“A tale of two Fox News appearances”: What Harris and Trump’s events say about the state of the election
By Michael Jones
We’ve reached the point in the presidential campaign where both candidates are shoring up vulnerable coalitions and looking to erode support from their opponents’ base.
This dynamic was at play on Fox News on Wednesday afternoon when it aired a town hall meeting with former President Donald Trump taped on Tuesday, moderated by host Harris Faulkner, in front of an all-women audience in metro Atlanta. Come evening, the network would air a sit-down interview with chief political anchor Bret Baier and Vice President Kamala Harris in Pennsylvania.
I previewed the Trump town hall in my newsletter on Tuesday and reported on the historic gender gap defining this election. This gap made the warm reception Trump seemed to receive from the audience feel strange as I watched. It only made sense later when I learned the crowd was populated with local Republican women and that Fox News edited its broadcast to remove some of their public support for the former president, which the network didn’t disclose in its promotion of the event.
Trump is the candidate of choice for most working-class white men. But polling shows he’s made inroads with men of color, a development Republican insiders feel could erode enough reliably Democratic votes from the Black and Latino communities in the critical battlegrounds to eke out a victory in less than three weeks.
It’s also worth noting, as I did in OUAH, that abortion is now the top issue for young women, according to new polling from KFF. (Inflation was the group’s top issue earlier this summer.) And not only did Trump nominate half of the six-justice conservative Supreme Court supermajority that overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, but he continues to bizarrely maintain that Democrats wanted federal protections for abortion care established in the landmark deferred to the states.
“Donald Trump did everything in his power to overturn Roe v. Wade. We are seeing now the impact of the abortion ban that [Republican Gov.] Brian Kemp passed in Georgia on women and doctors,” Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) said on a Harris campaign press call on Tuesday with Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) and the family of Amber Thurman, a 28-year-old Georgia woman who died due to septic shock after doctors waited too long to perform a routine medical procedure shortly after Georgia’s six-week abortion ban went into effect for fear of prosecution. “And it’s vitally important—as Donald Trump comes to Georgia, apparently to try to appeal to women in our state—that the public be reminded of his abysmal record on women’s health and the health of pregnant women in Georgia.”
If Trump’s nonsensical comments on abortion weren’t enough, he also claimed to be the “father of IVF,” a procedure the Alabama Supreme Court temporarily banned in February in a ruling that declared embryos created through the fertility treatment should be considered children. (The state wanted to provide personhood protections to frozen embryos that may be damaged or destroyed when they are thawed and prepared for transfer. Its legislature passed a law overturning the court’s decision.)
Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), Harris’s running mate, whose daughter was conceived with assisted reproductive technology, said the comments “pissed [him] off” during a campaign stop in Potomac, Maryland on Wednesday.
“If what he meant is taking responsibility, well, then, yeah, he should take responsibility for the fact that one in three women in America lives in a Trump abortion ban state,” Harris said in Detroit. “So, let’s not be distracted by his choice of words. The reality is his actions have been very harmful to women and families in America on this issue.”
Also harmful in the eyes of Democrats is Trump’s unwillingness to accept he lost the 2020 election and his characterization of his political opponents, including former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Adam Schiff (D-CA), as “the enemy within” who should be targeted by the American military. (Pelosi led the two impeachments of Trump; Schiff was the lead impeachment manager in the first impeachment trial.)
Instead of walking back the comments during the Fox town hall amid criticism that they reflect his rapid authoritarian shift, Trump doubled down: “I’m not threatening anybody. They’re the ones doing the threatening.”
During her interview with Baier, Harris wasn’t having it.
“This is a democracy,” she said in a forceful rebuke of Trump, whom she deems unfit for office.” And in a democracy, the President of the United States in the United States of America should be willing to handle criticism without saying he’d lock people up for doing it. And this is what is at stake.”
Harris’s response came after she called Baier out for airing Trump’s comments without context in one of several contentious moments during the adversarial conversation.
Baier asked Harris to defend the Biden administration’s immigration record. She hit Trump for killing a bipartisan border security deal that would have invested more resources in patrol agents, asylum judges, and technology to stem the flow of fentanyl.
He asked Harris to explain her previous position that undocumented immigrants detained in federal prison should receive gender-affirming care, the topic of the Trump campaign’s most effective ads this cycle. She noted that the Trump administration provided the same care.
The host asked when she “first noticed that President Biden’s mental faculties appeared diminished.” Harris said Biden was no longer a candidate in the race and that Trump lacked the mental acuity to serve another term.
And when Baier tried to bait Harris into a “basket of deplorables” moment by asking if Trump supporters were misguided in their support of the former president. Harris turned the question on its head: “If you listen to Donald Trump, if you watch any of his rallies, he’s the one who tends to demean and belittle and diminish the American people.”
To be clear, the interview wasn’t perfect. But it didn’t have to be.
Notably, she still hasn’t done enough to distance herself from the aspects of the Biden administration voters say they dislike the most. However, unlike Trump, who faced a friendly host in Faulkner and took questions from a generally supportive audience, Harris entered the lion’s den and came out of the other side better for it. She can now say she’s the only candidate in the race who’s gone on the primary news network of their opposition party. And she was able to chip away at the caricature the Republican Party has created of her as a San Francisco liberal too out of touch to govern for everyday Americans.
The interview alone demonstrates her desire to be a president for all Americans, not just those who agree with her. And, following another tough interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes last week, it shows a critical political press that her campaign’s media strategy stretches beyond the safe spaces of lifestyle podcasts and Oprah Winfrey specials.
It probably won’t be remembered for its substance. But the interview will be remembered for Harris’s tough style, which was important for the people who still wonder if she has the steel required of an effective commander-in-chief. And while it’s unclear if it will move the needle with early voting underway in several states, it was a risk worth taking in a margin-of-error race where every vote—no matter where it comes from—matters.
But it was obvious from the interview’s end that the Harris campaign believes it accomplished its mission.
“I think there’s a good number of independents and [Nikki] Haley-style Republicans who are very open to voting for Vice President Harris and that’s why we are open to doing events with Republicans and on Fox News,” campaign spokesperson Brian Fallon told reporters after the interview. “We feel like we definitely achieved what we set out to achieve in the sense that she was able to reach an audience that is probably not been exposed to the arguments she’s been making on the trail and she also got to show her toughness in standing tall against a hostile interviewer.”
Michael Jones is an independent Capitol Hill correspondent and contributor for COURIER. He is the author of Once Upon a Hill, a newsletter about Congressional politics.
