A few weeks ago, Donald Trump tried to address his gender gap problem by participating in a town hall event on Fox News, with an audience made up entirely of women. With everything going in the former president’s favor, the event probably should have been a piece of cake for him. That was not the case: despite the favorable circumstances, the Republican found it necessary to lie repeatedly.
But as my MSNBC colleague Clarissa-Jan Lim explained, one statement particularly stood out: Trump declared himself “the father of IVF” during the event.
As we discussed soon after, Democrats wasted little time seizing on the claim — Vice President Kamala Harris described the boast as “pretty bizarre” — but the Republican candidate’s team downplayed the story. A Trump spokesperson even said the sentence was a “joke.”
It really wasn’t. For example, at the former president’s last meeting in Nevada, he not only returned to the topic, but also told those present“I feel like I am the father of IVF.”
About an hour later, during the same speech to the same audience, Trump said it again, to declare“I’m like the father of IVF.”
As the videos show, he clearly wasn’t joking. This was not, as his campaign claimed in mid-October, a “joke.” The Republican candidate really expects that voters will see him not only as a kind of champion of in vitro fertilization, but also as the “father” of the procedure.
These claims are absurd. In fact, at the Fox News town hall he also went into more detail about how he came to understand the issue.
Describing the aftermath of an Alabama Supreme Court ruling earlier this year, the former president said: “I got a call from Katie Britt – a young, just a wonderfully attractive person from Alabama, she’s a senator – and she called me, like, ‘Emergency, emergency!’”
He added that he then asked Britt to explain IVF to him “very quickly,” and “within about two minutes I understood.”
In other words: Trump, by his own admission, was only really familiar with this general medical treatment earlier this year. Now, however, he apparently expects to be seen as ‘the father of IVF’.
“He should take responsibility for the fact that one in three women in America lives in a state where Trump has an abortion ban,” Harris said after the Fox event, referring to her Republican rival. “What he needs to take responsibility for is that couples who pray and hope and work to grow a family have been so disappointed and harmed by the fact that IVF treatments have now been compromised.”
That is still the case two weeks later.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
