At the age of 53, in a 1999 interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Donald Trump described himself as “very pro-choice.”

In 2011, without any explanation, he informed a packed room at a conservative conference that he was now “pro-life.”

In 2016, as a Republican candidate for president, he told MSNBC host Chris Matthews that he had become so ardently opposed to abortion rights that he would even support punishments for women who got abortions. He did not realize that this position went too far even for the social conservatives to whom he was trying to pander, and he quickly reversed himself.

The 2024 version of Trump is once again tying himself in knots — but this time, the stakes could not be higher.

The latest example came Friday, when Trump — nearly a full day after his campaign had to clean up his suggestion that he might support a Florida ballot measure allowing abortion up to 24 weeks after backlash from social conservatives — told Fox News that he would vote against it.

In 2022, the former president had told allies — as the Supreme Court was preparing to overturn Roe v. Wade — that the move would hurt his party. Since that year, when Republicans underperformed expectations in the midterm elections, Trump has been privately emphatic with advisers that, in his view, the abortion issue alone could kill their chances of victory in November. And he is willing to make as many rhetorical and policy contortions as he deems necessary to win.

It is through that narrow political lens that Trump has been weighing the subject, despite his role in reshaping the Supreme Court that overturned the landmark 1973 abortion decision.

Trump’s shifting views have been difficult for social conservatives to navigate.

“I don’t think he’s losing support, but no question, his acquiescence is confusing to people,” said Chad Connelly, a former chair of the South Carolina Republican Party who leads the nonprofit Faith Wins and has a following of hundreds of pastors.

However, he added that the contrast between Vice President Kamala Harris’ actions “versus Trump’s words” meant social conservatives would “look back and see the most pro-life president in American history.”

Still, even by Trump’s standards, the past few weeks have been head- spinning for people trying to keep track of his slippery social conservatism.

Trump was agitated by the speeches at the Democratic National Convention, especially by Harris’ assertions that a second Trump term would further imperil abortion rights.

He felt so defensive about the subject that on the morning of Aug. 23, the day after Harris’ speech, Trump wrote on Truth Social a sentence that sounded as if it could have come from the head of Planned Parenthood rather than a Republican candidate for president.

“My Administration,” he wrote, “will be great for women and their reproductive rights.”

Asked to comment, Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump, maintained in an emailed statement that Trump “has long been consistent in supporting the rights of states to make decisions on abortion and has been very clear that he will not sign a federal ban when he is back in the White House.”

Privately, Trump has been all over the place.

He told advisers in the spring that he was inclined to come out in favor of a 16-week national abortion ban with exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother, but that he was waiting until the Republican presidential primaries were over. After reviewing polling, he backtracked and said abortion should be left to the states, adding that he was “proud” to have overturned Roe.

But he has not left it to the states.

He has criticized various state abortion measures as overly harsh.

In 2023, he condemned Florida’s six-week abortion ban, signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis, as a “terrible mistake.” This year, he said an Arizona high court ruling that outlawed abortion went too far, and he successfully pressured Republicans in the state Legislature to address it.

And on Thursday, he said in an interview with NBC News that women in Florida needed to be given more time than just six weeks to decide whether they want to have an abortion, and that he still could not say how he would vote in that state’s referendum on abortion in November.

He had little understanding of in vitro fertilization, but when the issue was explained to him, he decided he would brand himself as a champion of IVF, again in opposition to some social conservatives who object to the destruction of human embryos. This past week, Trump went even further, declaring without any policy detail that as president he would make the expensive IVF treatments free for all Americans — an initiative that would put him to the left of many Democrats and would add billions to the national debt.

Because of his efforts to appeal to all sides, Trump’s campaign has often had to clean up his statements.

After his interview with NBC News on Thursday, his spokesperson, Leavitt, issued a statement saying that Trump had not yet said how he would vote on Florida’s abortion measure.

“He simply reiterated,” Leavitt said, “that he believes six weeks is too short.”

Trump ultimately said Friday that he would vote no on the measure, the defeat of which would preserve the six-week ban in Florida. He has still not said how many weeks he considers the right number.