“I’m very pro-choice.” So said Donald Trump in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press in 1999, attributing his views on abortion to “a little bit of a New York background”.
Two decades later, the businessman and reality TV star is the unlikeliest of heroes for social conservatives and Christian evangelicals because he delivered the ultimate prize: the end of America’s constitutional right to abortion.
The leak this week of a draft supreme court opinion showing that the court’s conservative majority is poised to overturn Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 decision legalising abortion, represented a vivid aftershock of the Trump presidency.
He had reversed his position on the issue by the time he reached the White House and, with uncharacteristic discipline, spent his four years in office bending the federal judiciary to the right, including with three supreme court appointments.
“The supreme court will be his most important and long-lasting political legacy,” said Amanda Hollis-Brusky, an associate professor of politics at Pomona College in Claremont, California.
“If the number of supreme court justices stays at nine, Trump will have appointed a third of the supreme court having been a one-term president who lost the popular vote by 3 million. And yet those justices will have a greater and a longer-lasting impact than anything else he did as president.”
The threat he posed to reproductive rights was always hiding in plain sight. As a Republican candidate running for president in 2016, Trump released a list of 11 potential supreme court nominees after heeding advice from conservative groups such as the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation.
The unusual move was seen as a way of reassuring conservatives troubled by his boorish behaviour and past views on issues such as abortion. Then, during the last presidential debate with his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, Trump was asked if he wanted to see the supreme court overturn Roe v Wade.
He replied: “Well, if we put another two or perhaps three justices on, that’s really what’s going to be – that will happen. And that’ll happen automatically, in my opinion, because I am putting pro-life justices on the court. I will say this: it will go back to the states, and the states will then make a determination.”
Once in office, Trump followed through by appointing Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to the highest court, handing conservatives a 6-3 majority. In all he appointed 234 judges, including 54 appellate judges, outpacing Barack Obama’s first-term total of 172 and George W Bush’s 204.
The process was guided by two men: Mitch McConnell, then Republican majority leader in the Senate, and Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, which counts among its members four supreme court justices, dozens of federal judges and every Republican attorney general since it was created in 1982.
Hollis-Brusky, author of Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution, said: “One of the interesting things about Trump, McConnell, Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society is that Trump made appointments based on friendships, brought his buddies into the administration, had loyalty tests for his appointees and fired people who displeased him but, when it came to the operation of finding, selecting and confirming judges, it was a completely professionalised shop.
“If anyone worked in lockstep, it was McConnell and Leo, and Trump just largely got out of the way.”
Trump gained further kudos in the eyes of conservatives when he resisted calls to withdraw his nomination of Kavanaugh, who was accused of having committed sexual assault as a teenager. The president also moved swiftly to replace the late justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg despite pressure to wait for the 2020 election.
Curt Levey, president of the conservative advocacy group the Committee for Justice, said: “He showed some backbone that I’m not sure other Republican presidents would have shown. He stuck by Kavanaugh when frankly there were Republicans on the Hill who did not want him to.
“When people said, ‘Oh, you can’t nominate anyone to fill Ginsburg’s seat, it’s too close to the election,’ he said, ‘I disagree’. He showed courage. Whether you like the guy or hate the guy, he was known for the courage of his convictions.”
When the draft opinion leaked to the Politico website on Monday, Democrats expressed outrage while most Republicans focused on the breach of court secrecy, perhaps aware that premature triumphalism could result in political backlash.
But Madison Cawthorn, a Republican congressman from North Carolina, wrote on Twitter that the ex-president deserved the credit. Others may eventually follow suit in praising Trump for delivering on his campaign promises and succeeding where other Republican presidents failed.
Michael D’Antonio, a political commentator and Trump biographer, said: “They will regard him as heroic. He’ll be the fallen man who redeemed himself by this advocacy and forevermore he’ll be worshipped in certain corners of the Christian right. Their fanaticism knows no bounds and they’ve been looking for this kind of person to come along forever. What’s ironic is that he’s proving that a profane man can accomplish what devout ones could not.”
If Roe v Wade falls, about half of the states in the US are certain or likely to ban abortion. The political impact on November’s midterm elections remains uncertain. But such an outcome could give Trump a ready-made applause line at campaign rallies for a White House bid in 2024.
Edward Fallone, an associate professor at Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, said: “It increases the likelihood Trump will run again because he’ll see this as a monumental issue for generating enthusiasm and turnout. If he was hesitating at all to run a second time, I would think now he’s going to feel a bit emboldened.
“I cannot imagine a scenario where Donald Trump does not take credit for this and repeat endlessly that he alone made it happen.”
Fallone added: “Seismic events like Roe versus Wade on the way to being overturned have all kinds of ancillary repercussions. I’m worrying about the legal landscape and the future of constitutional law but the entire political landscape and the leadership of the Republican party could also be impacted.
“This is an earthquake and it’s going to have repercussions.”