Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
The chances of Donald Trump saying something weird and sexist during his town hall on “women’s issues” with Fox News host Harris Faulkner that aired on Wednesday were pretty high from the start. Yes, Fox News hosts often ask Trump easy, fawning questions and even attempt to guide him back on topic when he rambles. And many in the all-female audience were reportedly recruited from Republican groups in Georgia. But Trump has long been known for his sexism, and recently we’ve seen a lot of evidence that the former president is generally deteriorating, from his messy Bloomberg interview to the town hall during which he listened to music and danced for 39 minutes.
Sure enough, when asked about abortion bans blocking access to IVF treatments, Trump began by referencing the attractiveness of the female U.S. senator from Alabama.
“So I got a call from Katie Britt, a young — just a fantastically attractive person from Alabama. She’s a senator,” he said.
Trump recalled Britt calling him to sound the alarm earlier this year when Alabama’s Supreme Court briefly shut down IVF treatments in the state by ruling that frozen embryos created for in vitro fertilization are “children” under state law, enabled by Trump-appointed justices on the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.
Trump suggested he “didn’t even know” embryos were involved in fertility treatments until he had Britt explain IVF “very quickly” over the phone:
[Britt] called me up like, “Emergency! Emergency!” Because an Alabama judge had ruled that the IVF clinics were illegal and they have to be closed down. A judge ruled. And she said, “Friends of mine came up to me, and they were — oh, they were so angry!”I didn’t even know they were going, you know, they were — it’s fertilization. I didn’t know they were even involved in, nobody talks about — they don’t talk about it. But now that they can’t do it — she said, “I was attacked. In a certain way, I was attacked.”
And I said, “Explain IVF very quickly.” And within about two minutes, I understood it. I said, “No, no. We’re totally in favor of IVF.”
It’s particularly weird that Trump didn’t know how IVF works, since moments earlier he proclaimed himself the “father of IVF”:
Why is Trump the “father” of a process he seems to know little about? It’s unclear, as the Kamala Harris campaign was quick to note:
Trump might have been referring to his efforts to position himself as the savior of IVF as the crisis in Alabama was unfolding. During the town hall, Trump pointed to his statement calling on the Alabama Legislature to find a solution, which it did a short time later, passing a law providing immunity to IVF providers.
“I came out with a statement within an hour,” Trump said. “A really powerful statement with some experts. Really powerful. And we went totally in favor, the Republican Party — the whole party. Alabama Legislature, a day later, overturned — meaning approved it, overturned the judge, essentially — approved it.”
Trump concluded by claiming that Republicans are actually better on IVF than Democrats.
“We really are the party for IVF,” he said. “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 of it.”
Hopefully another Senate hottie will call Trump and explain why that’s total nonsense.
