MAUREEN CALLAHAN reveals the ONE explosive issue that will now decide the presidential election. (Clue: It is NOT immigration... and it threatens to tear America apart)

Just when you think Donald Trump can't outdo himself, he gives an explosive new interview to Time magazine and changes the landscape of the 2024 presidential election.

In this profile, all-too-aptly-titled 'How Far Trump Would Go', the former and would-be next president left no key issue facing America untouched. 

But one exchange in particular might just have shifted everything:

Q: Do you think states should monitor women's pregnancies so they can know if they've gotten an abortion after the ban?

Trump: I think they might do that.

Q: Prosecuting women for getting abortions after the ban… Are you comfortable with it?

Trump: The states are going to [decide]. It's irrelevant whether I'm comfortable or not.

Yet clearly, Trump – a man never short of opinions – is comfortable with this idea.

This is horrifying for women everywhere. It is dystopian and, as so often said, the unimaginable stuff of 'The Handmaid's Tale': Women as property, as chattel and broodmares, nothing more.

Just when you think Donald Trump can't outdo himself, he gives an explosive new interview to Time magazine and changes the landscape of the 2024 presidential election.

In this profile, titled 'How Far Trump Would Go', the former and would-be next president left no key issue facing America untouched. But one exchange in particular might just have shifted everything...

Women need to reframe this argument. 'Abortion' is a damaging, deliberately brutish catch-all. What this is about, more correctly, is reproductive rights. It's about the self-determination of women.

The majority of Americans agree.

A year after the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2021, a Pew Research poll found that 62 percent of American adults thought abortion should be legal in 'all or most cases'.

Since the Supreme Court's ruling, every time abortion has been on the ballot — even in red states — reproductive rights have won.

That tells you that the average voter has a more nuanced take than the average politician.

Most rational people know that women aren't seeking painful, often heartbreaking late-term abortions because, like the silly women they are — whoops! — they just changed their mind. As if a fetus is a pair of shoes.

Late-term abortions are vanishingly rare. In America, as of 2015, more than 90 percent of terminations occurred before the 13th week. Fewer than 1 percent were performed after 24 weeks.

The idea that men's sexual and reproductive health would ever be legislated, would ever require the permission of state or federal government, is so fantastical as to be laughable. Yet women alone are made to suffer.

In 2016, Trump ran on the promise that he would overturn Roe v. Wade. On the campaign trail, he told Chris Matthews in a televised town hall that getting rid of Roe wouldn't be enough — that any woman who accessed an abortion would have to face grave consequences.

'There has to be some form of punishment [for women who have abortions],' Trump said.

Is he for real?

This is a guy currently sitting in a Manhattan courtroom — unfairly criminalized, he tells us, persecuted to a messianic degree — for paying hush money to the porn star with whom he allegedly cheated on his wife.

Another woman's lawyer has testified about an affair she also claims to have had with a married Trump, and the money he paid to keep her story quiet.

This is the individual to legislate women's sexual morality? To tell women how to conduct their reproductive health – and endorse states enacting womb surveillance?

This is the individual to legislate women's sexual morality? To tell women how to conduct their reproductive health - and endorse states enacting womb surveillance?

For a party that claims to be about less government intervention, this is the most invasive form of overreach imaginable: Some bureaucratic functionary privy to the goings-on in every and any woman's uterus, perhaps even reporting her if she deviates not from her doctor's best advice or her own autonomous decision-making, but from the diktats of faceless paper-pushers.

Americans of every stripe and political persuasion should be terrified, for this prospect is not limited to allowing states to criminalize abortion.

Far-right agitators are also seeking to:

1. Enact a federal abortion ban. Trump has said repeatedly he will not sign one, but who can believe him? I am among generations of women who grew up with Roe v. Wade, told repeatedly that it was the settled law of the land — and then it was gone.

2. Give embryos, from the moment of conception, full legal rights as part of the Life at Conception Act. This is backed, per Time, by 80 percent of the Republican caucus, with dark implications for IVF. In February of this year, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are 'children' and that anyone destroying them could be held responsible. I doubt this movement will get very far, because there is too much money at stake: the IVF industry is worth tens of billions.

3. Restrict access to mifepristone, a crucial drug approved 20 years ago that induces early abortion and can be taken at home. The Supreme Court will rule on its use this term, and Trump's supporters are also looking to enforce the Comstock Act, which would criminalize mailing the drug. Trump, coward that he is, would not tell Time whether he supports banning this drug, saying only that 'I feel very strongly about it'.

4. Next up: Restricting access to birth control. In July 2022, 195 Republicans in the House voted against the 'Right to Contraception Act'.

If this all feels like hyperbole, like the kind of political exaggerations that could never come to pass, think again.

It is already the case that women who live in states with new, archaic bans — and let's be real, we're talking about poor women who can't afford to travel or access the best doctors — are barred from abortions past a certain date even if their fetus has grave birth defects that would leave them in agony, or to die an excruciating death hours after being born.

How is that humane?

Florida recently passed a six-week ban, signed into law by Ron DeSantis, who either doesn't know or doesn't care about the way female biology works.

Far too many women don't realize they're pregnant at six weeks. That ban went into effect today.

In 2021, Texas governor Greg Abbott signed a law banning abortion beyond six weeks of pregnancy with no exceptions for rape or incest. It also allows any random civilian to report a doctor or patient involved in abortion to the police.

Weeks ago, Arizona disinterred a long-dormant ban (dating back to 1864) that prohibited abortion from the moment of conception with one provision, to save the mother's life.

Late Wednesday afternoon, lawmakers voted to repeal, with every Democratic senator and two defecting Republicans supporting the motion.

That tells you everything.

In 2021, Texas governor Greg Abbott signed a law banning abortion beyond six weeks of pregnancy with no exceptions for rape or incest. It also allows any random civilian to report a doctor or patient involved in abortion to the police.

Florida recently passed a six-week ban, signed into law by Ron DeSantis, who either doesn't know or doesn't care about the way female biology works. Far too many women don't realize they're pregnant at six weeks. That ban went into effect today.

Even Trump knows how dangerous these restrictive laws are to him politically.

Just three weeks ago, he made the point of publicly stating that Florida and Arizona have gone too far, and their new bans need to be changed.

So which is it, President Trump? States should be able to surveil pregnant women from conception until birth – 'it's irrelevant whether I'm comfortable or not' – or some laws are too prohibitive?

Let's work through what state surveillance of a pregnancy looks like.

A woman goes to her doctor and takes a pregnancy test — because, in this Brave New World, over-the-counter pregnancy tests are presumably no longer available.

Everything about a pregnancy must be known to the government, so the doctor alerts the state to each and every patient, along with their gestational timeline.

What if someone travels across state lines for an abortion?

Is a doctor a criminal if they falsely record an aborted fetus as a miscarriage?

If one woman can't access mifepristone but her friend in another state can, and mails it to her, do they both risk prison time?

This is the Pandora's Box unleashed by Trump. He shouldn't be allowed to slither out of it.

Amanda Zurawski found out her much-wanted pregnancy wasn't viable after 18 weeks.

But because of Texas's dangerous new law, her doctors weren't allowed to perform an abortion, which would have prevented the subsequent infection that almost killed Amanda twice.

The damage was so severe that Amanda may never conceive again.

Her story was featured in one of the strongest ads released by the Biden-Harris campaign so far.

It ends with one indelible line: 'Donald Trump did this'.

In his Time interview, the former president covered everything from crime, to immigration, the Middle East, tariffs and trade – and yet he had very little to say about the specifics of his plans for American women.

But oh, he said enough. And this issue is now on the ballot in every battleground state.

Mark my words: The defining issue in this election will not be the border, crime, the economy or Israel.

It's reproductive rights. Women's rights.

In the wake of the Time interview, President Biden released a pithy, potent statement: 'Trump doesn't trust women… I do'.

Trump got his way in overturning Roe. How poetic, how justifiably symmetrical, if it costs him this election.