After being almost invisible during the entirety of this campaign, suddenly Melania Trump is making news. Excepts from her memoir to be released next month say that she supports abortion rights. She then reiterated that view in a video.

Melania Trump doubled down in her first public response to news of her passionate support for abortion rights, a position starkly at odds with that of her husband, Donald Trump, and the Republican party he leads.

“Individual freedom is a fundamental principle that I safeguard,” the former first lady said in a video released on Thursday. “Without a doubt, there is no room for compromise when it comes to this essential right that all women possess from birth. Individual freedom. What does, ‘My body, my choice’ really mean?”

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On the page, Trump says: “It is imperative to guarantee that women have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government.

“Why should anyone other than the woman herself have the power to determine what she does with her own body? A woman’s fundamental right of individual liberty, to her own life, grants her the authority to terminate her pregnancy if she wishes.

“Restricting a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is the same as denying her control over her own body. I have carried this belief with me throughout my entire adult life.”

She also says that she persuaded creepy Trump to drop some aspects of his hardline immigration policy.

Melania Trump describes in her new memoir how she made her husband, then president Donald Trump, drop a signature hardline immigration policy under which migrant children were separated from their parents, stoking domestic and international uproar.

“This has to stop,” the former first lady says she told her husband, “emphasizing the trauma it was causing these families” and seeing him swiftly comply, ending the policy on 20 June 2018.

I doubt that she is doing this without the full knowledge and consent of creepy Trump’s campaign. But why?

Creepy Trump has been trying to blur his opposition to abortion, a topic on which the GOP is getting hammered, by saying different things at different times. Maybe this is yet another effort to suggest that he is not as hardline so as to win over some voters.

Melania Trump’s revelation, then, could be intended to reassure undecided voters who are disinclined to vote for Harris but support abortion rights – as a majority of Americans do. But Tresa Undem, a pollster who has surveyed people on abortion for more than two decades, said the odds of such comments appealing to moderates or abortion-supporting conservatives were “fairly slim”.

After all, regardless of her personal convictions, it seems unlikely that Melania Trump has any real sway over her tempestuous husband’s policies.
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What Melania Trump’s news seems to have done is anger the anti-abortion activists who have made up some of Trump’s most reliable supporters. These activists were already annoyed by Trump’s recent attempts to paint himself as an abortion rights champion.

“Melania Trump’s support of abortion is anti-feminist and clearly outside the teaching of our Catholic faith. She is wrong,” Kristan Hawkins, president of the pro-life organization Students for Life of America, posted on X. “What a lost opportunity to inspire a generation of young women.”

As a political strategy, it seems pointless to me. I think the impression that he and the GOP are abortion extremists is pretty much cemented in the public mind.

The only thing that makes sense is that she wants publicity in order to sell her book and has chosen to say things that will get her attention. And it seems to have worked, though it is hard for me to fathom why anyone would want to read anything by her. Even anti-abortion activist Hawkins says, “I won’t be buying Melania’s book.”