In a staged, barnlike setting in the Atlanta suburbs this week, Donald Trump faced an all-women audience in what Fox News billed as a “town hall.” Except the event that aired Wednesday morning bore little resemblance to an actual town hall, wherein a candidate faces undecided constituents and fields their genuine questions, however tough or critical those questions may be.
Instead, the event focused on “women’s issues” was more like an infomercial: pretaped and, according to reporting from CNN, edited by a friendly network that cultivated a safe space filled with current Trump supporters and Republican operatives. One woman sitting front and center wore an “RNC Delegate” hat. The first woman to ask a question was Lisa Cauley, the president of Fulton County Republican Women. Another audience member thanked Trump for being willing to face a room full of “women the current administration would call domestic terrorists,” and CNN reported that Fox News had to edit out a question in which one woman announced she was already voting for Trump.
The questions these women posed read as if they were written by the Trump campaign itself, focusing heavily on “immigrant crime,” border security, and trans women in sports. “How do you stop men from playing in women’s sports?” moderator Harris Faulkner, Fox News’ only Black woman anchor who once quipped on-air that her pronouns are “USA,” asked Trump. “Do you go to the sports leagues?”
Trump responded, “You just ban it. Not a big deal,” then shared an anecdote about a video he had supposedly just seen of a trans volleyball player spiking the ball too hard at a cis opponent.
The rest of the event was similarly free of specifics. Asked how he’d lower child-care costs, he only name-dropped his daughter and said she “drove him crazy” on the issue. “You’ve never heard of Ivanka, right?” he said. Asked what he could realistically do with Congress to secure the border, Trump complained about the current administration. “There’s no country that can sustain this,” he said. “We’re a laughingstock all over the world. They’re laughing at our president and our vice-president.”
There was just one question on abortion — “Why is the government involved in basic women’s rights?” — and one on IVF, both of which Trump seemed to expect. “I’m the father of IVF,” he declared in response to the latter, then admitted that earlier this year he had to ask the “young” and “fantastically attractive” Republican senator Katie Britt to explain to him what IVF even is.
The chummy atmosphere at the event made Trump look like a coward. And it was a puzzling choice for a candidate trying to project confidence and superiority after refusing both CNN and Fox News’ invitations for a second debate. Compare that with Kamala Harris, who has been stepping out of her comfort zone lately. She agreed to sit down on Fox News with Bret Baier on the same day the network aired Trump’s prerecorded town hall; did her own town hall live on CNN; and even talked to conspiracy theorist and man-fluencer Joe Rogan about appearing on his podcast. Since trouncing Trump in the first debate, she’s proven that no network, audience, or interview setting is unfriendly enough to intimidate her.
In Harris’s heated and tense Wednesday-night interview with Baier, she, unlike Trump, genuinely appeared to be scrapping for the votes of whichever women watching Fox News still remain on the fence. She took Baier to task for playing an edited clip of Trump referring to Democrats as “the enemy within” and made a passionate case for her candidacy to the network’s right-wing audience. “At stake in this race are the democratic ideas that our founders and generations of Americans before us have fought for,” she said. “At stake in this election is the Constitution of the United States.”
It’s unclear what Trump gained, meanwhile, from sitting down in a room full of women who already support him and repeating the stale lines we’ve already heard about how he plans to “protect” women via tariffs and border security. He reiterated the false talking point that “everybody,” Republicans and Democrats alike, wanted Roe v. Wade overturned so that abortion would be sent “back to the states.” (Nearly two-thirds of American voters opposed that decision.) He behaved in his usual creepy fashion, interrupting a single mom who was in the middle of telling a story about breaking her neck to point out that she has a “beautiful voice.” No woman in that room challenged Trump on the maternal health crisis unfolding since he got Roe overturned, his choice of a running mate who mocks childless women as “miserable cat ladies,” or his false claim that Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets in Ohio. He showed zero evolution on the issues that actually matter most to women voters, which are abortion and rising household expenses, not migrant crime. And he did nothing to earn a single vote that wasn’t already going his way.
But if the goal was to self-soothe among a group of fawning admirers and to convince Fox News’ audience that his campaign isn’t staring down a historic gender gap, Trump can count this so-called town hall as a success.