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A couple of 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 the deck stacked in the former president’s favor, the event probably should’ve been a breeze for him. It was not: Despite the favorable conditions, the Republican found it necessary to lie repeatedly.
But as my MSNBC colleague Clarissa-Jan Lim explained, one claim stood out as especially striking: Trump declared himself “the father of IVF” at the event.
As we discussed soon after, Democrats wasted little time in seizing on the claim — Vice President Kamala Harris described the boast as “quite bizarre” — but the GOP candidate’s team downplayed the story. In fact, a spokesperson for Trump said the line was a “joke.”
It really wasn’t. At the former president’s latest rally in Nevada, for example, he not only returned to the subject, he also told attendees, “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, declaring, “I’m like the father of IVF.”
As the videos help show, he clearly wasn’t kidding. This was not, as his campaign claimed in mid-October, a “joke.” The GOP candidate really does expect voters to see him not only as some kind of champion of in vitro fertilization but as the “father” of the procedure.
These claims are absurd. In fact, at the Fox News town hall, he also elaborated on 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 fantastically attractive person from Alabama, she’s a senator — and she called me up, like, ‘Emergency, emergency!’”
He added that he then asked Britt to explain IVF to him “very quickly,” and “within about two minutes I understood it.”
In other words, by his own telling, Trump wasn’t especially familiar with this common medical treatment until earlier this year. Now, however, he apparently expects to be seen as “the father of IVF” anyway.
“He should take responsibility for the fact that one in three women in America lives in a Trump’s-abortion-ban state,” Harris said after the Fox event, referring to her Republican rival. “What he should take responsibility for is that couples who are praying and hoping and working towards growing a family have been so disappointed and harmed by the fact that IVF treatments have now been put at risk.”
That’s still true two weeks later.