Florida's Amendment 4 as tRumps "Kobayashi Maru"--(love a good Star Trek reference, don't you?)

Nate Monroe

Columnist

Jacksonville Florida Times-Union

USA TODAY NETWORK

"Florida has lurked behind Donald J. Trump every day of his presidential campaign, his third in this long decade of his national relevance and his first as an official Florida resident. His fevered right-wing movement is more Floridafied than ever — stranger, scummier, populated by burnout wrestlers and b-listers and maladjusted Palm Beach socialites. Florida is his sunny, gilded refuge, the scene of at least one of his alleged national-security crimes. Florida is his very essence. Florida is his strength.

"And Florida could be his undoing.

"Not for the first time, Florida got Trump wrapped around the axle during Tuesday night’s debate against Vice President Kamala Harris. Within minutes, he’d flubbed a question about abortion rights, a damaging early exchange that foreshadowed his disintegration over the course of the evening. Florida is no bit player in Trump’s abortion drama: The state’s unpopular six-week abortion ban, signed into law last year by his one-time acolyte, Gov. Ron DeSantis, presents for Trump a kind of Kobiyashi Maru.

"Florida voters in November will weigh a proposed constitutional amendment that would reverse the six-week abortion ban and restore reproductive rights through fetal viability, the standard that had existed for decades until Trump’s appointees on the Supreme Court cast Roe v. Wade aside. Trump seems eager to vote for the amendment and vote against it, and to brag that he’d done both."

(By the way, for non-Trekkies, the Kobiyashi Maru is a fictional test of--well, it's a very harrowing, supposedly no-win war-games scenario.)