Former President Donald Trump offered what he believes to be a winning strategy for the 2024 election, urging lawmakers to lean into tough topics such as abortion that Republicans have typically shied away from in previous cycles. 

Trump met with lawmakers in a closed-door meeting on Thursday to discuss summer plans on the campaign trail and a 2025 agenda in the case that he is reelected to the White House and Republicans manage to hold on to their slim majority in the House. Part of that strategy is to hammer Democrats on abortion and to frame the opposite party as being too “radical,” one lawmaker told the Washington Examiner. 

Democrats have historically dominated the conversation surrounding abortion, often framing Republicans as restricting personal freedoms. That message has been used to motivate voter turnout, most recently evidenced in the 2022 midterm elections, in which Democrats managed to fend off a predicted “red wave” by targeting Republicans over the reversal of Roe v. Wade. 

Now, Trump is urging lawmakers to go on the offensive and reframe the overturning of Roe as a win for states’ rights and the Republican Party. 

“[Trump] said make sure that you exercise your own conscience to talk about it, share your conviction, and do that in a way that makes sense to people. And I think he made a good point,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) told reporters. “The states are handling the issue right now, and that’s where he’s comfortable keeping it. We’ve made the point that before you can have political consensus on a difficult issue, you have to have cultural consensus. And right now, we just don’t have the numbers in Congress to do anything on the federal level.”

Trump’s advice on abortion comes on the same day the Supreme Court dismissed a challenge to the common abortion drug mifepristone, ruling that the pill may continue to be prescribed online and shipped by mail. The case responds to a lawsuit by the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, a group of religious doctors who oppose abortion, to reverse the Food and Drug Administration’s 2000 approval of the drug.

Trump also touched on other policy matters, such as immigration, foreign aid, and taxes, according to lawmakers who attended the meeting. However, many described the visit as a pep talk to urge unity within the party as the 2024 election cycle ramps up. 

“He used the term ‘saving the country,’” said Rep. August Pfluger (R-TX), who also confirmed Trump said abortion decisions should be left to the states. “This is important to save the country, and he outlined the issues that he thought were part of that: the border crisis, the attack on domestic-produced, American-made energy, [and] inflation. Those were a couple of the key topics.”

Another lawmaker in attendance said Trump stressed that abortion should be a state-level issue while advising that it shouldn’t be seen as walking away from convictions but just being smart about how to talk about a topic that is divisive in the country.

Trump’s message comes as party leaders say they want to work in “close coordination” with a possible Trump administration in the future that will keep the party united on all fronts — something Johnson said has cost the party in the past. 

“We lost a few steps, frankly … because the plan was not fully prepared and the implementation lagged a little bit,” Johnson said of Republicans’ loss of the House majority in 2018. “We’re not going to make that mistake again.”

Trump urged lawmakers to remain unified, a special message as House Republicans have experienced a tumultuous year in the majority that has been marked by intraparty tension and public feuding. 

The former president repeatedly praised Johnson’s performance as speaker, even telling Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) to “be nice” to him — a playful jab at her effort to oust Johnson from the speakership last month. 

Lawmakers who attended the meeting said they felt confident in Trump’s ability to lead the party to victory in November and lauded his strategy to grow the GOP majority. 

“He’s very good at pointing out what’s wrong with this country,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) said. “But he’s even better about pointing out what we need to do to fix it.”

Others acknowledged that while Trump’s presence will be beneficial to Republicans running in November, they can’t solely rely on the former president to grow the majority. 

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“He’s not going to carry the load for us. We can’t just stop working as individuals,” Rep. Kevin Hern (R-OK) told reporters. “Every member of Congress that I know is working hard to make sure that we keep the majority and grow the majority.”

The planned visit comes as Trump prepares to make the rounds with GOP lawmakers in Washington, D.C., this week, including a meeting with Republican senators later Thursday afternoon. The former president will meet with Johnson again in Mar-a-Lago on Monday, along with National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Richard Hudson (R-NC).