Sometimes, in 2024 America, you have to pinch yourself to make sure you’re not in a long-running dystopian nightmare. Then again, maybe we all are. And no amount of pinching will help.
Two scenes from this week stand out.
One, thoroughly bizarre, was on the floor of the Arizona senate, where – led by a Republican state senator, Anthony Kern - a fundamentalist Christian prayer group “spoke in tongues” as they knelt together over the state seal, praying for a civil war-era abortion ban to become law again. Kern and the group got their wish; a day later, the Arizona supreme court ruled to allow the law to go into effect.
Kern, naturally, is one of those under investigation for falsely claiming to be an Arizona elector as Donald Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election. He also got an Arizona bill passed allowing the Ten Commandments to be posted and read out loud in the state’s public school classrooms. If you had any lofty notions about the separation of church and state, consider them laid to rest.
The other memorable scene was on the Larry Kudlow Show on the Fox Business channel, as three middle-aged white guys kicked around the aforementioned ruling by the Arizona supreme court. That 4-2 decision reinvigorates a 160-year-old law that says virtually all abortions are felonies. On the broadcast, radio host Mark Simone was blithe.
“Buying a bus ticket to go somewhere to get it is not the worst thing in the world,” Simone – someone who will never be in that situation and apparently lacks the empathy to imagine it – opined.
The bus-ticket solution might not even be an option. If Donald Trump is elected again, a national abortion ban is far from unlikely.
Just a day before the Arizona ruling, the former US president came out with his long-promised, supposedly new stance on abortion rights, trying to spin up a moderate position. Declining to address whether he would support a national ban, he merely bragged about his role in the demise of Roe v Wade and suggested that abortion rights would now be up to the states, skipping over the obvious reality that they already are.
He also blatantly lied about various things, like how Democrats think it’s fine to execute babies and how the entire spectrum of legal experts agreed that Roe should be overturned.
Too many in the mainstream media swallowed this whole, at least in all-important headlines, presenting Trump’s position not only as news but as a politically savvy move toward the center.
But something more like the truth was available if you turned your gaze from Washington to Arizona, where, in a matter of days, abortion providers can be sentenced to multiple years in prison for providing medical care.
Some saw the meaning clearly.
“This decision should serve as a warning for the rest of the country,” wrote lawyers Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern on Slate. “In the hands of a far-right court, a dead, openly misogynistic, wildly unpopular abortion ban can spring back to life with a vengeance.”
How it all will play out is unclear. Since Roe was overturned, voters have expressed their displeasure. Pro-choice measures have carried the day in state after state, including some bright-red ones like Kentucky and Kansas. Next up is Florida, where voters will decide in November whether to override a six-week abortion ban with one that allows access until 24 weeks.
Americans in the rightwing media bubble may not hear much about the Arizona ruling. Fox News gave it a mere 12 minutes on Tuesday (as opposed to two hours across eight shows on CNN), according to Media Matters research, and none of Fox’s big-name opinion hosts addressed it on their evening shows. Apparently, the highest priority is getting the cult leader elected again.
The draconian decision in Arizona has the potential to deliver at least one swing state – maybe more – to Joe Biden. As my colleague at Columbia Journalism School, professor Bill Grueskin, quipped Tuesday: “It’s not too early for the Fox News decision desk to call Arizona for Biden.” (Fox famously made that controversial – though accurate – call on election night 2020, much to team Trump’s angry displeasure.)
Contradictions abound. Trump, having unleashed the dogs on longstanding abortion rights with his supreme court appointments, is simultaneously taking credit for that, and denying that it could go any further. The rightwing media protects him; the mainstream media lets him portray his position as moderate and somehow consistent with the public’s preferences.
As for non-politicians, particularly women of child-bearing age, the reality could get much, much worse.
It’s a mess. But that’s life in our national nightmare. Let’s hope enough Americans wake up by November to reverse some of the damage.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
