Trump Focuses on Women’s Issues in Town Hall Fox News After the Dobbs Decided Decline: A Mixed Reaction from Minority Causality
Former President Donald Trump attempted to reach out to women voters with a Fox News town hall that aired Wednesday morning. Trump took questions from an all-women audience during the hour-long special.
Trump heard from a friendly crowd on a range of issues, including child care and transgender kids in sports. He talked about reproductive rights late in the town hall, conceding that some states have passed abortion laws that are “too tough” in the wake of the Dobbs decision. He also defended his comments to Maria Bartiromo over the weekend where he called some Democrats “the enemy from within” and said he’d use the military against them.
The crowd was very supportive of the former president. Faulkner shook her head after she played a clip from the Democratic press call and she was critical of the Democratic effort to disrupt the town hall.
On some questions, Trump did not give clear answers. When Faulkner pressed him on what he could realistically get done with Congress on immigration, he did not answer, but instead slammed Biden and Harris’ record on the border.
“There’s no country that can sustain this,” he said. All over the world, we’re a laughing stock. They’re laughing at our president and our vice president.”
Source: Trump focuses on women’s issues in front of all-woman audience in Fox News town hall
The New York Times’ Call to the New Congress on Proton and Abortion. A Preliminary Report on the Campaign of Donald J. Trump
After one question asking how he’d help with the costs of childcare, Trump talked about growing the Child Tax Credit as president. The benefit went to high-income families. He was also unclear about how he would further help with the costs of raising children, saying he wants to “readjust things so that it’s fair to everybody,” adding that he wants to bring down corporate taxes.
“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within. Not even the people that have come in and are destroying our country,” he said on Bartiromo’s Sunday Morning Futures this week. There are a lot of bad people here. We have people that are sick and crazy. It should be done easily by the National Guard or the military.
The topic of abortion came up in the broadcast. One questioner claimed that women are entitled to do what they want to do with their bodies and then asked, why is the government involved in women’s basic rights?
Three of the five Supreme Court justices voted to overturn abortion rights in the 1960’s.
The Harris campaign is continuing to hit Trump hard on the topic of reproductive rights. In the call held before the town hall, the family of a woman who died waiting to be seen for birth control talk about how she could have died if she had not taken abortion pills.
“He spent $20 million on those ads trying to create a sense of fear in the voters, because he actually has no plan in this election that is about focusing on the needs of the American people,” Harris said, describing the issue of gender transition surgeries for prisoners as “really quite remote” compared to the biggest issues affecting American voters.
She said she would follow federal law, even though Trump has spent millions of dollars on ads demonizing Harris for trying to help trans prisoners and migrants. Harris also pointed to evidence that the Trump administration followed the same law.
Harris did not accept blame for the deaths of young women by immigrants, even as Baier pressed her to do so. Trump called for Republicans to “tank” the border security deal that failed to pass after it was bipartisan.
“We feel like we definitely achieved what we set out to achieve in the sense that she was able to reach an audience that’s probably been not exposed to the arguments she’s been making on the trail,” said Brian Fallon, a top Harris campaign aide. “And she also got to show her toughness in standing tall against a hostile interviewer.”
He has talked about going after people who are peaceful in their protest, and I know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people. He’s talked about putting people in jail if they disagree with him. This is a democracy and in a democracy the President of the United States, in the United States of America, should be willing to be able to handle criticism without saying he would lock people up for doing it.”
Trump told Faulkner that they were the ones doing the threatening. They do fake investigations. I’ve been investigated more than Alphonse Capone was.”
In a town hall with women voters that aired on Fox News earlier in the day, Trump doubled down on that statement, saying, “It is the enemy from within, and they are very dangerous; they are marxists and communists and fascists and they’re sick.”
She took every opportunity she could to mention those endorsements and made sure to reference former President Donald Trump’s recent remarks referring to Democrats as “the enemy within.” He said he might have to use the military to take care of that enemy.
After appearing with more than 100 Republicans and former Trump administration officials, Harris went onto the pro-Trump network on her mission to reach moderate Republicans.
Harris said that his presidency would not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency, and he would bring his life experiences, professional experiences and fresh and new ideas. “I represent a new generation of leadership.”
About half way through the intense 30-minute interview, Baier asked Harris a question she didn’t answer very well in more friendly interviews last week on The View and on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert: What would she do differently from President Biden? She was prepared this time.