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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics, power and prejudices.

This year, 2024, is an election year in America, a presidential election year. And so we will be doing two podcasts a week, rather than our usual one,

because we want to and because we know you can't get enough Americano in your life. I am delighted to be joined

today by two people instead of one, as we normally do. I'm joined by Innes Stepman, who is a fellow

at the Claremont Institute, and Daniel McCarthy, who is editor of Modern Age, which has a very

exciting new revamped website, Modern Age age journal.com. I'd encourage all

American listeners to go there after they've visited the spectator.com or the spectator.com.

And we're going to be talking today about abortion, which has been in the news quite a lot this week.

Donald Trump on Sunday, in between truth socialing about a very exciting live golf tournament

announced that he was going to make a big statement about abortion. He then did make the

statement and it was, it appears, and I'd like to get both your views on this, an attempt to

position himself politically away from where the Democrats want to put Donald Trump and the Republicans on abortion.

And he described himself as like Reagan.

He doesn't believe in abortion in cases of rape, incest, or threat to the life of the mother.

And first of all, well, I'll start with you, Innes.

What do you think Trump was trying to do here? And how do you think his position on this has been

read by the media? Has it been misread? And so on. I don't think it's being misread. I'm not

sure that this gambit is going to work very well simply because the left is still going to pin any state law.

He says he supports a portion going back to the states.

Any state law on Trump, it's worked very well for them politically.

But in terms of his position, I think it tells us a lot more about who Donald Trump is

...