Author Stephen King has once again gone viral for his comments about Donald Trump.
This time, the It writer took to X, formerly Twitter, to slam the former president’s remarks about abortion.
“Trump says he won’t sign a national abortion ban, but he made one possible. And…if this guy’s lips are moving, he’s lying,” King, a frequent Trump critic, said in the post that went viral within an hour, racking up 128,000 and more than 800 comments in that time. It has nearly 605,000 views and more than 4,000 comments at the time of writing.
King was referring to Trump’s statement on Wednesday where he seemingly backtracked on the abortion stance that he had held while in the White House to support states’ rights to legislate on the issue.
The presumptive Republican nominee for the 2024 presidential election a posted video to his Truth Social on Wednesday night after the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that an abortion law enacted during the Civil War could be enforced.
Created in 1864, years before Arizona became a state, the law bans almost all abortion except in the case of saving the mother’s life.
Trump asserted that Arizona had gone “too far” by reviving the law, saying “It’ll be straightened out. I’m sure that the governor and everybody else are going bring it back to within reason. And that will be taken care of, I think, very quickly…It’s a perfect system.”
Arizona’s move echoed the 2022 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court which overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade. The 1973 ruling asserted that abortion was a constitutional right and ensured legal access to the procedure nationally.
Trump previously took credit for the role he played in overturning Roe. Trump appointed three conservative justices to the Supreme Court during his time in office: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
“After 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close, I was able to kill Roe v. Wade, much to the ‘shock’ of everyone,” Trump wrote in May. “Without me there would be no 6 weeks, 10 weeks, 15 weeks [bans], or whatever is finally agreed to. Without me the pro Life movement would have just kept losing.”
John Lamparski/WireImage, Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
But in Wednesday’s video, he rolled back his claims, asserting that upending Roe was actually about “states’ rights” and he did not support a federal ban on abortion.
“People forget fighting Roe v. Wade was, right from the beginning, all about bringing the issue back to the states,” Trump says in the video. “It wasn’t about anything else…Every legal scholar, everybody from both sides, said you’ve got to get it out of the federal government, you have to bring it back to the states.”
“It wasn’t about anything else,” he continued. “The Democrats will never give up on this issue, no matter how many Republicans…are willing to give everything. You could give unlimited abortion, and the Democrats would find a reason not to do it because they don’t love our country.”
It has been suggested that Trump’s backflip on the issue because supporting restrictive anti-abortion laws could be a major liability for Republicans in November.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.