WASHINGTON: Former US President Donald Trump, who made it possible for the Supreme Court to take away abortion rights from American women, is now worried that the ruling could hurt his reelection chances, the US media reported on Sunday.

The New York Times (NYT) called Trump “the man most responsible” for Friday’s 5-4 decision that overturned the Roe vs Wade precedent after 50 years. And three of those five judges who scrapped the legal protection that Roe vs Wade provided to women were appointed by Trump.

The former US ruler nominated 234 conservative judges in his four-year term who were later confirmed by the then Republican-dominated Senate.

But NYT reported that for weeks Trump, who is seeking reelection in 2024, has been warning his supporters that “overturning Roe would be bad for Republicans.”

Although after the court announced its ruling, Trump told Fox News that “God made the decision,” which, “in the end … will work out for everybody.”

But privately, he called the reversal ‘bad’ for his party. After a draft of the likely decision leaked in May, Trump was remarkably tight-lipped for weeks about the possible decision.

He told his friends and advisers that the ruling “will anger suburban women, a group who helped tilt the 2020 presidential race to Joe Biden and will lead to a backlash against Republicans in the November midterm elections,” NYT reported.

But Trump is not the only politician assessing the ruling’s impact on the midterm and the presidential elections.

Charles Booker, who is challenging incumbent Republican Rand Paul for US Senate, urged Democrats to come and vote if they wanted liberals in the courts and other key positions. “We need a historic turnout. We need democracy to be real here,” he said in a clip shown on a Kentucky news channel, Wave.

“We have an open seat for mayor and a US Congress. And then a US Senate seat. We can transform Kentucky in this election cycle,” Booker said.

Star Parker, founder of the conservative Centre for Urban Renewal and Education reminded Republican voters that the verdict has “huge implications” for both elections” as “every political candidate will be asked about their specific positions on abortion.”

Senator Elizabeth Warren, a 2020 presidential candidate, reminded Democrats how Republicans worked on a strategy to induct “extremist judges into the US courts” and urged voters to add more senators to their caucus in November’s midterms.

The Boston Globe newspaper reported that Friday’s ruling had “pushed abortion to the center of the midterm elections.”

“With four months to go before voters return to the ballot box … Democrats are hoping to turn … the abrupt erasure of a precedent relied on by millions of women into a rallying cry for their weary base,” the Globe reported.

The Democrats, the report added, were “depicting this fall’s midterm elections as voters’ chance to shore up abortion rights and warning that other freedoms could hang in the balance if Republicans prevail.”

Before the ruling, most political pundits predicted that Republicans would easily regain both the House and the Senate. And Biden, a Democrat, will be a lame-duck president for the rest of his tenure.

Published in Dawn, June 27th, 2022