Donald Trump Jr sang his father’s praises and cited him as being personally responsible for Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the landmarkRoe v Wade ruling that recognised a woman’s constitutional right to abortion.
“Proud of my father for what he has accomplished today,” the president’s eldest son and namesake tweeted just hours after the high court made its announcement on Friday.
“He gave our movement 3 strong pro-life Supreme Court Justices and despite the Dems and the leftwing media doing everything they could to stop their confirmations, especially with Kavanaugh, he never wavered!!!”
For his part, the former US president took a humbler course and cited “God” as being responsible for the end of Roe, which came by way of the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision on Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organisation.
“This is following the Constitution, and giving rights back when they should have been given long ago,” Donald Trump told Fox News in an exclusive interview Friday.
During his four-year tenure as president, Mr Trump appointed three of the six conservative judges – Neil Gorsuch in 2017, Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 and Amy Coney Barrett in 2020 – that ruled in favour of a Mississippi law that outlaws abortion at 15 weeks of pregnancy while also overturning key precedents established by the landmark 1973 decision in Roe.
When asked by the news outlet whether he believed he may have played a role in the Supreme Court’s ruling, he kept his reply uncharacteristically simple: “God made the decision.”
In 2016, one month before the election that would crown him the 45th president of the US, Mr Trump said during a debate against his then-Democratic rival Hillary Clinton that one of his goals as commander-in-chief would be to appoint justices that would tilt the bench in a rightward direction so as to one day overturn Roe.
“Well, if we put another two or perhaps three justices on, that ... will happen automatically in my opinion because I am putting pro-life justices on the court,” Mr Trump said during the 2016 debate.
