Former President Donald Trump has caused massive and lasting harm to the Republican Party and the conservative movement in ways not fully comprehended today.

And he has also caused the overturn of Roe v. Wade, possibly the greatest accomplishment by any Republican since Abraham Lincoln.

During the 2016 primaries, I was 100% certain that Trump was the worst possible Republican nominee. During the 2016 general election, I was undecided on whether a Trump presidency would be better than a Hillary Clinton presidency — which is why I cast a protest vote.

The harms I feared from a Trump presidency almost all came to fruition, and Trump caused many harms I never imagined.

Trump transformed the GOP from a mostly (if imperfectly) conservative party to a cult of personality wedded to conspiracy theories. A “RINO,” or a “Republican in name only,” used to be a Republican who supported tax hikes or abortion. Today, a RINO is a Republican who doesn’t believe Rudy Giuliani’s fever dreams about a stolen election.

Trump didn’t simply tarnish the GOP brand in certain circles — that’s a very temporary thing, and Republicans of all stripes had done plenty to tarnish the brand on their own. Trump habituated Republicans and conservatives into conspiracy-theorizing, into lib-owning as the highest undertaking, and into defending corruption and abuse of power.

Yet Trump brought about the end of Roe. That is something every prior Republican decidedly couldn’t do or refused to do.

The majority in Roe included five Republican appointees. The majority in 1992 upholding Roe in Planned Parenthood v. Casey included five Republican appointees. Pro-life voters were told endlessly to elect Republican presidents and senators to overturn Roe, and again and again, after Souters and O’connors and Kennedys, this proved folly. Even George W. Bush, the closest thing to a religious Right president, didn’t give us two reliable votes against Roe.

It took, of all people, Trump to give us a majority more wedded to the Constitution than to abortion.

No issue in politics is more important than abortion because no cause is more righteous than protecting innocent babies from slaughter. No president did more good on abortion than Trump. So this makes things complicated.

How is a pro-life conservative who is fully aware of Trump’s crippling vices and his lasting harms to feel today?

One relevant question is whether a different Republican nominee would have yielded as good results, Supreme Court-wise, in 2016 through 2020 as Trump did. First, would Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, John Kasich, or Ted Cruz have beaten Hillary? Maybe anybody with a pulse would have defeated that obviously corrupt, thoroughly unlikable, entirely opportunistic politician. Then again, maybe it took Trump’s unique appeal to the working-class voter to carry Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in 2016.

Also, once in office, perhaps it took Trump’s unique disdain for the liberal media to place three conservatives on the high court. When the Washington Post and Democratic senators rallied relentlessly behind uncorroborated sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, would another Republican president have caved? When the media and Democrats decided that it was somehow foul play to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg a month before the election in 2020, would another Republican have gone along with that argument?

You could make the case that other Republicans would have lacked the cojones to stand up to the cultural pressure in these cases. I’m not sure that’s true, but it could be.

The second question is what would have happened had Clinton defeated Trump in 2016. Surely the seats occupied by Justices Neil Gorsuch (replacing Antonin Scalia) and Amy Coney Barrett (replacing Ginsburg) would have been filed by her. That would mean a 5-4 liberal majority at best, and Roe would have been sacrosanct. So someone like me, who sees all the evil effects of Trump’s presidency, including the embrace of lies and corruption, has to weigh those costs against this glorious benefit. We have discarded the most evil and corrupt lie since slavery: the lie that our Constitution protects the right to exterminate babies.

It’s hard to believe Trump was bad, on net for the country, when he delivered this great good. But it’s also hard to embrace a man so foul as a force for good.

In a generation, we will have a better perspective on this man. For now, all we can say with confidence is thank God for Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett.

“There are always new things to find out if you go looking for them.” Sir David Attenborough, English broadcaster, biologist