Opinion: They’re lying. Trump and RBG didn’t agree on abortion.

I’ll wager that most American voters, no matter who wins the presidency next week, will feel a measure of relief when the political ads on television and radio and social media and cellphone texts finally go quiet.
Before we get there, let’s note that anyone spending millions of dollars in just over a week before a major election while doing everything possible to hide where the money comes from and goes is not playing honest with you.
Meet “RBG PAC,” a last-minute political action committee that has a lot to say about former President Donald Trump and abortion and almost nothing to say about who is paying for all that. The committee, registered by a former Trump White House staffer, reported on Friday that it will spend $20 million on digital ads, mailers and text messages.
The “RBG” refers to the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a tiny titan of jurisprudence so iconic that her initials still project plenty of power four years after her death. Using her image and moniker to defend Trump’s successful effort to undo constitutional protections for abortion rights has stoked understandable outrage.
Trump faces a political backlash this year after pushing to limit access to abortion as president. That anger crosses party lines as the majority of American voters – Republicans and Democrats – support reproductive rights. And this comes as Vice President Kamala Harris puts abortion access at the center of her presidential campaign while winning over moderate Republicans who reject Trump.
Trump’s allies, with their shady invocation of RBG, may further stoke those negative repercussions in the days before Tuesday’s election. They have it coming. Just ask Ginsburg’s granddaughter.
Clara Spera, RBG’s maternal granddaughter, is senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center, where she helps lead the Abortion Access Legal Defense Fund. She’s also a lecturer at Harvard University’s Law School.
She helped debunk the main thrust of RBG PAC’s dishonest argument – that somehow her grandmother would agree with Trump, who appointed the three conservative Supreme Court justices who, in 2022, undid Roe vs. Wade and the constitutional protections it provided for nearly half a century.
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Ginsburg, Spera told me, had long thought that Roe would have been better decided using the Constitution’s 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause. But the Supreme Court in 1973 ruled instead using that amendment’s implied right to privacy.
Spera told me her grandmother “always unequivocally defended Roe” after that ruling and shared no common ground with Trump on abortion. She said RBG PAC is trying to “confuse voters” with a misleading and “completely manufactured connection” between her grandmother’s judicial leanings and Trump’s anti-abortion legacy.
That was clear from the time of Ginsburg’s 1993 confirmation hearing in the U.S. Senate, where she said this about government interference in a decision on whether to bear a child.
“When government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices,” the nominee to the Supreme Court said then.
Nobody from RBG PAC dared to speak with Spera or her family before spending millions of dollars using her grandmother’s name and photograph. I asked what Spera would say to the committee.
“I think the principle message would be – stop,” she told me. “Stop this false equivalency. I think that the reason they’re doing this is because they know that Donald Trump’s platform on abortion and on women’s rights generally is so abysmal.”
Nobody from RBG PAC wanted to talk to me either, it seems, after I called and emailed to seek a response to what Spera told me. The committee was registered by May Mailman, a lawyer who worked on Trump’s White House staff and took over earlier this year as director of the Independent Women’s Law Center.
Her group’s mission: “Protect single-sex spaces” and “advocate for the continued legal relevance of biological sex.” Translation: Making the already complicated lives of trans people oh so much more complicated.
Mailman signed on as RBG PAC’s treasurer when it was registered on Oct. 16 with the Federal Election Commission. It’s only other filing came nine days later, when it reported spending $76,000 on digital media production, $17.3 million on digital media ads, $1 million on printing and postage and $1.6 million on text messages.
The timing of that filing means that RPG PAC won’t have to disclose where that money came from until after the election. It’s a common tactic for people in politics who want to influence your vote without revealing who they are.
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We know all of that money went to Western Creative Group, LLC, a corporation registered in Wyoming in April that has zero record of working on federal elections.
That company, registered by a law firm, lists no owner or executives and cites a private mailbox at a mail and marking firm as its address.
Again, the secrecy here is the whole point. They want to mislead you about RBG to bolster Trump before they’re forced to reveal who they are after the election.
I found a dozen RBG PAC digital ads on Facebook that started running Sunday, including two videos of women who say Trump opposes a national ban on abortion, and that’s why they support him. Those ads don’t reference the late Supreme Court justice directly but do use her initials when saying who paid for the ads.
The committee prominently displays Ginsburg’s photograph on its website and social media platforms while asking this question: “Why did Ruth Bader Ginsburg agree with Donald Trump’s position on abortion?” That’s a trick question ‒ she didn’t.
Trump said this month that he would veto a national abortion ban if he won reelection and Congress tried to pass one. But he’s been all over the map on this issue. He called in 2016 for women to be punished for having abortions before backing off on that too.
Trump, who now lives in Florida, signaled in August that he would support a ballot measure in that state expanding abortion rights but then voted against it.
In other words, he has zero credibility when it comes to his position on abortion. And the RBG PAC zero-credibility move to help the GOP presidential nominee should instead outrage any voter – Republican, Democrat or independent – being lied to about Donald Trump in the name of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Follow USA TODAY elections columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan