him that the policy of his administration was to defund Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers, and that his voters would love him for it.
They planned for Trump to announce the regulations himself at the upcoming SBA List Campaign for Life Gala. He was the first president to speak at the event and could push his upcoming agenda for the midterm election.
Backstage at the National Building Museum the day of the gala, Trump posed for a photo with one of SBA’s special guests—Kathy Ireland, a Sports Illustrated swimsuit supermodel from the 1980s and 1990s, when Trump was at the height of his celebrity in New York City. She had converted to the antiabortion cause and was the night’s emcee. Onstage, Pope Francis’s ambassador to the United States, Archbishop Christophe Pierre, gave the invocation. The host committee of donors included the Leos, Eugene Scalia’s wife, Trish, and more.
Trump paced back and forth backstage, watching on the monitor as Dannenfelser introduced him. A White House official later offered an explanation for why he seemed nervous: it was the first time Trump had ever spoken to such a high-profile, exclusively antiabortion gathering. It was a far cry from the dinner he cosponsored at the Plaza Hotel in 1989 to honor former NARAL president Robin Chandler Duke, the event he ended up not attending after antiabortion activists threatened his family—the year Ireland was first on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit edition.
The reality was that what Trump truly believed about abortion didn’t matter. Abortion opponents were integral to the entire ecosystem of his administration, their priorities woven into its very fabric, whether or not their cause was a priority for Trump. The machine was in motion.
Dannenfelser played a video before inviting Trump to the stage, functionally an ad for SBA’s voter outreach project, with senators like Thom Tillis of North Carolina praising the group’s turnout operation for helping boost him to victory in the 2014 midterms. They were on the verge of an even bigger revolution, the Dannenfelser voice-over said: “The most important thing that can happen in this election is that voters elect senators who will confirm a Supreme Court justice who will be the final vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.”
Trump took the stage to cheers and put his arm around her. “All my friends are out here,” he said.
When Conway rose to accept an award that night, she gave Trump all the credit for their accomplishments. And then she made clear that the ultimate work was not to simply win elections but to remake the country. “This is not a political calculus,” she said. “This is a change in the culture. This is not about institutions. This is about the Constitution.”
It was a remarkable flip from when Obama came to Planned Parenthood’s national conference after his 2012 win, signaling to feminist progressives that their movement had national clout despite the rise of antiabortion state laws. “Cecile Richards was in the White House all the time during the Obama administration,” Dannenfelser had said shortly after Trump took office. “It’s our turn.”