After a week of horribly damaging and completely inconsistent statements on abortion, Donald Trump finally settled on the position that the abortion laws in this country shouldn’t be changed from what they are now. Many people have pointed out that this is a functionally openly pro-choice position, because the current abortion laws in this country are just about the most extremely pro-abortion laws on earth.

That’s a completely fair characterization of Trump’s current position. There is no world in which a person who believes that abortion ought to be legal up to and including the point of delivery can consider themselves to be “pro-life,” as Trump has been calling himself throughout the campaign season. He even threatened to sue Ted Cruz over questioning this, declaring “everyone knows I’m pro-life!”

Memo to Trump: “The abortion laws in this country should not be changed” is not what “pro-life” means.

Trump has tried to soften the impact of declaring himself to be openly pro-choice by declaring that he still believes that abortion is murder. This is supposed, to I guess, make us feel better about Trump as a person, but in fact it has the exact opposite effect. What Trump is saying is, sure abortion is murder, it’s just a species of murder that ought to be legal.

We have a word for people who think like this, and it isn’t “pro-choice,” it’s “sociopath.”

At least liberals have intellectual consistency going for them. They deny that abortion is murder, they deny that an unborn child is a person (or even a human), and state unequivocally that having an abortion is just the removal of a clump of cells, not unlike the removal of a cancerous tumor. They’re wrong both scientifically and philosophically, but at least they aren’t, in their own terms, explicitly blessing legalized murder.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, is. And to my mind, being pro-murder is probably worse than being anti-science.

It’s entirely consistent with Trump’s past behavior, though. As audio surfaced this weekend of Trump bragging on the Howard Stern show that he once attempted to coerce one of his mistresses into having an abortion, we come to understand that Trump really does not care if an unborn child is a human life or not; if it gets in the way of what Trump wants, it should be legal to kill it.

There’s no reason to believe that Trump’s basic philosophy on this has changed over the years, he’s just basically found a group of suckers who will believe him if he says he’s “pro-life” in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. And this group of suckers intends to lead this party (and this country) over the cliff along with him.

No thanks, I think I’ll pass.