TAXING TIMES
Trump’s all-women audience brought to tears at town hall as they beg for help with rising cost of groceries & child care
Trump compared his abortion stance to that of Ronald Reagan
DONALD Trump brought an all-female town hall audience to tears as he responded to concerns about spiking childcare expenses and the rising cost of living.
With 20 days left before Election Day, and his team are pounding the campaign trail, looking to make strides in critical battleground states that will determine which candidate takes up residence in in January.
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On Tuesday, Trump was joined by anchor Harris Faulkner at a town hall as he took questions from an all-female audience about issues besetting the nation, including abortion, immigration, and childcare.
The prerecorded town hall, which was held in Cumming, outside Atlanta, premiered on Wednesday's edition of The Faulkner Focus.
A single mother of two asked Trump what changes he would push to help struggling families with rising childcare expenses, revealing her child tax credit decreased by 80% since the former president left office.
"I’m a single mom to two kids here. And just in three and a half years, my child tax credit has decreased by 80%," the woman said as she fought back tears.
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"Last year, I had broken my neck, and I tried applying for any kind of assistance and was denied because I did not make less than $700 a month.
"What kind of realistic changes that do you think you can provide? Single parents, married parents, any kind of parent to just simply afford children in today's world, with the way things are here, right?”
Trump responded by boasting about the child tax law he signed in 2017, with the help of his daughter which doubled the child tax credit to $2,000 per child for millions of Americans.
"I gave you the largest tax cuts in the history of our country. Okay, larger than the Reagan cuts. Larger," Trump said.
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"I understand exactly what you're saying. We're going to readjust things so that it's fair to everybody, because it's really not fair to everybody.
"But we have a lot, and we're going to we're going up higher, but we're also going to readjust because you have to make some readjustments.
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"It's unfair to some people, and we're not going to have that."
Trump is banking on his tariff increase proposal to solve the nation's rising childcare issues.
The former president is proposing increasing tariffs on foreign imports, which he said will lead to a "national economic renaissance."
"We're going to be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it's - relatively speaking - not very expensive, compared to the kind of numbers we'll be taking in," Trump said at a news conference at the Economic Club of New York in September.
Trump again spoke highly about his tariff proposal during Tuesday's town hall when asked about his plans to revitalize the economy.
"We have tremendous wealth in this country, but it's under our feet - it's called liquid gold, and we're going to bring down your energy costs, and with that, everything is going to follow," he said.
"We're also going to make it possible for companies to come into our country again. You know, we've lost so many businesses.
"If you're in furniture making like in North Carolina, they're flocking out of our country because we have politicians who don't know what to do.
"We're bringing them all back. We have a tax rate that's going to lure them, and we're going to protect them with tariffs so they can make money and so they don't get stolen."
For 52 years, the issue [of abortion] has torn our country apart.
Donald Trump
When the issue of abortion was raised, Trump compared his stance with that of former President Ronald Reagan.
The Republican presidential nominee, 78, said the issue of abortion has divided the country, but he believes there should be exceptions to total bans.
"For 52 years, the issue has torn our country apart," Trump said when asked by a town hall attendee about why the government is "involved in women's basic rights."
"Every legal scholar, the greats ones, every lawyer, but the Democrats, the Republicans, the liberals, and conservatives, they wanted it brought out of the federal government and brought back to the states for a vote of the people.
"And, like Ronald Reagan, I believe in the exceptions for rape, incest, life of the mother - I strongly believe, you know, you have to follow your heart."
Trump continued, "Some people don't. It's a very small percentage, but you have to follow your heart.
"But you have the exceptions. But with what we were able to do is through really the courage of six Supreme Court justices, we were able to do this after years and years of turmoil.";
'STRONGLY PRO-LIFE'
Trump has repeatedly aligned his views on abortion to that of his former Republican presidential counterpart.
In May 2019, Trump voiced his stance as "strongly Pro-life" but again argued that abortion should be accessible under certain circumstances.
"As most people know, and for those who would like to know, I am strongly Pro-Life, with the three exceptions - Rape, Incest and protecting the Life of the mother - the same position taken by Ronald Reagan," Trump wrote on X at the time.
As governor of California, Reagan signed legislation that decriminalized abortion in the state in 1967.
The law was one of the most liberal abortion legislation passed by a politician, which allowed for abortion if the woman's mental or physical health was in danger or if they were victims of rape or incest.
Reagan was famously quoted in his book Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation, "We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life — the unborn — without diminishing the value of all human life."
Hours before the town hall aired on Fox News on Wednesday, anchor Harris Faulkner told Fox colleague Sean Hannity that she was "really moved" by the questions asked during the event.
"It certainly put everything into perspective — just how close we are to election day, really what’s at stake — listening to these women who, some of them, had left their jobs to be here today because they wanted to be among a crowd asking real questions that felt like reality to them," Faulkner said.
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"And the questions came up during the town, 'Mr. President is there anything you can help parents like me do to raise our children, to deal with the cost of raising children in America.'
"I was really moved, and it was an intimate setting in a barn in Cumming, Georgia, where I was born about 45 minutes from here, so I hadn't seen the area in a while, and it was just touching, it really was."
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