On Wednesday, Fox News aired a pre-taped, “women’s issues”-focused “town hall” featuring Donald Trump and a room full of women. But as more and more details are unearthed about the event, what’s increasingly clear is that it wasn’t a town hall at all. A town hall is an event where candidates face undecided voters and field difficult questions; Trump’s event was closer to a slightly muted campaign rally that just so happened to exclude men. A closer look at footage from the “town hall” shows one woman in the front row wearing a hat that literally says “RNC Delegate” on it, while the first woman to ask the former president a question was the president of the Fulton County Republican Women organization.
Yet, even in this GOP safe space full of female sycophants, Trump still managed to fuck up. For example, he made women everywhere uncomfortable when he called himself the “father of IVF” and then described a sitting U.S. senator, Republican Katie Britt of Alabama, as “young” and “fantastically attractive.”
Trump—and Fox News—have severely betrayed the trust of millions of viewers who turn to the channel for its unwavering ethics, journalistic integrity, and fair and balanced election coverage. Objective, nonpartisan reporting is, famously, Fox News’ specialty. So, to correct for the network’s egregious lapse in judgment, I’m here to propose the only possible solution: Trump must sit in a room full of women who hate him, and let us—err, I mean, them—throw peanuts and scream at him for two hours.
I will say, there’s something undeniably comical about Fox News scrambling to find as many Trump-supporting women as they could, and probably being able to fit them all in a single room. A new poll this week shows Harris leading Trump 57 to 42% among women. The entire staged, faux town hall was a ploy to address this gap, as pollsters keep warning that suburban women and their opposition to Trump’s abortion bans could decide the election. But if anything, I’d argue that the image of a man found civilly liable for sexual abuse being too afraid to face actual women who haven’t been pre-vetted to be his supporters should do little to win anyone over.
So, what, really, was the point of this? Sure, it’s doubtful Trump would say anything illuminating or even coherent in a town hall of “undecided” or Democratic women voters. But at the very least, maybe we could heckle him, mock his hideously ugly makeup, or otherwise make him feel very down about himself, and there’d at least be some value in that.
In the final stretch before Election Day, Trump and Kamala Harris’ media strategies are pretty telling. While Trump sat in a room filled with adoring female fans asking planted questions like how he’d keep men out of women’s sports, Harris did an adversarial interview with Fox News Brett Baier, in which she pitched herself to the network’s overwhelmingly right-wing audience. Who knows, maybe she expanded her base even slightly from this appearance. Meanwhile, the best Trump can hope for is that his pre-taped “women’s issues” town hall didn’t lose him women’s support by continuing to be a total and complete weirdo.
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