Anti-abortion groups blast Trump

The anti-abortion activists celebrating Donald Trump’s vow to vote no on Florida’s upcoming abortion-rights amendment have their sights on a bigger target: extracting a promise from the former president to staff his administration with staunch abortion opponents if he wins in November.

“It would be nice to be able to say that President Trump is with us, that he has promised to appoint pro-life experts who will abide by the Constitution,” said Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life Action. “We want to be able to go back to our base and be able to show them that President Trump, despite what they’ve heard in the media, despite some of his confusing or cutesy tweets, is still going to be a plus in the column for the pro-life movement.”

Hawkins said her phone was “blowing up” last week with angry calls and texts from activists refusing to knock on doors on the former president’s behalf after he said, when asked about Florida’s Amendment 4, “I’m going to be voting that we need more than six weeks.” Naming a list of judges he’d nominate — which he has promised to do — or anti-abortion-rights advocates for top jobs would “go a long way” toward winning back disaffected anti-abortion supporters, Hawkins said.