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Surprise!
Donald J. Trump, one time big city Democrat has come out as the social moderate he’s always been.
In a Fox News “Town Hall” that aired Wednesday morning, Trump sat down with Harris Faulkner and a group of friendly female voters in Georgia to help boost his appeal to the crucial demographic.
In a recent Fox News poll Kamala Harris is ten points ahead of Trump among women.
Sure, he’s been cast by the left as a Handmaiden’s villain, but his positions on abortion – much to the chagrin of Republican Pro Life wing – are nuanced.
The 45th president — who appointed three Supreme Court Justices who voted to overturn Roe v Wade, which sent the issue of abortion back to the states — said some state abortion bans are “too tough.” And that he supports exceptions for “rape, incest, life of the mother.”
In his own hyperbolic Trumpian vernacular, he declared his unequivocal support for In vitro Fertilization, by calling himself “the father of IVF.”
Trump defies easy characterization – remember he remade the Republican Party in his likeness (for better or for worse).
And it was important for him to at least answer these questions from real women. The GOP has struggled with their messaging a post-Roe world, and it’s allowed the left to doggedly pursue female voters using fear mongering messaging about reproductive rights – frequently twisting the truth.
Why else would Tim Walz lie and lie about him and his wife using IVF?
The Town Hall also tackled other topics, like border safety, the economy and child care costs. Because women aren’t just single issue voters who eat pro-abortion slogans for breakfast.
We care about the cost of housing and sky high grocery bills. We worry we have so many unvetted illegal immigrants in the country, sucking away government resources and a sense of security and safety (even as ABC host Martha Raddatz poo poos this concern). We worry that the left has allowed biological men into female spaces.
One woman asked Trump what he’d do about keeping trans athletes out of girl’s sports.
He said, “You just ban it.” which is a great slogan but hardly a viable path to action.
It is, however, refreshing for a candidate to at least acknowledge that biological men do not belong in women’s sports.
Many on the left simply don’t have the cojones to take this obvious position and call out truths that until maybe eight years ago would have been pretty banal.
It’s unclear if any of this will resonate outside of the MAGA echo chamber. But at least it all came straight from his mouth, not though a dem messaging machine.