How Trump’s Haitian migrant pet-eating lies indirectly led to a vote on IVF

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

With their opponents mired in a new controversy after Donald Trump’s uninspiring performance at his debate with Kamala Harris, Democrats are taking the opportunity to divide their foes in Washington.

Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill opened up a two-pronged messaging assault against the GOP on Tuesday as the Senate was due to vote for the second time on legislation that would enshrine federal protections for in vitro fertilization (IVF) and force insurance companies to cover it. The legislation previously failed in the chamber, which Democrats control by a one-vote majority. But this second vote comes as Trump, seeking to shield himself from the Harris campaign’s attacks around reproductive freedom, has himself endorsed the plan.

It’s set to cause divisions within the Republican Party for obvious reasons — one chief among them being that many right-wing Christian conservatives oppose the practice of IVF entirely. Forcing private insurance companies to expand their coverage in an Obamacare-like fashion on top of all that has caused serious consternation.

“If you believe that life begins at conception as I do, there is no difference between an abortion and the destruction of an IVF embryo,” read a poster hung by Congressman Matt Rosendale — quoting Rosendale himself — outside his office over the summer. The inclusion of those views in their party is clearly embarrassing for Rosendale’s less radical colleagues.

“All Republicans, to my knowledge, support IVF,” Senator Tom Cotton wrongly said on Meet the Press earlier in September.

Harris campaign officials and Senate Democrats blasted their Senate Republican rivals on Tuesday, and made particular note of the fact that JD Vance wouldn’t attend the IVF vote at all.

“He’s a no-show,” quipped Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow on a press call. “He also wasn’t here to vote on the Child Tax Deduction after saying it was so important to support families with children.”

Senator Tammy Duckworth, who spoke of her own experiences having children through IVF, added: “I’m not going to sit quietly while Donald Trump and JD Vance run on a platform that would threaten access to IVF, because every American deserves a right to be called Mommy or Daddy without being treated like a criminal.”

And the DNC responded as well, in a statement from press secretary Emilia Rowland: “Senate Republicans put politics first and families last again today by blocking the Right to IVF Act for the second time since June. As Trump makes baseless claims about being “a leader on fertilization,” the reality is that his Project 2025 agenda and the Republican Party platform directly threaten IVF.”

Meanwhile, in the House, a Democratic lawmaker held a press conference on the House triangle to mark the introduction of a bill aimed at another supposed priority of Trump’s campaign: ending federal taxes on tipped wages. It’s become one of the former president’s central economic proposals as he seeks to return to the White House.

Congressman Steven Horsford’s bill, which would leave intact payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, would also raise the federal minimum wage for tipped workers, currently set at $2.13 an hour. That latter provision is likely to be a sticking point for Republicans, many of whom have fought against hikes to the federal minimum wage in the past.

And it wasn’t just in Washington where Republicans found themself hounded by Democrats over their positions. Vance, on the campaign trail this week in battleground states, found himself the target of a new ad campaign launched by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), is the largest teachers’ union in the country and has endorsed Harris. The message in the ad is a tried-and-tested one, aimed at spreading Vance’s own comments about women who don’t have children.

AFT’s ads will follow Vance as he campaigns in Michigan and North Carolina, running on digital platforms, while the union is simultaneously launching a radio and TV campaign in Pennsylvania, a state key to Harris’s path to victory.

“What’s wrong with these guys?” asked AFT president Randi Weingarten, in a statement shared with The Independent. “We have to lift people up right now. We have to see the future in the eyes of every single one of our children. We all need us to be on Team Kid. Why would you do anything that undermines that? If you care about parents, if you care about kids,why would you do anything that undermines that connection between teachers and parents and the students?”

Trump’s campaign, meanwhile, was focused on exposing supposedly “violent” rhetoric used by Democrats in the wake of a second assassination attempt against the former president on Sunday. It provided a break from the incessant questions Vance and the rest of the campaign have been facing recently regarding an onstage rant from the former president about Haitian migrants supposedly eating dogs and cats in Ohio. Vance dealt with accusations of spreading false racist stereotypes in three interviews Sunday prior to the attempted shooting, only to seemingly admit on CNN that his campaign was “creating” such stories.

Trump was uninjured during the incident over the weekend but was rushed from his golf course after an armed man was confronted Sunday afternoon by Secret Service agents at his Palm Beach, Florida golf course. An AK-47-type rifle was recovered at the scene, and the suspect was apprehended.

“[M]ake no mistake, this psycho was egged on by the rhetoric and lies that have flowed from Kamala Harris, Democrats, and their Fake News allies for years,” the Trump campaign charged on Sunday.

It was an odd position for the Republican candidate to be in, having himself described his opponents in dehumanizing terms at a rally in Ohio earlier in 2024 and having used the same or similar rhetoric linking his opponents to fascism in his own past statements, as well as those of his allies.

Just two weeks ago, in an address to the Economic Club of New York, the former president described Harris as the “first major party nominee in American history who fundamentally rejects freedom and embraces Marxism, communism, and fascism”.