Asked about his stance on IVF care, Donald Trump claimed at the Fox News town hall that he and the rest of the Republican party were in favor of the care that allows people struggling with fertility issues to have children, going so far as to call himself “the father of IVF”.

The question came after the Alabama supreme court issued a ruling earlier this year that briefly cut off access to the treatment in the deep-red state, raising fears that Republican politicians opposed to the treatment would press the party to ban it nationwide, or in other states.

After describing himself to the questioner as “the father of IVF” Trump said at the town hall that after the court ruling, he got a call from Katie Britt, “a fantastically attractive person” who is also a Republican senator from Alabama. She told him about the decision’s implications, and he said he then came out in favor of continued access to IVF. Here’s how he put it:

We really are the party for IVF. We want fertilization, and it’s all the way, and the Democrats tried to attack us on it, and we’re out there on IVF even more than them, so, we’re totally in favor of it.

Nonetheless, Republicans in the US Senate have repeatedly blocked passage of legislation that would guarantee access to the procedure nationwide:

Donald Trump said at his Fox News town hall that if he was elected, he would sign an executive order to ban sanctuary cities under a two-century old law.

“We are going to end all sanctuary cities immediately … I can do it with an executive order. I have to do it with an executive order. You can do it with … the Aliens Act of 1798, we can do things in terms of moving people out. We can move them out of the sanctuary cities,” Trump said.

After first taking office in 2017, Trump signed an executive order cutting cities who do not cooperate with immigration authorities off from federal funding, but it was later struck down by the courts. He has centered his most recent campaign on imposing hardline immigration policies, and plans to use the Aliens Act of 1798 to do so:

Fox News is now airing its pre-recorded town hall with Donald Trump and a group of female voters in Georgia.

It’s a friendly crowd, which greeted Trump with applause and cheers when he stepped onstage. Thus far, the former president has spent most of his time talking about how much better everything would be if he was in charge.

Moderator Harris Faulkner nonetheless made a modest effort to get him to back up some of his assertions, particularly when it comes to inflation. Trump has said prices will go down if he is elected, but Faulkner pointed out that prices that rise due to inflation typically do not go down, but rather grow at a slower rate.

Trump replied by changing the subject, before acknowledging that prices probably will not decrease:

So I feel so badly about what’s happened, because none of this would have happened just to start. There wouldn’t have been a war in Ukraine and Russia. There wouldn’t have been an October 7 in Israel. There wouldn’t have been this horrible, most embarrassing day in the history of our country, with Afghanistan, where we lost 13 soldiers, but they never talk about the soldiers that are so badly wounded. I mean, with legs and arms and face Obliteration, all these things, and there wouldn’t have been any inflation. And it’s so sad to say, we have to get prices down, because the damage is done.

Survivors of Donald Trump’s family separation policy are telling their stories at an event convened by Kamala Harris’s campaign to condemn the former president’s hardline immigration policies.

A young man who identified himself as Billy told a press conference in Doral, Florida, that he was detained after arriving in the United States and told he would see his father again soon.

“After that day, I never saw him again for 40 days,” Billy said, describing how he was instead flown to New York and put with a foster family.

“They told me that I wasn’t going to get to see my dad again and that I wasn’t going to be able to see my family again. As a nine-year-old, you can probably imagine how that felt, great sadness in front of me and very traumatic, something that I still hold to this day. The emptiness that I felt when I when they told me that I wasn’t going to be able to see my family again, was something out of this world, and something that no kids should go through.”

Lauren Gambino

Joe Biden is headed to Arizona next week – but the White House says it’s for an official event (ie not a campaign event).

It’s not clear yet what brings the president to the battleground state that he won by just over 10,000 votes in 2020, becoming the first Democratic nominee to win Arizona since Bill Clinton.

Recent polling shows Kamala Harris trailing Donald Trump in the state, even as the Democratic candidate for Senate, Ruben Gallego, leads his Republican opponent, Trump ally Kari Lake.

Harris doesn’t need to win Arizona, since she has other paths to 270. But it is perhaps a worrying sign about her standing among Hispanic voters, who make up about a third of the state’s electorate. However, Democrats cannot hold on to the Senate without keeping the seat.

Michelle Obama will later this month hold a rally in Atlanta aimed at encouraging young voters to get to the polls, her nonpartisan organization When We All Vote announced.

The 29 October event will feature Atlanta-area college and high school students and is aimed at encouraging first-time voters to cast ballots in Georgia, which Joe Biden won in 2020 by a narrow 12,000 votes.

“The election doesn’t start on Election Day — it ends on Election Day. Thanks to our Georgia partners and volunteers who continue to make sure their communities are ready to vote, Georgia voters are fired up and ready to use their voices,” said When We All Vote’s executive director Beth Lynk in a statement.

Obama launched When We All Vote in 2018 with the aim of getting new voters out to the polls. The Atlanta rally will be her first public event since her speech to the Democratic national convention, where she artfully decried Donald Trump:

It’s a big day for Fox News, where Kamala Harris will at 6pm sit for an interview with anchor Bret Baier, hours after Donald Trump’s pre-recorded town hall airs.

It will be something of a journey into hostile territory for the vice-president, since Fox’s coverage and viewership tends to skew conservative. We don’t know yet what they’ll talk about, but Baier yesterday said the interview would air without commercial breaks.

Harris will appear on Fox News as she continues a string of media interviews intended to boost her candidacy with less than three weeks to go until the presidential vote. Here’s more on that:

At 11am today, Fox News will broadcast a pre-recorded town hall with Donald Trump and a group of women in swing state Georgia.

Expect a friendly encounter – Fox News is a conservative network, and a brief clip of the event broadcast yesterday shows Trump taking questions on immigration, an issue that is a mainstay of his speeches. Nonetheless, the event does serve a purpose for the former president: polls have shown that his standing is weak among some groups of women, and the event appears to be geared towards turning that around, specifically in a state that could decide the election.

“Women constitute the largest group of registered and active voters in the United States, so it is paramount that female voters understand where the presidential candidates stand on the issues that matter to them most,” Fox News presenter Harris Faulkner said in announcing the event.

Barack Obama will next week hit the campaign trail on behalf of Kamala Harris on Tuesday, when early voting begins in Michigan, the vice-president’s campaign announced.

The former president will rally voters in Detroit, Harris’s campaign said, without giving further details.

Obama made his first campaign appearance for Harris last week in Pennsylvania, where he encouraged Black men to cast ballots for the vice-president: