During a Fox News town hall aimed at women and featuring an all-female audience, former President Donald Trump defended the federal rollback of abortion rights, ignored the death of a Georgia woman under her state’s restrictive abortion law, and called an Alabama U.S. senator “fantastically attractive.”
The Fox News event, which was taped Tuesday night in Cumming, Georgia, and aired late Wednesday morning, was stacked with Trump supporters, including a woman in an “RNC delegate” hat from the GOP convention, feeding the GOP presidential nominee pre-screened softball questions.
“I want to thank you for coming into a room full of women that the current administration would consider domestic terrorists,” one audience member said.
The vast majority of questions in the hour-long segment — which covered topics ranging from the border and immigration to “men in women’s sports,” a derogatory reference to transgender athletes — allowed Trump to cast himself as a protector of women’s safety with no pushback from the host, Fox New’s Harris Faulkner, who cut Trump off at moments when he seemed ready to launch into tirades about the 2020 election and electric vehicles.
“We had the safest border. We had the best economy. Think of it, a combination of security and finance,” Trump falsely claimed of his presidency during the event.
Both campaigns are making an effort in the run-up to Election Day to shore up support among certain key constituencies.
The gender gap is particularly wide between Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump, with female voters favoring Harris by 9 points, enough to sway an election.
AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson
The issue of reproductive rights was barely broached during Trump’s town hall in Georgia, a swing state with a six-week abortion ban. The topic finally came up in the second-to-last question and was framed as an issue that Democrats are using for an electoral advantage.
“After years and years of turmoil, now it’s back in the states,” said Trump, who has boasted in the past about appointing the Supreme Court justices who repealed Roe v. Wade — a move that a majority of Americans did not support.
“Nobody wanted it to be in the federal government,” Trump lied. “Five or six or seven years ago, they started talking about weeks and this and that. But what they wanted is, they wanted back in the states for a vote of the people, and that’s what we have.”
But Trump noted that voters in Ohio and Kansas, both states that voted for him, passed measures at the ballot box protecting abortion rights after the fall of Roe. He suggested that voters in those states might come to regret their decisions — even as he argued that it was his ultimate goal was for states to set their own abortion laws.
“Those are going to be redone, because already there’s a movement in those states,” Trump said.
To appear supportive of reproductive rights, the GOP is trying to convey that the party backs in-vitro fertilization after an Alabama court ruled earlier this year that embryos frozen used in the procedure qualify as “unborn children” for the purposes of civil liability.
“I’m the father of IVF,” Trump bragged, adding that he’s fielded calls on IVF from Alabama Republican and U.S. Sen. Katie Britt, “a young, just fantastically attractive person.”
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Trump did not explain why he would refer to himself as the “father of IVF” beyond simply supporting the procedure.
At the start of the town hall, Trump and the Fox host mocked a Harris-Walz campaign call on Tuesday that featured the family of a Georgia woman who, according to reporting in ProPublica, died under Georgia’s abortion law. The woman, Amber Thurman, had traveled to North Carolina for abortion pills and was later denied urgent life-saving care in Georgia after suffering a deadly complication.
“We’ll get better ratings, I promise,” Trump said of his town hall.
Harris called Trump’s remarks on IVF “quite bizarre” in remarks to reporters on Wednesday afternoon. “He needs to take responsibility for the fact that 1 in 3 women in America live under a Trump abortion ban,” she said.