(AFP) – Kamala Harris takes her media blitz into opposition territory Wednesday with an interview on Fox News, after Donald Trump sought to use the same network to connect with female voters wary of his record. Democratic nominee Harris will sit down with the conservative-leaning broadcaster in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, part of a push to reach out to wavering Republicans who have tired of Trump’s dark rhetoric.
The White House race is neck-and-neck with less than three weeks to go, and both candidates are increasingly looking for ways to gain momentum. Harris will be quizzed by Fox anchor Bret Baier — regarded as a tough but fair interviewer — in a show screening at 6:00 pm (2200 GMT), as she gambles to break the deadlock with a sortie into unfamiliar ground.
The vice president is aiming to neutralize Republican criticisms that she has avoided difficult interviews, but Fox is also the top-rated US cable news channel with a valuable audience. Fox News has played a key role in Trump’s political rise, and he blasted the network over the Harris interview, accusing Baier of being “very soft” and the channel of having “totally lost its way.”
He sat down with the network ahead of Harris’s appearance, in a pre-recorded town hall with an all-female audience, where the conversation turned to vitro fertilization (IVF), a fertility treatment that Democrats say is threatened by his policies. Despite being on home turf, it was a challenging topic as women have been turned off by Trump’s statements on reproductive rights, and by his campaign more broadly.
He was cheered as he told his audience in the closely-watched swing state of Georgia that Republicans were the party championing the procedure. “I want to talk about IVF. I’m the father of IVF, so I want to hear this question,” he said.
Harris, who has made the defense of reproductive rights a centerpiece of her election platform, called on her opponent to “take responsibility for the fact that one in three women in America lives in a Trump abortion ban state.” “Couples who are praying and hoping and working toward growing a family have been so disappointed and harmed by the fact that IVF treatments have now been put at risk,” she told reporters on her plane.
And she ridiculed his professed support for IVF, posting on X: “What is he talking about? His abortion bans have already jeopardized access to it in states across the country — and his own platform could end IVF altogether.” Reproductive rights have been a major vulnerability for Trump since the Supreme Court, featuring three Trump-picked justices, gutted federal protections for abortion access in 2022. Many in the anti-abortion movement also want to see IVF curbed.
The Harris campaign hosted a press call highlighting the case of Amber Thurman, a 28-year-old mother-of-one who died in Georgia in August after delays in receiving care for complications related to a medical abortion. Trump’s town hall in Georgia was filmed on Tuesday, the first day of early voting in the closely-watched state, with voters casting a record number of 328,000 ballots.
A Georgia judge this week blocked a new rule that would have required election workers to hand-count ballots. Trump has been charged with election tampering in the state, pushing for Georgia officials to “find” enough votes to overturn President Joe Biden’s narrow win there in 2020. The 2024 election promises to be just as close with both candidates looking for an edge.
Harris’s campaign has stepped up attacks on Trump, branding him “unhinged” for threatening to use the military against internal enemies and mocking a recent rally where he danced to music for nearly 40 minutes. At his town hall event, Trump repeated a view that led to accusations of fascism from the Harris campaign, that Democrats are America’s “enemy within.”
– Danny KEMP
© 2024 AFP
