Former President Donald Trump’s strategy of ducking questions on abortion requires mainstream reporters to let him off the hook and leave pro-choice swing voters with the false impression that he is more moderate than he actually is. So far, it’s working. 

Major news outlets are falsely claiming that Trump said abortion “should be left to the states” in a video announcement Monday on his Truth Social platform. In fact, Trump said only that abortion “will” be left to the states, a statement of law that does not address how he would respond if Congress passed a federal abortion ban or how regulators would treat abortion under a second Trump administration. 

The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 with the help of Trump’s three appointees, eliminating the constitutional right to abortion that had stood for nearly 50 years. The ruling paved the way for total and near-total abortion bans and related extreme policies in many Republican-controlled states while creating a political vulnerability for the GOP given the unpopularity of its position.

Trump, who has largely avoided taking firm positions on how abortion would be treated federally if he were returned to office, previewed his abortion statement with a Sunday night post in which he wrote that “we must use common sense in realizing that we have an obligation to the salvation of our Nation, which is currently in serious DECLINE, TO WIN ELECTIONS, without which we will have nothing other than failure, death, and destruction.”

Trump’s language suggested that he would obfuscate his abortion position to bolster his political standing, and indeed, that’s exactly what he did in his video message. 

Trump took credit for overturning Roe and said that going forward, “my view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint, the states will determine by vote or legislation, or perhaps both. And whatever they decide must be the law of the land. In this case, the law of the state.”

Many news outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN.com, CBS News.com, and NPR.org, gave Trump the headlines he likely wanted by reporting that the former president had said abortion law “should be left to the states.”

But that’s not true: Trump did not say whether he would sign a federal abortion ban if Congress passed it. Nor did he say whether federal regulators under his administration would move to ban medication abortions or restrict sending them through the mail, or how he will vote on the abortion referendum in his home state of Florida, or whether he will continue to appoint judges who will further curtail abortion rights.

As Semafor’s Jordan Weissman explained on X:

Responding to Weismann, Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern wrote: “It's not even a statement of what the law is! Trump's likely appointees, like Roger Severino and Jonathan Mitchell, say they interpret Comstock as a nationwide ban on all abortions and intend to enforce it in a second term. Goes beyond mifepristone—to them the ban already exists!”