Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday greeted what may have been his dream audience: A roomful of seemingly adoring women.
The squeals and claps seem confounding when you consider Trump’s history with—and impacts on—women: He has been found liable of sexual assault against a woman; he was found guilty of 34 felony counts related to buying a porn star’s silence, after he allegedly cheated on his wife with her; and he appointed three of the five Supreme Court justices who overruled Roe v. Wade, which has subsequently created a healthcare apocalypse and endangered vulnerable women.
But his presence at the all-women Georgia town hall, hosted by Fox News’ Harris Faulkner, makes sense when you recognize that Trump (understandably) has a major problem with women voters: A national poll from NBC News released this weekend found that Harris has a 14 point lead among them. (Trump seems to be aware of the problem; see, for example, a late-night, all-caps meltdown he had on Truth Social last month, in which he essentially—and implausibly—promised to make women great again if reelected.)
As attendees to the Georgia town hall, which was taped Tuesday, made clear, Trump’s women problem has a lot to do with his role in restricting abortion access nationwide, and the ripple effects that have flowed from that—including threats to accessing IVF, which often involves the discarding of embryos.
As audience members confronted him over these impacts—which became clear in Alabama earlier this year—Trump reiterated his usual spiel of reproductive rights-related falsehoods, which included claiming that “every legal scholar” wanted Roe overruled (easily debunked) and that Republicans are “the party of IVF”—despite the fact that Republicans have twice blocked a vote on a bill that would protect IVF access nationwide, as I have covered. (The GOP said that it supports IVF and that the bill was unnecessary.)
But Trump also debuted a new lie at the town hall: He claimed he’s the “father of IVF.”
“I want to talk about IVF,” Trump said in the lead-up to a question about how abortion bans could impact fertility treatments. “I’m the father of IVF, so I want to hear this question.” (He then proceeded to call Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.)—who he said taught him what IVF is—”fantastically attractive.”)
If you are wondering what on Earth he could have possibly meant, you are not alone. Trump is certainly not the creator of the reproductive technology (that was a British doctor, named Robert Edwards, in 1978). And Trump has never suggested any of his five children were born through IVF. In a statement provided to Mother Jones, Karoline Leavitt, national press secretary for the Trump campaign, dismissed the comment as “a joke President Trump made in jest when he was enthusiastically answering a question about IVF as he strongly supports widespread access to fertility treatments for women and families.” She did not respond to questions about whether Trump supported the Democratic-led bill on IVF that Republicans twice blocked, or how his proposal to force the government or private insurance companies to fund IVF would actually work (estimates say it could cost around $8 billion).
Harris promptly clapped back, telling reporters Trump’s comments were “quite bizarre,” adding, “if what he meant is taking responsibility, then yeah, he should take responsibility for the fact that one in three women in America lives in a Trump abortion ban state.”
Jenny Lawson, executive director of Planned Parenthood Votes, said in a statement that Trump’s claim was “disturbing,” adding, “He can try pandering (or whatever that was) to women on issues like IVF but he only cares about himself.” Women voters, on the other hand, care a lot about reproductive rights: While the NBC poll found Trump and Harris in a dead heat overall, polling at 48 percent each, voters said abortion was a top motivator for them—and that they prefer Harris to Trump on the issue, 53 percent to 34 percent.
But Trump seems to be living in an alternate reality—one in which he is the best candidate for reproductive rights. “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,” he said at the town hall. “So we’re totally in favor of it.”
