Originally published by The 19th.
Donald Trump’s political ascent was initially greeted warily by both the Republican establishment and the anti-abortion groups in the party’s base. But in her latest book published this week, abortion law historian Mary Ziegler argues that Trump was able to reach the White House because of, not in spite of, the grassroots anti-abortion movement.
In “Dollars for Life,” Ziegler, who recently joined the law school faculty at the University of California, Davis, traces how some prominent leaders in the anti-abortion movement were also instrumental in the push to relax campaign finance laws. One result was the rise of populism within the Republican Party that opened the door for candidates like Trump.
The 19th spoke to Ziegler ahead of the book’s release about the anti-abortion movement, campaign finance rules, and how the two intersected to create an opportunity for a non-establishment GOP figurehead.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Amanda Becker: This is the first time I’ve really seen this topic explored: campaign finance and links to abortion politics. How did you know this was your next book? Why was this an important story to tell at this moment?
Mary Ziegler: I just started to see anti-abortion groups in all these places having nothing to do with abortion — like campaign finance, like voting restrictions — and I wanted to know what was going on. That made me curious.
Why I wanted to write this was twofold: I began to think the Supreme Court was going to overturn Roe, so I saw this as partially a book about how that happened. And relatedly, I think that how that happened is not just a story about abortion, or about women’s rights. During this research, I saw that the effort to overturn Roe had changed the way a lot of our political system had worked, and contributed to really significant changes in the function of our system.
Do you now see the movement to end abortion and the movement to gut campaign finance regulations as parallel movements, intertwined movements, or kind of one and the same?
They’re definitely not one and the same — there are people in the movement to undo campaign finance restrictions who were pro-choice. For example, the ACLU has historically been opposed to campaign finance restrictions and supportive of abortion access. There are organizations on the right that are more libertarian that are maybe not supportive of abortion rights but certainly don’t prioritize abortion rights in the kind of litigation they do. And there are folks in the anti-abortion movement who don’t support or really care about restrictions on campaign finance. So they are more movements that have intersected in particularly consequential ways. They’re not the same movement.
But I think there’s a story about how social conservatives made a major contribution to the fight against campaign finance reform that we often don’t think about. And it’s somewhat counterintuitive, right? Often when we think about the fight against campaign finance reform, we think about the people with the most money, the people who stand to gain the most. There’s an important piece of the story about conservatives trying to fight campaign finance limits for other reasons.
I think the conventional wisdom is that unlimited money in politics hurts the little person. One of the points you make in the book is that relaxation of campaign finance restrictions allowed the grassroots conservative movement to gain more power than the establishment wing of the Republican Party. Did you see that trend on both sides of the aisle? In a way did the relaxation of campaign finance laws make it a more democratic process to influence the Republican Party?
The relaxation of campaign finance laws has had a pretty complicated effect on democracy. On the one hand, more people are donating so the number of people who participate in elections by donating to candidates or campaigns or PACs has gone up over time, and that’s true of progressives as well as conservatives. I think the complicated part has been that on the right, there’s been a kind of perfect storm of factors that have empowered populists … and that’s made it such that you have candidates like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Trump, who the establishment would probably view as unelectable, in part because they’re not committed to democratic principles. So the story isn’t that it’s been good or bad for democracy – it’s been both.
James Bopp, a conservative attorney who has advised the National Right to Life Committee since the 1970s, among other organizations, is a character who surfaces again and again in your book. Is there a way to assess the impact he’s had on the anti-abortion and anti-campaign finance regulation movements? If he wasn’t working on these two things, would the world look a lot different?
He’s obviously kind of the hero, or antihero, of the book. If we’re trying to understand the motives of people who felt this way, it was the easiest for me to understand him. I had the most insight into what he was doing. It wasn’t always true that the strategies he developed or the arguments he made worked; quite often they didn’t. But he was able, along with his colleagues at the National Right to Life Committee, to see opportunities that others weren’t yet recognizing. So it’s hard to say. This isn’t a narrative about one person who changed the world or even one organization. But I think that if you’re trying to understand how social conservatives come on board, the National Right to Life Committee is pretty central to that story. And Bopp was the leader of that effort within the National Right to Life Committee.
Bopp was also an attorney in Citizens United, the Supreme Court case that upended campaign finance rules. He is kind of everywhere on conservative causes here in Washington. What other things and causes has Bopp been involved in over the years that people might recognize or remember?
He was involved with True The Vote and some of the litigation in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election. He’s been involved in representing folks like Madison Cawthorn [a Republican House lawmaker from North Carolina] and Marjorie Taylor Greene [a Republican House lawmaker from Georgia] against charges that they were involved in the insurrection. He’s been kind of a steady figure in the Republican National Committee and the Republican Party, writ large. He’s helped represent organizations opposed to marriage equality and same-sex marriage.
You explain several shifts in anti-abortion electoral strategy in the book. In the 1980s and 1990s, for example, you said they tried to “pick winners” among the presidential contenders. Trump was initially embraced by neither his party nor the anti-abortion movement but went on to cement an anti-abortion majority on the Supreme Court and take a number of other steps the movement lauded. What changed?
They were primarily focused on candidates who could win, much as the GOP establishment was, and only later, I think, began to see the promise of populist movements. I think there was a feeling, eventually, that the various things that made Trump unappealing could be assets in the sense that there was a hope among folks in the anti-abortion movement, and I think to some extent other conservative grassroots movements, that if Trump did not have allies in Washington, D.C., and did not have a lot of support among voters, and didn’t have a lot of the kind of advantages that establishment politicians had because his approval ratings were always low, that it might make him even more beholden to conservative movements. Part of what Bopp and his allies wanted was a Republican Party that would answer to them rather than the kind of model they thought had been in place before, which was essentially powerful candidates dictating to movements. Trump was more willing to cater to the anti-abortion movement than arguably any Republican president before him.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.