After kicking the can down the road for seemingly as long as his handlers deemed it politically feasible, former president, indicted insurrectionist and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has finally come out with a statement of ‘his’ position on abortion. I put ‘his’ in quotation marks, because Trump has been all over the map on abortion and only came out in favour of severe restrictions since becoming a, and then the, key figure in Republican politics.

In 1999, for example, Trump was “very pro-choice”, yet in 2016, he agreed that women who have abortions should be punished. Now, he says he’s for letting the states set their own abortion laws, though “like Ronald Reagan” he strongly supports exceptions for rape, incest, and danger to the life of the mother. If you parse that sentence, it’s a sort of roundabout admission that Trump supports draconian abortion bans, but in fairness we probably shouldn’t ever parse the words of the bumbling Donald too closely.

As I predicted it would soon after Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022, the increasingly Christian nationalist Republican Party’s successful decades-long assault on reproductive justice has cost it in subsequent elections. Trump is aware of this, and he reportedly worries in private conversations that abortion is a losing issue for the party. This attitude comes through rather hilariously in his new video statement, released on Monday morning, in which he asserts: “You must follow your heart on this issue, but remember, you must also win elections to restore our culture and, in fact, to save our country, which is currently, and very sadly, a nation in decline.”

Trump’s current position on abortion is one that is likely to please no one. In his statement, he still brags about being responsible for the overturning of Roe, which he absurdly asserts is “something that all legal scholars, both sides, wanted”. While it is true that some liberal legal scholars worried that Roe was decided on weak grounds, it is straight-up gaslighting to falsely claim that anything approaching “all” scholars wanted the decision overturned.

In his statement, claiming that Democrats are the “radical” party on abortion, Trump also pushes the false narrative that Democrats “support abortion up to and even beyond the ninth month… and even execution after birth”. This sort of conspiratorial fearmongering about fictional baby slaughter might have worked for Republicans, sometimes, before Roe was overturned. But I highly doubt it will have an impact on any race in post-Roe America, where state ballot initiatives (referendums) on abortion – even in highly conservative states – have consistently been winners for reproductive justice and abortion access.

That fact is undoubtedly on Trump campaign staffers’ minds as they try to craft a fine line for the candidate to walk. This is all the more true given that last week the Florida Supreme Court allowed a ballot initiative to proceed alongside the presidential vote in November that would enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution.

The state requires a 60% majority to pass any ballot initiative that would amend its constitution. But given Floridians now face a choice between a ban on most abortions after six weeks and the protections once afforded by Roe, turnout by pro-choice voters – among them some Republicans who oppose a strict ban – will undoubtedly be high.

Numerous journalists and pundits have argued the greenlighting of the ballot initiative could even put Florida back in play for the presidential and Senate races, despite the state’s recent history of being solidly Republican. (2012, which is the last year that it supported a Democratic presidential candidate, seems like a million years ago.)

Florida provides 30 of the 270 electoral votes needed to elect a president under our obnoxious Electoral College system, so the potential to turn the state from red to blue, even if still perhaps a long shot, is a big deal. It will force Republicans to play defence in the state where Trump resides, a state they have been able to count on as in the bag for over a decade – and the Republicans currently don’t have much campaign cash to spare.

At the same time that it greenlighted the ballot initiative for November, the Florida Supreme Court also allowed the state’s draconian six-week abortion ban to go into effect. The ban, which even Christian extremist governor Ron DeSantis has not been keen to draw attention to, had previously been tied up in the courts. Its passing into law will provide further incentive for supporters of reproductive justice to get to the polls in November.

Meanwhile, Trump is risking at least the enthusiasm of his white evangelical base by backing away from support for a national abortion ban. After releasing his statement, Trump was harshly criticised by his former vice president Mike Pence, and even “respectfully disagreed with” by the usually sycophantic senator Lindsay Graham. But I also find it unlikely many moderates will trust that Trump, under pressure from a Republican congress dominated by right-wing Christians, would refuse to sign a national abortion ban. His statement made no promises one way or another (not that Trump’s promises can be trusted), and I personally think he would sign such a ban.

In short, it’s hard to see how Trump’s new statement on abortion does him any favours. White evangelicals will, as always, turn out in large numbers to vote for him, but if even a few abstain in crucial swing states, it could cost Trump the election.

As I always say, though, Democrats cannot take anything for granted. The Biden administration needs to shore up the support of its own base, a significant proportion of which is currently alienated by the White House’s failure to halt weapons shipments to Israel. Their discontent has only increased in the aftermath of the slaughter of high-profile World Central Kitchen aid workers by the IDF (though their tragic deaths are only the tip of the iceberg with respect to the horrors in Gaza, where more than 33,000 people have been killed since 7 October, according to the Palestinian Health Authority).

If Biden were to make that move, however, the likely impact on voters outraged by American complicity in Israel’s atrocities in Gaza would make it that much more difficult for Trump to win with the abortion albatross around his neck.