October 26, 2024, presidential campaign news

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Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance said Ukraine is “not nearly important” to the United States as other regions of the world, such as Taiwan —the world’s biggest manufacturer of semiconductor chips — and dismissed the idea that Russian President Vladimir Putin would march beyond Ukraine through Europe, calling it “absurd.”

Asked whether he believes Putin would march through Europe, Vance laughed and said, “Of all the absurd arguments I’ve heard that is the most absurd. He can’t take half of Ukraine. That’s his goal. He can’t take half of Ukraine, but somehow, he’s going to march all the way to Berlin?”

Vance said that the United States will not pull out of NATO but that it “needs to be a true alliance, a true partner, and not basically just another welfare client the United States of America.” He said NATO countries need to fund more of their own defense and take more ownership of their own security.

Some background: Former President Donald Trump previously said he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO member country that doesn’t meet spending guidelines on defense in a stunning admission he would not abide by the collective-defense clause at the heart of the alliance if reelected.

Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris both campaigned in battleground Michigan on Saturday, the first day of early voting statewide. Harris was joined by former first lady Michelle Obama, while Trump spoke with with Muslim leaders in a Detroit suburb and rallied in another key state, Pennsylvania.

Catch up on today’s campaign news:

Trump wooed Muslim Michigan voters: Trump invited several Muslim leaders onstage with him at his campaign in Novi, Michigan, as he courts Arab American and Muslim voters disillusioned or angry over US policy on Israel and Gaza in the critical battleground state. Trump said in his speech that he had held a meeting earlier Saturday with Muslim leaders. He was joined onstage by what his campaign described as “prominent leaders of Michigan’s Muslim community,” including imam Belal Alzuhairi, who described Trump as the “peace” candidate.

Michelle Obama rallied for the first time with Harris: The former first lady issued a scathing indictment of Trump at Harris’ rally, calling the former president an existential threat to women’s rights and telling men that a vote for Trump “is a vote against us.” This was Obama’s first time rallying for the vice president, providing a reprisal of her passionate remarks this summer at the Democratic National Convention.

Candidates remain in a locked race: The race for the White House rests on a razor’s edge in the final nationwide CNN poll before votes are counted. The poll, conducted by SSRS, found 47% of likely voters support Harris and an equal 47% support Trump.

Voting resources: The single-digit countdown to Election Day starts Sunday, and millions of Americans are already voting every day, either early in person or by returning mail-in ballots. Do you have a plan to cast your vote?

Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz on Saturday called Donald Trump’s comments that “America is like a garbage can for the world,” “unpatriotic” and attacked the former president for “trash-talking this country.”

“Trump’s now been going around on the campaign trail, calling America the garbage can of the world. A direct quote. This country that so many died protecting, that is the beacon of the world of democracy and human rights, he calls it the garbage can of the world,” the Minnesota governor said at a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona.

“That is so pathetic and so unpatriotic, that it’s almost unbelievable. He is literally trash talking this country now every single day,” Walz said.

Some background: During a rally Thursday night in Arizona, Trump said the United Sates is “like a garbage can for the world.”

“We’re a dumping ground. … We’re like a garbage can for the world. That’s what’s happened,” Trump said in Tempe.

Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday called Trump’s comment “just another example of how he really belittles our country.”

“The president of the United States should be someone who elevates discourse and talks about the best of who we are and invests in the best of who we are, not someone like Donald Trump, who is constantly demeaning and belittling who the American people are,” she said.

Former President Donald Trump held a rally at Penn State University’s main campus in State College on Saturday as he looked to appeal to younger voters and boost turnout in battleground Pennsylvania.

Trump declared that “no one respects” his opponent, Kamala Harris, calling the vice president’s efforts at the border, on the war in Ukraine and the federal response to hurricanes in the US as “humiliating.”

After former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned in battleground states on Saturday, here’s a look into where the candidates, along with their running mates, will be on the campaign trail over the next couple of days.

Sunday:

Harris’ interview with CBS’ Norah O’Donnell will air on “CBS Sunday Morning” and “Face the Nation.” She will travel to Philadelphia for a series of local stops and a campaign event. Meanwhile, her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, will hold campaign events in Las Vegas.

Trump will deliver remarks at a rally in New York City’s Madison Square Garden. The former president and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, will also attend a campaign fundraiser in the New York City area.

Monday:

Trump will deliver remarks at the National Faith Advisory Board’s inaugural summit in Powder Springs, Georgia, in the afternoon before delivering holding a rally in Atlanta. Vance will deliver remarks at a campaign event in Racine, Wisconsin in the evening.

Walz will campaign in Wisconsin, hosting events Waukesha and Manitowoc.

After promising to eliminate taxes on tips, Social Security benefits and overtime pay, former President Donald Trump is taking aim at the largest levy of them all — the federal income tax.

With Election Day around the corner, Trump talked about his interest in ending the federal income tax in two high-profile interviews this week, harking back to the late 19th century, when the US relied on tariffs to fund federal spending. The former president has vowed to broadly impose tariffs, arguing they can generate trillions of dollars in revenue.

Speaking with barbers in the Bronx, New York, in a segment aired on Fox News on Monday, Trump said, “There is a way, if what I’m planning comes out.”

A few days later, podcaster Joe Rogan asked Trump whether he was serious about replacing federal income taxes with tariffs.

“Yeah, sure, why not?” Trump said during his interview Friday on “The Joe Rogan Experience.”

Trump, who also floated the idea of ending the federal income tax in June, has not said whether he would eliminate federal corporate income and payroll taxes or just the individual income tax — which raises about half of the nearly $5 trillion in revenue that the federal government collects.

Read more about what Trump’s tax plan looks like here.

Vice President Kamala Harris, left, and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer speak at the Trak Houz Bar & Grill after a campaign rally in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on Saturday.

Vice President Kamala Harris and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer enjoyed a beer together in Kalamazoo, Michigan, after the vice president’s rally in the city.

“Can I treat you to a beer, made here in Kalamazoo?” Whitmer could be heard on pool journalists’ cameras asking the vice president inside the Trak Houz Bar & Grill.

“I am having what she’s having,” Harris said.

“It’s an Oberon, and it’s made right here in Kalamazoo, which many are calling Kamala-zoo,” Whitmer replied. The two then cheersed their beers and each took a sip while also cheersing with others in the restaurant.

“Great rally … ” Whitmer could be heard saying. Harris then discussed how much she loved shouting out Gen Z at her Saturday rally.

At one point, Whitmer could also be heard saying, “It feels better on the ground.”

“You’ve been so amazing,” Harris said just before realizing reporters were capturing her conversation with the governor on camera.

“Oh, we have microphones in here just listening to everything, I didn’t realize that,” Harris said.

“You’ll bleep my F words, I hope,” the governor said, laughing.

“We just told all the family secrets. Sh*t,” Harris said.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Saturday traveled to the Navajo Nation in battleground Arizona, where he pitched directly to Native American voters on behalf of Vice President Kamala Harris and argued Donald Trump diminished Native Americans throughout his life, including during his tenure as president.

Walz, adorned with a turquoise necklace gifted to him by Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren, addressed a crowd of hundreds in front of Window Rock Tribal Park, where he laid out the Biden administration’s efforts to protect tribal lands, provide funding for tribes and Native American organizations, and investigate cases of murdered and missing Indigenous people.

Walz sharply criticized Trump’s treatment of Native Americans, accusing him of making racist remarks about Native Americans in the past and highlighting a 2017 incident in which Trump met with Navajo Code Talkers at the White House in front of a portrait of former President Andrew Jackson, who signed legislation that eventually led to the “Trail of Tears.”

“I don’t know if he knows his history well enough to know what he was doing, but I damn sure guarantee you the people around him knew the insult they were throwing to Indian country by making those heroes stand in front of that portrait,” he said.

Walz’s Saturday visit marked the first time this cycle that a presidential or vice presidential candidate from either major party has visited Navajo Nation territory.

Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign rally in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on Saturday.

Vice President Kamala Harris focused on the pillars of her closing argument as she urged Michigan voters to take advantage of in-person early voting, which began statewide in the electoral battleground Saturday.

“We need you to vote early Michigan,” she pleaded in Kalamazoo, later adding, “Folks, the election is here. It is here, and the choice is truly in your hands, and your vote is your voice and your voice is your power.”

Speaking after former first lady Michelle Obama, who made an impassioned case for voters to choose Harris, the vice president focused her remarks on now-familiar themes of her campaign as it enters its final stages, focused on former President Donald Trump and his “enemies list,” versus her own “to-do list.”

Harris, who spent the previous night in Texas highlighting the stakes of protecting reproductive rights, contrasted herself with Trump on the issue.

“Remember how we got here. Donald Trump hand-selected three members of the United States Supreme Court with the intention that they would undo the protections of Roe v. Wade. They did as he intended, and now 1 in 3 women in America lives in a state with a Trump abortion ban, many with no exceptions for rape and incest,” she said.

Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance claimed Saturday that former Trump administration officials who have sounded the alarm about a second Donald Trump presidency are targeting the former president because he rebuffed their efforts to control him and start “ridiculous military conflicts.”

“So all those … people, including the former vice president, Mike Pence, all of these people have this horribly damaged worldview and they’re all just going after Donald Trump because they want to send people into war? That’s really your argument?” CNN’s Jake Tapper said in an interview with Vance, which will air in full Sunday on “State of the Union.”

“Absolutely, that’s my argument, Jake,” Vance said.

Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, John Kelly, told The New York Times this week that the former president fits the “general definition of fascist.” Kelly said that it was “a new concept” for Trump that the loyalty of top government officials was to the Constitution, not to the president personally, and that Trump praised Hitler’s generals for their loyalty.

And former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said Trump “is the most dangerous person to this country” and “a fascist to the core” in Bob Woodward’s new book, “War.”

Vance rejected the idea that these are conservative Republicans concerned about a second Trump presidency.

“All these people, Jake, they came into office thinking that they could control Donald Trump, that when he said he wanted peace in the world — ” Vance said.

“Mike Pence thought he could control Donald Trump? Really?” Tapper said.

“Yes, he did. And when he found out that he couldn’t, they all turned on Donald Trump,” Vance said.

In a previous interview with CNN’s Dana Bash during his own presidential run, the former vice president said Trump had asked Pence to put him over the Constitution.

Over the past three years, Elon Musk has met dozens of times with presidents, prime ministers, lawmakers, government officials and political candidates from around the world.

The meetings show how Musk has been courted for his ability to impact the course of wars through his Starlink satellite service; his opinion on artificial intelligence, the next major wave of technology development; and his role in swaying public opinion through his platform, X.

Read more about Elon’s powerful foreign relationships here.

Musk has also become a political power player in the United States. He held livestream campaign events on X for presidential hopefuls and has since thrown tens of millions of dollars behind former President Donald Trump, attending and hosting his rallies and criticizing (and, in some cases, spreading false information about) his competitor, Vice President Kamala Harris, on X.

But Musk’s transnational conferencing has drawn concern from some US officials. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson on Friday called for an investigation into a Wall Street Journal report that Musk and Russian President Vladimir Putin have been in “regular contact” since late 2022.

Other US officials have raised counterintelligence concerns in the last year about Musk’s interactions with US adversaries like Russia, but the intelligence community is wary of looking into those interactions because Musk is an American citizen, an official familiar with the matter told CNN.

Read more about security concerns among US officials here.

Former President Donald Trump attends a luncheon hosted by the Economic Club of Chicago on October 15 in Chicago.

Former President Donald Trump continues to repeat his lie that US schools are sending children for gender-affirming surgeries without their parents’ consent — even though his own campaign could not find a single example of this having happened.

Trump debuted the tale in late August. It was debunked by CNN and others in early September. But the former president, whose campaign has spent tens of millions of dollars on late-campaign attack ads related to transgender people, has revived the story in October as Election Day draws near.

He made the claim once more during his Friday interview with prominent podcast host Joe Rogan: “Who would want to have — there’s so many — the transgender operations: Where they’re allowed to take your child when he goes to school and turn him into a male — to a female — without parental consent.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim remains false. There is no evidence that schools in any part of the United States have sent children for gender-affirming surgeries without their parents’ approval, or performed unapproved gender-affirming surgeries on site; none of that is “allowed” anywhere in the country. Even in the states where gender-affirming surgery is legal for people under age 18, parental consent is required before a minor can undergo such a procedure.  

Trump’s campaign and four conservative groups contacted by CNN in September about the former president’s claim were unable to find any evidence for it. Experts on health care for transgender people said the situation Trump described simply does not happen in this country.

Landon Hughes, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a co-author of a recent study on the prevalence of gender-affirming surgery in the US, said in a September email: “There are no instances of children receiving surgeries or access to surgeries from their schools.” Hughes added: “No provider in the US would perform surgery on a minor under the direction of a school, let alone without parental consent.”

Read more here.

Former first lady Michelle Obama speaks at a campaign rally for Vice President Kamala Harris in Kalamazoo, Michigan on Saturday.

Former first lady Michelle Obama made a passionate plea to take reproductive rights seriously and “not put our lives in the hands of politicians” during a Saturday rally in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she is campaigning with Vice President Kamala Harris.

She continued, “The only people who have standing to make these decisions are women with the advice of their doctors. We are the ones with the knowledge and experience to know what we need.”

Obama pleaded for the crowd to “not hand” their fates to Trump and emphasized the stakes of the election.

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Michelle Obama makes plea to voters about reproductive rights

11:48 • Source: CNN

Michelle Obama makes plea to voters about reproductive rights

11:48

House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik is hosting former President Donald Trump tonight for a virtual rally for New York’s battleground seats. A source familiar with the efforts told CNN that Stefanik and her team are dialing out to nearly 1 million Trump supporters to push early voting during the tele-rally.

Members and candidates on the call include:

Some context: It’s in New York, particularly in the suburbs of central New York, the Hudson Valley and Long Island, where the balance of power for the House of Representatives will likely be decided, and it’s through these competitive races where red cracks in the state’s reputation as a blue fortress are becoming more exposed.

Former first lady Michelle Obama slammed former President Donald Trump and blamed him for his handling of Covid-19 during her remarks in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on Saturday.

Obama praised Kamala Harris, who she was campaigning with in Kalamazoo, and said the vice president and Trump are held to different standards.

“We expect her to be intelligent and articulate, to have a clear set of policies, to never show too much anger, to prove time and time again that she belongs. But for Trump, we expect nothing at all,” she said.

She continued, “No understanding of policy, no ability to put together a coherent argument, no honesty, no decency, no morals. Instead, too many people are willing to write off his childish, mean-spirited antics by saying, ‘Well, Trump’s just being Trump.”

Vice President Kamala Harris and former first lady Michelle Obama address the crowd in the overflow space of a campaign rally in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on Saturday.

Vice President Kamala Harris told supporters in Michigan on Saturday that “we are going to win” the election. Harris appeared alongside former first lady Michelle Obama in the overflow room ahead of the vice president’s rally in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Saturday is the first day of early voting statewide in Michigan.

Saturday marks Obama’s first rally for the vice president. She introduced Harris, saying the election will be close and urging supporters to stay “fired up.”

“It’s gonna be close, y’all. We can’t take anything for granted. We are gonna need you this fired up for the next 10 days so that we can get this done and we can sleep at night,” Obama said.

Former first lady Michelle Obama speaks at a campaign rally for Vice President Kamala Harris in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on Saturday.

Michelle Obama said Saturday that the presidential election is “too close” and encouraged people to vote at a rally for Vice President Kamala Harris.

She continued, “I know that if we want to help this country finally turn the page on the politics of hatred and division, we can’t just sit around and complain. No, we’ve got to do something.”

The event, promoting voter turnout in Michigan, marks the first time the former first lady has rallied with Harris as the vice president seeks to win the White House next month.

Obama, alongside her husband, former President Barack Obama, endorsed Harris in July amid a push for the vice president to succeed President Joe Biden after he ended his reelection bid. The former first lady also delivered a rousing and forceful endorsement of Harris in her speech during the second night of the Democratic National Convention.

Vice President Kamala Harris meets with reproductive health care providers and medical students in Portage, Michigan, on Saturday.

Vice President Kamala Harris stopped by a doctor’s office in Portage, Michigan, on Saturday, telling a small group of health care providers gathered that she wanted to visit the office since the providers were “on the ground” seeing the impacts of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

“I know there’s also been an impact in terms of students thinking about their career as physicians and what type of practice they would actually engage in and where they would go,” she added.

That sentiment was reiterated by one of the medical students Harris spoke with, Emily Hinners, who said the election has the chance to “monumentally impact our careers before they even start.”

Some background: Harris has leaned hard into her abortion rights message in the final days of the campaign, amplifying the stories of women affected by the state-level restrictions that followed the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.

Former President Donald Trump on Saturday criticized Beyoncé for not performing at Vice President Kamala Harris’ rally the night before in Houston.

Trump falsely claimed that people then “booed the hell out of” Harris at her rally because Beyoncé didn’t perform.

“They have to use people to get people to come,” Trump said.

Texas music legend Willie Nelson also attended Harris’ Friday rally and played two songs for the crowd.