Fox News said Trump was 'ambushed' in a town hall where undecided American voters asked him basic questions

• Fox News' Laura Ingraham on Tuesday night suggested President Donald Trump was ambushed by voters asking timely questions during an ABC News town-hall event.
• Trump was questioned about everything from why he downplayed the COVID-19 pandemic to his stance on insurance coverage for people with preexisting conditions.
• The president fumbled during the town hall, coming off as unprepared and repeatedly pushing false information.

The Fox News host Laura Ingraham accused ABC News of ambushing President Donald Trump on Tuesday night after a town-hall event where voters asked him basic questions.

"The president loves mixing it up with everybody, but this is an ambush," Ingraham said.

Undecided voters in Pennsylvania asked Trump about several issues, including his decision to not pursue a national mask mandate during the coronavirus pandemic, his take on the racial divide in the US, and his stance on insurance protections for people with preexisting conditions.

Trump was also asked why he downplayed the threat of COVID-19 to the public.

The president often stumbled through his responses, offering blatantly false information to the voters. For example, he suggested it was former Vice President Joe Biden's responsibility to implement a national mask mandate. But the Democratic presidential nominee has not been in government since January 2017, and the coronavirus outbreak began less than a year ago.

"A good question is you ask, like, Joe Biden. They said, 'We're going to do a national mandate on masks,'" Trump said. "But he didn't do it. I mean, he never did it."

The questions voters asked Trump on Tuesday night touched on issues affecting virtually every American.

But Ingraham, who, like other Fox News opinion hosts, tends to throw softballs at Trump during interviews, was adamant that the town-hall event was set up to deliberately make the president look bad.

"Why did the president decide to do this, to open himself up to a room full of basically Trump resistance?" Ingraham said.

Rather than critiquing Trump's apparent lack of preparation and aversion to facts, Ingraham painted the event as a Democratic plot against the president, saying the Democratic National Committee "may as well have put the whole thing on."