'The president is the problem': Famed conservative group turns on Trump

The anti-abortion movement has been a major ally of President Donald Trump, applauding him for appointing three U.S. Supreme Court judges who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade after 49 years. But on Sunday night, May 3, the Wall Street Journal published an article detailing tensions between Trump and a top anti-abortion activist: Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.

Dannenfelser told the Rupert Murdoch-owned WSJ, "Trump is the problem. The president is the problem."

Patrick T. Brown, director of anti-abortion policy for the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, highlighted Dannenfelser's quote in a Sunday night post on X, formerly Twitter.

According to WSJ reporters Philip Wegmann, Liz Essley Whyte and Jennifer Calfas, "The ubiquity of abortion pills during the second Trump Administration has led anti-abortion advocates to decry the president's appointees, including Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary, and promise cash and political firepower to politicians who oppose the drugs."

When the High Court overturned Roe v. Wade with its 5-4 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization ruling in 2022, Trump applauded the decision as a victory for states' rights. Abortion is now banned or greatly restricted in many Republican-leaning states, while remaining legal in other states.

Some blue states, in fact, have strengthened their abortion-rights protections since the Dobbs decision. But Dannenfelser and other anti-abortion activists are hoping for a national anti-abortion law. And Dannenfelser recently said that the anti-abortion movement "as we know it is finished" without such a national ban or restriction.

"Now, Dannenfelser's group is preparing to spend $160 million in the coming midterms and the 2028 presidential primary. The hurdle for candidates looking to tap in to that support: They must commit, Dannenfelser said, 'to pro-life action at the national level,'" the WSJ journalists report. "Leaders in the anti-abortion movement are quick to credit Trump for nominating the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe, but their frustration has been building for months. They hoped that the (Trump) administration would roll back (Joe) Biden-era rules allowing the abortion pill, mifepristone, to be prescribed online and shipped through the mail."

Wegmann, Whyte and Calfas add, "The regulations have allowed clinicians in states with liberal abortion laws, such as New York, to prescribe and send pills to women in states with strict abortion bans, such as Mississippi. The Food and Drug Administration has instead left those rules intact."

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council — a major Religious Right group — told the WSJ, "You have Republican states that are challenging a Republican administration over this because their laws are being undermined. Pro-life voters are going to be wondering what’s going on when they head into the polls in November."