For months, Donald Trump, aware of the fact that he’s trailing badly among women voters, has taken a variety of steps to address the gender gap. In every instance, the former president has made matters worse, not better.
It was against this backdrop that the Republican agreed to a town hall, hosted by Fox News, and all of the attendees in the audience were women.
A CNN report noted that the network “did not disclose that the female audience it selected for the event was packed with local Republican supporters and the network edited its broadcast to remove some of their vocal advocacy of Trump.”
With the deck stacked in the former president’s favor, the event probably should’ve been a breeze for him. It was not: Despite the favorable conditions, Trump found it necessary to lie repeatedly.
But as my MSNBC colleague Clarissa-Jan Lim explained, one claim stood out as especially striking.
Donald Trump declared himself “the father of IVF” to a crowd of women at a Fox News town hall on Tuesday night, making bombastic, bizarre claims about his support for the procedure as he tries to curry favor with female voters ahead of the election. The Republican presidential nominee made the wildly false declaration while fielding a question from someone in the audience, who asked about his position on in vitro fertilization.
“We really are the party for IVF,” Trump added. “We want fertilization, and it’s all the way, and the Democrats tried to attack us on it, and we’re out there on IVF even more than them. So we’re totally in favor.”
Right off the bat, it’s important to emphasize that since earlier this year, Senate Republicans have rejected four different Democratic efforts to protect and expand IVF access. The idea that the GOP is “out there on IVF even more than” Democrats is obviously preposterous.
What’s more, as part of the same on-air exchange, Trump didn’t just label himself “the father of IVF,” the Republican candidate also elaborated on how he came to understand the issue.
Describing the aftermath of an Alabama Supreme Court ruling issued earlier this year, the former president said, “I got a call from Katie Britt — a young, just a fantastically attractive person from Alabama, she’s a senator — and she called me up, like, ‘Emergency, emergency!’”
Why was it necessary to describe the Alabama Republican as “fantastically attractive”? It wasn’t.
Trump nevertheless added that he then asked Britt to explain IVF to him “very quickly,” and “within about two minutes I understood it.”
In other words, by his own telling, Trump wasn’t especially familiar with this common medical treatment until earlier this year. Now, however, he apparently expects to be seen as “the father of IVF” anyway.
A spokesperson for the GOP nominee said the line was a “joke.” Vice President Kamala Harris wasn’t laughing. In fact, the Democratic nominee told reporters that she found Trump’s boast to be “quite bizarre.”
“He should take responsibility for the fact that one in three women in America lives in a Trump’s-abortion-ban state,” Harris added. “What he should take responsibility for is that couples who are praying and hoping and working towards growing a family have been so disappointed and harmed by the fact that IVF treatments have now been put at risk.”
The incumbent vice president went on to say, in reference to her 2024 rival, “Let’s not be distracted by his choice of words. Reality is, his actions have been very harmful to women and families in America.”
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
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