Kamala Harris has done her best to make abortion the central issue for female voters this election. Of course, Democrats can’t even define “woman” (They aren’t biologists!), but they have no problem defining women’s issues as “reproductive freedom,” which is just lefty-speak for abortion at any time for any reason. Luckily for the Republican Party and the rest of the country, not all women are abortion-loving childless cat ladies — which was abundantly clear in both of Trump’s town halls on Wednesday.

The first was an all-female audience, the exact crowd you might expect to grill the former president on abortion policy for an hour — but no. Border security, immigration policy, the economy broadly, Social Security, women’s sports, the child tax credit, onshore manufacturing, energy policy, interest rates, Russia and Ukraine, Hamas and Israel, the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, sanctuary cities, Democrats’ weaponization of government, the hurricanes, and FEMA — every single one of these topics was discussed before abortion was uttered once. The first 50 minutes of the hour-long town hall were consumed by issues other than abortion. Taking the lives of the next generation in utero may be the first thing Democrats want to talk about, but it doesn’t crack the top eight issues affecting Americans every day.

The second was Univision’s “Latinos Ask” town hall, and again, only one question broached the abortion topic. Women’s concerns about grocery prices, the national debt, and border security all preceded it.

Unlike Democrats’ front woman, Republicans understand that females

By now it’s commonplace to note that Kamala Harris often seems out of her depth, like she’s unsure what to say about policy, or how to explain her past positions, or why she hasn’t already done the things she’s promised to do if she’s elected given that she’s the current vice president.

But on one particular subject she’s been consistent and forceful throughout her campaign. She’s adamant that Donald Trump will destroy America if he’s reelected. And not “destroy” in the sense of enact bad policies, but that he’ll round people up with the military and put them in camps.

She talks about this all the time now. At one point during her Wednesday evening interview with Bret Baier on Fox News, she became visibly upset after Baier played a clip of former President Donald Trump calling out the weaponization of government and the endless investigations and lawfare he’s been subjected to.

The vice president, her voice rising in outrage, jabbed her finger at Baier and said, “You and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people. He has talked about going after people who are engaged in peaceful protest. He has talked about locking people up because they disagree with him.”

At a campaign rally in Pennsylvania this week she told the crowd that former President Donald Trump considers anyone who doesn’t support him to be an enemy of the United States. “He is saying he would use the military to go after

American journalism has experienced a spectacular collapse in the last 25 years — daily newspaper circulation has declined from over 60 million subscribers to just over 20 million. And the trend is accelerating: According to the Pew Research Organization, the average monthly number of unique visitors to the websites of the country’s top 50 newspapers plummeted 20 percent in one year from 2021 to 2022.

At the same time, the remaining readership expresses a historically low level of faith that the news they are getting is accurate. Just 32 percent of Americans say they have a “great deal or a fair amount of trust” in the media, according to polling from Gallup.

If there is a bright spot here, polling has long shown that American consumers trust local media more than the national press. “In 2021, Americans were 17 points more likely to say they trust reporting by local news organizations ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’ than to trust reporting by national news organizations,” notes a survey done by Gallup and the Knight Foundation. But the rapid consolidation of the news industry has adversely affected the level of trust in the news Americans are consuming. 

Local news organizations, however, have been hit especially hard by the decline in readers. Many have folded, cut staff, been purchased by private equity firms, or absorbed by national news organizations, which has diminished their editorial independence. 

In recent years, hundreds of millions of dollars in new investment poured into local media in what appears to be a salutary injection