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Tag: Different people

  • ‘Plant-Based’ Peanut Butter … And Shampoo … And Booze

    ‘Plant-Based’ Peanut Butter … And Shampoo … And Booze

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    Several years ago, I made a New Year’s resolution to eat more plants. Doing so, I assumed, would be better for my health, for animals, and for the planet. Besides, it would be easy: The rise of plant-based meat alternatives, offered by companies such as Impossible Meat and Beyond Meat, made it a breeze to eat less meat but still satisfy the occasional carnivorous urge. I could have my burger and eat it too.

    Or so I thought. Meat alternatives, I found, cost more than their conventional counterparts and are made with complicated ingredients that raise doubts about their healthiness—and even then, taste just okay. Other people have had similar concerns, part of the reason the popularity of those products has declined in recent years to such a degree that Beyond Meat is reportedly now in “survival mode.” But beyond the meat aisle, the “plant-based” label lives on in virtually every food product imaginable: instant ramen, boxed mac and cheese, Kraft singles, KitKat bars, even queso. You can now buy plant-based peanut butter. You can also wash your hair with plant-based shampoo and puff on a plant-based vape.

    Queso made from cauliflower instead of milk is correctly described as plant-based. But if peanut butter is vegan to begin with, then what is the point of the label? And who asked for plant-based liquor? On packaging and ad copy, plant-based has been applied to so many items—including foods that are highly processed, or those that have never contained animal ingredients—that it has gotten “diluted to nothing,” Mark Lang, a marketing professor at the University of Tampa who studies food, told me.

    Technically, plant-based does have a clear definition. The Cornell University biochemist Thomas Colin Campbell is often credited for coining the term in the 1980s as a neutral, less fraught descriptor for diets considered “vegan” or “vegetarian.” That is what made plant-based a popular term for companies eager to sell their meat replacements to a wide range of eaters. The Plant Based Foods Association uses essentially the same criteria—foods made from plants that do not contain animal products—to determine which products can bear its “Certified Plant Based Seal.”

    Some companies describe products as “plant-based,” however, even if they don’t meet these criteria. Items sold as such include foods that have always been vegan, such as prepackaged jackfruit, and those mixed in with some animal products, such as Wahlburgers’ “Flex Blend” patties. But even a product that is properly described as “plant-based” might mean different things to different people, because there is no one reason to try and avoid the consequences of animal rearing and consumption. Health is the leading one, followed by environmental and ethical concerns, Emma Ignaszewski, the associate director of industry intelligence and initiatives at the Good Food Institute, told me.

    The label’s vagueness has been a marketer’s dream, creating an enormous opportunity to capitalize on the perceived virtuousness and healthiness of eating plant-based. Brands use the “plant-based” label to “draw people’s attention to the aggregate goodness of a particular product” and simultaneously “deflect attention” from any less appealing attributes, Joe Árvai, a professor of psychology and biological sciences at the University of Southern California, told me. Some, like coconut water, are relatively good for you; others, like booze, are probably not. And their environmental benefits remain murky: Using fewer animal ingredients generally decreases emissions, but the climate impacts are not always straightforward.

    In this way, the evolution of plant-based mirrors that of organic or gluten-free. These terms have specific meanings that are legitimately useful for helping people make choices about their food, but they have been overused into oblivion. You can now buy organic marijuana and gluten-free water along with your plant-based energy drinks. With multiple labels, including gluten-free, plant-based, GMO-free, Earth-friendly, and Fair Trade, “some products look like a NASCAR” vehicle, Lang said. “You’re just putting buttons all over the place, trying to get my attention.”

    We may have already hit peak “plant-based.” According to a recent survey from the Food Industry Association, there is substantial confusion about what the label means—and that could be discouraging people from buying plant-based products. Some are now outright skeptical of the label. A 2023 study co-authored by Árvai suggested that people are less likely to go for foods described as “plant-based” (or “vegan”) compared with those called “healthy” or “sustainable.” One reason may be negative associations with plant-based meat alternatives, which are seen as “artificial” because of their ultra-processed nature, co-author Patrycja Sleboda, an assistant professor of psychology at Baruch College, City University of New York, told me.

    Another may be that consumers are not sure whether “plant-based” foods are healthy. Americans may respond better when the actual benefits of the food are highlighted, she said. Similarly, market research conducted by Meati, a company that sells meat alternatives made of mushrooms, found that the “plant-based” label, applied to food, signaled “bad eating experience, bad flavor, bad texture, poor nutrition, too many ingredients, and overprocessing,” Christina Ra, Meati’s vice president of marketing and communications, told me.

    Some good may still come out of the messiness of “plant-based” everything. Meati deliberately avoids the label altogether, opting instead to highlight the contents of its products (“95 percent mushroom root”). A recent Whole Foods report predicted that in 2024, consumers will want to “put the ‘plant’ back in ‘plant-based’” by replacing “complex meat alternatives” with recognizable ingredients such as walnuts and legumes. In a particular literal interpretation of this prediction, the company Actual Veggies sells a greens-and-grains patty called “The Actual Green Burger.” And some milk alternatives are also now skipping “plant-based” and simplifying their ingredient lists to just two items (nuts and water).

    Shoppers just want to know what’s in their food without having to think too hard about it. Plant-based hasn’t helped with that. Even Campbell, after he coined the term, acknowledged that it was a limiting, potentially misleading phrase that left too much room for unhealthy ingredients, such as sugar and flour. Perhaps shoppers’ exasperation with the vagueness of “plant-based” eating may eventually lead brands to promote more plant-based eating: that is, just eating plants.

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    Yasmin Tayag

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  • How a Common Stomach Bug Causes Cancer

    How a Common Stomach Bug Causes Cancer

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    At first, doctors didn’t believe that bacteria could live in the stomach at all. Too acidic, they thought. But in 1984, a young Australian physician named Barry Marshall gulped down an infamous concoction of beef broth laced with Helicobacter pylori bacteria. On day eight, he started vomiting. On day 10, an endoscopy revealed that H. pylori had colonized his stomach, their characteristic spiral shape unmistakeable under the microscope.

    Left untreated, H. pylori usually establishes infections that persist for an entire lifetime, and they’re common: Half of the world’s population harbors H. pylori inside their stomach, as do more than one in three Americans. In most cases, the microbe settles into an asymptomatic chronic infection, but in some, it becomes far more troublesome. It can, for example, cause enough damage to the stomach lining to create ulcers. Worse still, H. pylori can lead to cancer. This single bacterium is by far the No. 1 risk factor in stomach cancers worldwide. By one estimate, some 70 percent can be attributed to H. pylori.

    But what still puzzles doctors years later is why H. pylori has such different consequences for different people. Why is it asymptomatic in most but carcinogenic in others? Although the full answer is complex, one key factor seems to be mutations in H. pylori itself. Not every strain is created equal. The presence of select genes intensifies H. pylori’s pathogenicity, and even a single mutation in a single gene, scientists recently found, enhances the link to cancer. A small genetic tweak in a common stomach bug could have profound consequences for us, its unwitting hosts.

    H. pylori has lived inside of us for a long time. Our ancestors who left Africa likely carried it inside them as they crossed continents and oceans, built and felled civilizations. And over the course of what some scientists hypothesize to be more than 100,000 years of co-evolution, H. pylori has exquisitely adapted to the harsh, acidic conditions of the human stomach.

    It survives, for example, by producing “copious amounts” of an enzyme that neutralizes stomach acid, Richard Peek, a gastroenterologist at Vanderbilt, told me. H. pylori can also burrow into the mucus-gel lining of the stomach using powerful, whiplike flagella. The mucus lining offers a relative haven from stomach acid, but another prize lies underneath too: stomach cells, rich in nutrients that the bacteria needs to survive.

    The way that H. pylori steals nutrients could be the key to how it ends up causing cancer. The bacterium isn’t necessarily out to hurt its human host. “H. pylori doesn’t want you to get an ulcer or to get cancer, but it needs to replicate to high enough levels in the stomach that it can be transmitted to another person,” Nina Salama, a biologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, told me. (The bacteria seem to spread through an infected person’s saliva, vomit, or feces.) But to replicate, it needs nutrients, in particular iron, which our cells probably hoard to starve pathogens.

    In response, certain strains of H. pylori have evolved genetic changes that might make its iron-mining more efficient. But this also causes more collateral damage to the host’s stomach, enough damage, perhaps, to eventually trigger cancer. First, the bacteria uses a protein called HtrA—essentially “a pair of molecular scissors,” Peek said—to cut the bonds that hold stomach cells together, so the microbes can slip between. A single mutation in this scissor protein makes it better at cutting, a group based in Germany found in a recent study, and this mutation is disproportionately found in H. pylori strains isolated from people who developed stomach cancer.

    Once H. pylori has wedged itself in between cells, it also has clever ways of accessing the nutrients inside. Certain strains carry a set of about 18 genes that collectively encode a molecular needle through which H. pylori injects bacterial proteins, triggering a cascade of changes to the cell. These hijacked cells end up giving up their iron more easily, but they also become worse at essential functions such as fixing damaged DNA. This set of approximately 18 genes, collectively called the “cag pathogenicity island,” are in fact disproportionately found in strains from cancer patients. Stomach cancer thus might be a secondary consequence of the microbe’s aggressive search for nutrients. For the H. pylori, “there’s no selective pressure to cause cancer in 80 years. The selective pressure is to acquire iron now,” Karen Guillemin, a microbiologist at the University of Oregon, said.

    But not everyone infected with one of these cancer-linked strains will develop cancer. Other factors likely play a role too: diet, environment, and genetics of the individual patient  Stomach-cancer rates vary quite widely around the world, with the highest prevalence in East Asia. In Japan, doctors routinely test for H. pylori in people with no symptoms, and prescribe antibiotics if the tests come back positive. But some scientists have argued against aggressive treatment, pointing at hints that humans derive some benefits from living with H. pylori too. Those infected, for example, tend to have lower rates of asthma and allergy. Genetic signatures associated with more pathogenic H. pylori strains, Peek told me, would help identify those at highest risk, who could most benefit from antibiotics.

    Marshall, the Australian doctor who infected himself with H. pylori, ultimately recovered just fine. His self-experiment, in addition to other studies with his collaborator Robin Warren, proved that the bacterium does indeed infect the stomach and does indeed cause stomach ulcers, which later spurred the work linking H. pylori to cancer. Understanding exactly how and why H. pylori becomes pathogenic is still key to finding the way to treat it, but in the past 40 years the significance of H. pylori to human health has become indisputable—so much so that in 2005, Marshall and Warren won the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

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    Sarah Zhang

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  • It’s 5 a.m. Somewhere

    It’s 5 a.m. Somewhere

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    JFK Terminal 8—It is 9:22 a.m., and I am learning about consumer protections from a food-safety inspector who is on her second Bloody Mary. There is nothing quite like alcohol to facilitate an expansive conversation: I should encourage young people, she tells me, to consider careers in food safety. She’s on her way back from a work trip, and I learn that she always drinks Bloody Marys when she travels, which is often, but never drinks them at home. We move on to other topics: reincarnation, ExxonMobil, karma, the state of labor unions. The only thing that seemed to be off limits was her full name (her job, she said, prevents her from speaking to the media).

    We’re sitting in the New York Sports Bar across from Gate 10, which is next to Solstice Sunglasses and a vending machine selling ready-to-eat salads in plastic mason jars. In the corner, two blond women drank white wine. A passing traveler pops her head in: Does the bar serve French fries? The bartender says no, they don’t start serving French fries until 10:30. It is too early for French fries. But it is not too early for white wine.

    By the time security spit me out into JFK Terminal 8 at 7:02 a.m., the bars were already slinging drinks. At least four bars had patrons, including O’Neal’s Restaurant (a “cozy wood-paneled pub,” according to the JFK directory) and Bobby Van’s Grill (“elegant ambiance and upscale menu”). At JFK, alcohol service can begin at 6 a.m., the same time bars open at LAX. That’s hardly early for major airports. At MSP, outside Minneapolis, opening time was once also 6 a.m. but is now 4 a.m.; at Tokyo Narita Airport and London’s Heathrow, there are no restrictions. Early-morning drinking at airports is not just accepted but pervasive, Kenneth Sher, a University of Missouri expert on alcohol habits, told me. The internet has noticed, too. “What’s with all these people drinking pints in the airport at 6am?” wondered a Redditor in one of the many threads devoted to the topic.

    Outside the airport, this is not how drinking works—or at least, not how it works in public. Morning drinking, with few exceptions (brunch, tailgating), tends to be “a sign of pretty severe alcohol dependence,” Sher said. Legally, it is discouraged: Non-airport bars in New York State are not allowed to start serving alcohol until 8 a.m. (10 a.m. on Sundays), and most hold out until at least the early afternoon, if not happy hour, Andrew Rigie of the New York City Hospitality Alliance, told me. But in the airport, the normal rules of drinking do not apply. “I’m not judging,” the bartender at Bobby Van’s Grill said, pouring vodka into a flute of orange juice. “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere.”

    I’d woken up at 4 a.m. to get to the airport, and by the time I met the food inspector, five hours later, I would have believed it was any time you told me. I was hopped up on adrenaline—feeling glamorous and vaguely ill—even though I had accomplished nothing. Mostly, travel is standing in different types of lines. I waited for people to look at my ticket. I waited for different people to inspect my shoes. None of this especially made me want alcohol, even though the idea of drinking at the airport felt romantic, in a novelistic sort of way.

    At Bobby Van’s, perhaps the most dignified dining option in Terminal 8, I ate lukewarm potatoes next to a sad-eyed man drinking coffee and red wine. Mostly, the terminal was quiet. How Do I Live played, which seemed like a reasonable question. I watched a man in a zip-up cardigan eat eggs.

    What are any of us doing here, sipping early-morning drinks at the airport Bobby Van’s? I am here because I am trying to answer that question. Other people have other reasons. You can, by observation and experience, put together a basic taxonomy of airport-drinking types. There is the solo business traveler with time to kill and no particular interest in working. There is the festive couple for whom airport drinks signal the beginning of vacation, and their corollary, the festive group of friends. And then there is the anxious traveler, motivated less by excitement than by ambient terror of being in a pressurized metal tube at 36,000 feet.

    For a place where everyone is watching clocks, there is no real sense of time at an airport. “If you look out, all you see is the tarmac, a few airplanes,” says Michael Sayette, an alcohol researcher at the University of Pittsburgh. There are very few cues that you shouldn’t drink, and maybe it is actually happy hour for you. “You’ve got people coming in from all over the world who are on different times,” he points out. “It really is 5 p.m. where they woke up.” The airport perhaps is best understood as what French anthropologist Marc Augé has called a “non-place:” a blip in space and time. “A person entering the space of non-place is relieved of his usual determinants,” he wrote in his book on the subject. “He becomes no more than what he does or experiences in the role of passenger.” It is perversely freeing, if lightly dehumanizing, to be alone in the airport.

    Once you pass security—the transition, in the language of the business, between “landside” and “airside”—you assume another version of yourself. Landside, you are still anchored in your normal life, which is to say that you can come and go and hang out with your family and carry as many ounces of water as you want. Airside, you have assumed a new identity. You have become a traveler. You have no legible context and no obvious history. Are you a person who orders cocktails on a weekday morning? Who’s to say? You belong to the airport now.

    So does everybody else there. There is a sense of solidarity: As fellow travelers, we are all indefinitely trapped in the same timeless, placeless boat. Why not drink? “It’s exciting for people to take an activity that is normally very, very regulated, time-wise, and then be embedded in a space where everything’s okay,” Edward Slingerland, the author of Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization, told me. Alcohol signals the transition from one set of rules to another. “We use this, on a small scale, at the end of the workday, to transition to leisure time at home,” he suggests. “Drinking in airports is just kind of a bigger version of that. It’s a way of transitioning from our normal everyday lives to whatever unusual thing we’re off to.”

    From the bartender at New York Sports Bar, I learn that women drink white wine and men order whiskey. I learn that back in Terminal 4, where she worked until recently, she’d go through five or six bottles of prosecco every morning shift. Luckily, for the travelers, JFK has no shortage of drinking opportunities, also including but not limited to Tigín Irish Pub, Soy & Sake Asian Eats, Blue Point Brewery, and Buffalo Wild Wings. And that’s not counting the multitude of private lounges, where elite passengers (or those with certain credit cards) are treated to an oasis of snacks and free-flowing booze. The American Express Centurion Lounge in Terminal 4, in fact, has three distinct bars, including a Prohibition-inspired speakeasy with drinks curated by a James Beard Award–winning mixologist.

    None of this is an accident. The modern airport produces a captive, thirsty audience. Airports were once permeable by design, says Janet Bednarek, a historian of airports at the University of Dayton. Bars and shops and restaurants were open to everyone, and “airports depended upon non-travelers to spend money,” she told me. Then 9/11 happened, airports locked down, security tightened, and once you were airside, you’d passed a point of no return. For airports, Bednarek said, that provedt to be a business opportunity rather than a problem: People were now getting to the airport hours early, and they had to do something to pass the time, whether it was shopping or eating or lounging at the bar. “Airports are looking for any way they can to generate revenue,” Henry Harteveldt, a travel-industry analyst, told me. Airports charge airlines huge fees, and still, pre-pandemic, retail concessions accounted for approximately 30 percent of airports’ total revenue, according to data from the Airports Council International.

    Here is the thing about the airport, though: Nobody has control. You cannot control the people sitting next to you, or their children, or the security line, or the prepackaged sandwich options at CIBO Express. And most of all, you cannot control when the plane comes, or whether it comes, or how long it is delayed. More than 20 percent of arrival flights in the U.S. in the first three months of this year were delayed, more than the same stretch in any year since 2014. And that’s not even considering the epic meltdowns that can leave travelers stranded for days. “In a way, alcohol may be crucial for air travel, because it allows you to relax into passive helplessness,” said Slingerland, who was in an airport when we spoke. “I’ve been on, like, 10 flights in the last week and a half, and every single one of them was delayed.” Alcohol, he explains, turns down your brain’s ability to focus, suppress distractions, delay gratification, and do all the things you need to do to succeed in your daily life as a functional adult. But you are not a functional adult in the airport. You are a giant suitcase-wielding baby.

    There is, perhaps, a darker read. “I think 80 percent of what you’re seeing is people who, in their normal lives, would never drink in the morning,” Slingerland said. But that leaves a good number of people whose regular behavior is presumably on display at 7 a.m. No one at JFK seemed all that bothered by the white wine and whiskey passengers were sipping so early in the day, but it’s hard to not see it as yet another sign of what everyone keeps saying: Americans drink too much.

    “Drinking is acceptable in all sorts of other places it didn’t used to be,” wrote The Atlantic’s Kate Julian in 2021. “Salons and boutiques dole out cheap cava in plastic cups. Movie theaters serve alcohol, Starbucks serves alcohol, zoos serve alcohol.” A study published last year traced one in five deaths of people ages 20 and 49 to booze. Another paper found that one in eight American adults drank in a way that met the criteria for alcohol use disorder, a figure that seems to have worsened during the pandemic. And drunken passengers cause problems. Although all-hours drinking is useful for airports, airlines have been less thrilled. “It’s completely unfair,” a Ryanair executive said in a statement arguing for stricter policies in 2017, “that airports can profit from the unlimited sale of alcohol to passengers and leave the airlines to deal with the safety consequences.”

    Alcohol in the airport, I had thought, isn’t like alcohol in the world outside. But perhaps airport drinking isn’t different at all. It still facilitates transition from one state to another—only literally. It still provides the illusion of easing the low-grade misery of life. And it still fosters camaraderie. I thought about the food-safety inspector, whom I’d talked with for most of an hour and surely will never see again. Our conversation had been lovely, I thought. Why don’t I talk to people more? This is the weird duality of alcohol: It can simultaneously blunt and enhance the world. In the airport, you desperately need both.

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    Rachel Sugar

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  • Nikki Haley’s Dilemma Is Also the Republicans’ Problem

    Nikki Haley’s Dilemma Is Also the Republicans’ Problem

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    Republicans have had 10 months to hammer out a coherent post-Roe message on abortion. You would think they’d have nailed it by now.

    Yet on Tuesday, Nikki Haley set out to declare her position on the issue—and proceeded to be about as clear as concrete.

    She began with plausible precision. “I want to save as many lives and help as many moms as possible,” the former South Carolina governor and ambassador to the United Nations told reporters gathered at the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America headquarters, in Northern Virginia—a press event billed as a “major policy speech.” But her statements quickly got squishier. It’s good that some states have passed anti-abortion laws in the past year, she said. And as for the states that have reacted by enshrining abortion-rights protections? Well, she wishes “that weren’t the case.”

    And then she seemed to channel Veep’s Selina Meyer. “Different people in different places are taking different paths,” Haley said, with a self-assurance that belied the indeterminacy of her words.

    Read: Abortion pills will be the next battle in the 2024 election

    Questioning whether any national anti-abortion legislation would ever pass, Haley did gesture at a need for some action. “To do that at the federal level, the next president must find national consensus,” she said. As for what that might look like, she had no words. And she took no questions.

    Some people seemed to like Haley’s speech, in a tepid way. She sounded human when she described how her husband had been adopted, and how she’d struggled with infertility. “Ms. Haley deserves credit for confronting the subject head on, with a speech that wasn’t sanctimonious or censorious,” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote, before concluding, “The party could do worse than Ms. Haley’s pitch.” But it could do better—or at least do with something more specific.

    Leaders of the self-described pro-life movement were predictably annoyed at Haley’s conciliatory-sounding vagueness. “Disappointing speech by @NikkiHaley today. Leads with compromise & defeatism, not vision & courage,” Lila Rose, who heads the group Live Action, tweeted. “We agree that consensus is important, but to achieve consensus we will need to stake out a principled position,” wrote Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life of America.

    Even Haley’s hosts seemed on the wrong page. “We are clear on Ambassador Haley’s commitment to acting on the American consensus against late-term abortion by protecting unborn children by at least 15 weeks,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in a statement sent to me. But a few hours later, Team Haley emailed me to correct the record: “She committed to working to find a consensus on banning late-term abortion. No specific weeks,” Nachama Soloveichik, Haley’s communications director, wrote. Not only did Haley alienate both sides—she confused them!

    Mary Ziegler: Abortion restrictions targeted at minors never stop there

    Haley is in a tough spot, as are all of the Republican presidential wannabes. They each have their own personal convictions on abortion; former Vice President Mike Pence, for example, has been outspoken in his support for a national ban. But they’re up against an issue that seems to have cost their party a string of recent elections. Most Americans believe that abortion should be accessible, with some limits.

    The “consensus” position, then, is somewhere in the foggy zone between no abortion ever and abortion whenever. But primary elections tend to push candidates toward one extreme or another. “The gap between what the base demands and what swing voters will tolerate has gotten really wide,” Sarah Longwell, the publisher of the Never Trump site The Bulwark, told me. “Nowhere is this more true than on abortion.”

    What all politicians need to do “is settle on a position they believe they can defend, and they need to repeat it consistently and clearly,” Whit Ayres, a Republican strategist, told me. “Any politician whose position on abortion is vague will be wrapped around the axle eventually with questions and doubts about where they actually stand.”

    Some GOP candidates have followed Ayres’s advice. But much axle-wrapping has occurred already in the early days of the 2024 primary season.

    Asked on the campaign trail whether he’d support a 15-week federal ban on abortion, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina told CBS, “I do believe that we should have a robust conversation about what’s happening on a very important topic,” before pivoting so hard to an anecdote about Janet Yellen that I thought he’d need a neck brace. In a follow-up interview, Scott backtracked, clarifying that as president, he would “literally sign the most conservative pro-life legislation” Congress sent to his desk.

    Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is expected to mount a presidential bid, did approve a very conservative state law recently—a six-week abortion ban. But he signed that legislation in the dead of night earlier this month, while most people in Tallahassee were probably in bed. (By contrast, last year, he celebrated the signing of a 15-week ban with a big party at a church.) The following day, DeSantis gave a speech at a Christian university full of students who are opposed to abortion, yet said nothing about his major legislative achievement. He’s mostly stayed quiet about it since—even at glad-handing events in early primary states.

    So far, the only confirmed presidential candidate who seems clear on his position and keenly aware of the political optics is Donald Trump. Despite being hailed by anti-abortion activists as the “most pro-life president” in history, Trump has never been rigid on abortion (probably because he supported abortion rights for most of his life as a public figure), and he doesn’t talk much about the issue now. But a spokesperson told The Washington Post recently that Trump “believes that the Supreme Court, led by the three Justices which he supported, got it right when they ruled this is an issue that should be decided at the State level.” Shorter Trump: I’ve done my bit—it’s up to the states now. God bless.

    If any national consensus on abortion exists, the GOP strategist Ayres said, Trump’s position “is pretty close” to it. Trump has always seemed to have “a lizard-brain sense of where the voters are,” Longwell said. “He has a relationship to the base, and he doesn’t have to pitch what he believes.” And, unlike DeSantis, Trump has never signed a law banning abortion at any stage, so it’ll be harder to pin him down. Sure, there’s an activist class that would like to see abortion banned in all cases. To them, Trump could reply, You got your justices. You’re welcome.

    Read: The new pro-life movement has a plan to end abortion

    Right now Trump and his lizard brain have a commanding lead in the GOP primary. His victory would set up an interesting general-election situation—a fitting one for our complicated post-Roe country: a former president who once personally supported abortion rights and is now politically opposed to them running against a sitting president whose own position on abortion is the exact opposite.

    Until a Republican presidential nominee emerges, we’ll hear many more Haley-esque platitudes that sound thoughtful and weighty but ultimately aren’t.

    “Whether we can save more lives nationally depends entirely on doing what no one has done to date,” Haley told reporters on Tuesday, before wrapping up her speech with—you could almost hear a drumroll—“finding consensus.” The waffling will continue, in other words, until the primary concludes.

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    Elaine Godfrey

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