That didn’t take long. Priorities USA, the well-financed super PAC backing Hillary Clinton, wasted almost no time cutting an attack ad using Donald Trump’s extreme-even-for-him suggestion Wednesday that, if abortions are outlawed, women who have one should receive “some form of punishment.”
According to the Hill, Priorities USA and Planned Parenthood’s political wing—which co-produced the ad—are planning a “five-figure” ad buy on Facebook and Instagram in an effort to get the 30-second spot in front of women in Florida, Ohio, and Washington, D.C. That’s a relatively small sum but it is noteworthy since it will reportedly be the first time the super PAC has specifically targeted Trump via paid media. It also won’t be the last time given the group began the month with nearly $45 million in the bank.
Trump’s “punishment” remarks—made during an MSNBC town hall—were met with a swift backlash from Democrats and Republicans alike, and the GOP front-runner scrambled to pretend he never made them in a pair of written statements released later that day. In the first, he said that abortion issues should be left up to the states, and in the second that, in his hypothetical, he’d only want the doctor who performed the abortion to be held legally responsible, not the woman. (On Thursday, his spokeswoman attempted to brush off the whole thing as your run-of-the-mill “complete misspeak.”) Trump’s I-swear-it’s-not-new position brought him in line with the conservative mainstream, which prefers to focus its public ire on those performing the procedures as opposed to the women who have them. (As my colleague Christina Cauterucci points out, though, despite such framing, the antiabortion crowd’s efforts have resulted in a United States where women who seek abortions are punished in a variety of other ways.)
The super PAC–funded attack, meanwhile, fits nicely into Team Clinton’s larger electoral strategy, which involves the candidate focusing mostly on Bernie Sanders for now while her technically independent allies train their fire on Trump with an eye toward the general election. The Clinton campaign has already suggested that one of its main lines of attack against Trump, should he be the nominee, will be his long history of misogyny. The celebrity billionaire, of course, has already given Democrats plenty to work with on that front. But it’s telling that of all the incendiary things Trump has said to date, his abortion comments were the first he felt compelled to actually row back.
Elsewhere in Slate:
