"We want fertilization": Trump's all-female Fox News town hall wasn't for women, but his male base

Donald Trump is so scared of questions these days that he doesn't just cancel interviews, he will stand and sway to music for 39 minutes rather than answer the inquiries of his rally attendees. Still, in an odd choice for a campaign canceling interviews faster than they can book them, Trump's team did allow him to sit for an all-female town hall. His staff did everything they could to make it easy on the increasingly addled old man. They scheduled it on Fox News, rather than a legitimate news network. It was pre-taped and edited, unlike the unedited interview Fox News did with Vice President Kamala Harris. And the host, Harris Faulkner, has legitimately impressive skills at cutting him off and redirecting his attention without triggering a tantrum, suggesting she would be a crackerjack at handling the worst dementia patients at a care facility.

Right away, the town hall felt less like Trump trying to appeal to female voters, and more like his campaign trying to reassure the notoriously fragile candidate that women don't hate him. It was immediately obvious that audience members were chosen for their loyalty to Trump. One participant even joked that it's a "room full of women the current administration would consider domestic terrorists," which is to say they aren't just Republicans, but ready to volunteer for the next Jan. 6. This line drew gushing applause, because on Fox News, "feminism" is reminding viewers that women can be fascists, too.

The next hour was built around Trump's main — sole, really — pitch to women: If they don't vote for him, they will be raped and murdered by dark-skinned immigrants. He argued at one point that immigrants have such allegedly superhuman strength that they are literally picking up refrigerators and walking out of stores with them, while cops, in his lurid fantasy, are standing by, forbidden by "woke" city leaders from stopping crimes in action. As usual with his bizarre lies, Trump claimed to have seen this on a video with his own eyes. Of course, since it's physically impossible, the fact-checking performs itself.

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At no point did host Faulkner mention that two separate juries have found that E. Jean Carroll was telling the truth when she said Trump raped her in the 90s. Nor was there any danger of this heavily curated audience of MAGA loyalists reminding viewers that Trump, statistically speaking, is far more likely to commit sexual assault than any random immigrant. After all, as Eric Garcia reported for the Independent, "the attendees in an intimate setting were from Republican groups around the area whom Fox News invited."

In the real world, this election is shaping up to have the biggest voting gender gap in history. The Trump campaign's "outreach" to women has been anemic. Multiple experts have argued that the campaign has decided it's a waste of time to court female voters. Instead, Trump is focused on trying to turn out low-propensity male voters with a "bro"-centric strategy, to make up for his losses with women.

In light of that, it is likely that this town hall was not meant for a female audience at all. Instead, it's about reassuring Trump's male base that they aren't misogynists, even though they back a sexual predator whose only real accomplishment in office was getting abortion rights taken away. This impression is reinforced by the fact that Faulkner deftly controlled Trump when he was threatening to go on rants about the 2020 election or other topics that are unpopular even with many Republican voters. But when Trump was being creepy to women, she didn't interfere. She did nothing to stop him from leeringly telling one participant that she has a "beautiful voice." She let him gush about how sexually attractive he finds Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala.

That Trump doesn't care about getting women's votes was made especially evident when, 50 minutes in, the town hall finally touched on the issue of reproductive rights. When asked about abortion, Trump rolled out a non-answer about how ending Roe was no big deal because, in some states, people are restoring abortion rights with ballot initiatives. Unsurprisingly, Faulkner did not push and ask him if he would sign a national abortion ban. As we learned during his debate with Harris last month, the answer is a big, fat yes. Nor does "leave it to the states" do much for women who are bleeding out in parking lots because their state banned abortions even in case of emergencies.

But things truly got weird when a participant asked Trump about IVF, and Trump got both gross and punchy, like a weary toddler trying to eat spaghetti. "We want fertilization, and it's all the way," Trump said, which is disturbing to read but even more unsettling in his nasal tone which makes it sound like a threat.

"I'm the father of IVF," Trump declared. Fact check: Sir Robert Edwards, a British physiologist, developed in-vitro fertilization in the 1970s, winning the Nobel prize for his research in 2010. But, of course, common sense tells us that Trump — a man who once suggested bleach injections to cure COVID-19 — is barely aware of how human biology works. He is not, as he pretends, a Nobel-level biologist.

Most tellingly, after implying he invented IVF, Trump then pivoted to admitting he didn't know what it was. He told the story of Britt calling him "emergency, emergency" when Alabama's highest court, following the lead of the Supreme Court's Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health, banned the procedure earlier this year. "I said, 'Explain IVF, very quickly,'" Trump said of his conversation with Britt. "Within two minutes, I understood it," Trump added.

He does not, in fact, understand what IVF is. Listening to him in this interview, it was clear he still doesn't know what "IVF" stands for, even after months of being asked questions about it. But I do believe him when he recounts asking Britt to explain it to him. This brief admission of ignorance was perhaps the only true thing he said in an hour-long interview. But it also underscored how little Trump was actually trying to speak to female voters. The overall moral of his story was "Women keep yapping about it, so we'll promise they can have it to shut them up." But that promise is a lie. As Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., pointed out on Twitter, Republicans were twice given the opportunity to vote for a bill to protect IVF access, and twice they voted against it.

Women vote more than men, so it seems unwise of the Trump campaign to treat female voters like a joke. But it also seems like their candidate is congenitally incapable of viewing women as autonomous human beings. On the campaign trail, he frequently says things like, "I always thought women liked me. I never thought I had a problem. But the fake news keeps saying women don’t like me." It's not a surprise that most women loathe Trump, who bragged on tape about how he routinely commits sexual assault. But he is so unable to imagine women have minds that it simply doesn't register that women tend to dislike known sexual assailants. So whether they like it or not, the Trump campaign is stuck with a strategy of talking past women in hopes that enough men love the misogyny to get off their couches and vote.