Donald Trump says there are ‘a lot of bad genes’ among migrants in the US
Gram Slattery and Kristina Cooke – October 7, 2024
FILE PHOTO: Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. president Donald Trump holds a rally in Juneau
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By Gram Slattery and Kristina Cooke
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said on Monday there are “a lot of bad genes” in the United States, while discussing murders allegedly committed by immigrants living illegally in the United States.
“How about allowing people to come to an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers,” Trump said in an interview with conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt, while discussing the immigration policies of his Democratic opponent in the Nov. 5 election, Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”
The former president has frequently attacked migrants on the campaign trail, particularly those who have been implicated in crimes. At times, he has used dehumanizing language, and he has increasingly turned to extremely graphic depictions of the crimes even though a range of studies show immigrants do not commit crime at a higher rate than native-born Americans.
Trump appeared to be referring to a letter from Immigration and Customs Enforcement to Republican Representative Tony Gonzales, released last month, which showed that 13,099 people have been convicted of homicide who are on ICE’s “non-detained docket.” That docket includes various types of immigrants who entered the country legally and illegally.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security called those statistics misleading.
“The data in this letter is being misinterpreted,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “The data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this Administration. It also includes many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners.”
In a statement, the Trump campaign defended his comments, saying he was speaking only about murderers, not immigrants.
“President Trump was clearly referring to murderers, not migrants,” said Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt. “It’s pretty disgusting the media is always so quick to defend murderers, rapists, and illegal criminals if it means writing a bad headline about President Trump.”
The White House condemned Trump’s remarks.
“That type of language is hateful, it’s disgusting, it’s inappropriate and it has no place in our country,” White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said.
(Reporting by Gram Slattery in Washington, additional reporting by Kristina Cooke and Jarrett Renshaw, editing by Ross Colvin and Rod Nickel)
Trump attacks Harris’ economic plans, says she ‘wants to feed people governmentally’
Bryan Metzger – October 7, 2024
Trump gave a rambling response when discussing Kamala Harris’ economic proposals.
He said that she “wants to feed people governmentally.”
Trump also said that some immigrants have “bad genes” and are predisposed to murder.
In a Monday morning interview, former President Donald Trump made a series of outlandish and false claims about Vice President Kamala Harris’ economic proposals.
“She wants to go into government housing,” Trump said on The Hugh Hewitt Show. “She wants to go into government feeding. She wants to feed people. She wants to feed people governmentally. She wants to go into a communist party type of a system.”
It’s unclear what Trump meant by “government feeding,” and a Trump spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The comment came after Hewitt, a conservative radio host, noted that Harris has proposed giving $25,000 in down-payment assistance to first-time homebuyers, a policy that some economists have warned would spike demand and raise prices.
“That’s going to drive the prices up, yeah,” Trump said. “Your price is going to be $100,000 dollars more now.”
More broadly, Harris has proposed working with the private sector via tax incentives to build three million more homes, despite the former president’s suggestion that she “wants to go into government housing.”
‘We’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country’
Moments later, Trump pivoted toward immigration, arguing that some immigrants have “bad genes” and are predisposed to murder.
“You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes,” Trump said. “And we’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”
It’s the latest example of Trump using inflammatory rhetoric to describe some immigrants. Last year, he said that some immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the country, which was seen by many as a reference to racial purity.
Trump also claimed on Monday that Harris has allowed “people to come through an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers.” He was apparently referring to recently released data from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) indicating that more than 13,000 noncitizens in the US who have been convicted of homicide, either in the US or other countries.
The Department of Homeland Security has said that data is being misinterpreted, and that “the data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more.”
Donald Trump — pictured at the US-Mexico border on August 22, 2024 south of Sierra Vista, Arizona — has a history of divisive racial rhetoric (Rebecca Noble)Rebecca Noble/GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/Getty Images via AFPMore
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Republican White House hopeful Donald Trump said Monday that illegal immigrants were bringing “bad genes” into the United States, doubling down on previous inflammatory rhetoric about migrants poisoning the blood of the country.
Trump was criticizing his Democratic presidential rival Vice President Kamala Harris in a radio interview when he brought up government figures showing there were thousands of immigrants in the United States who were not in federal immigration detention, despite homicide convictions.
“You know now, a murderer — I believe this — it’s in their genes. We’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now,” former president Trump told conservative host Hugh Hewitt.
The White House swiftly condemned Trump’s comments as “vile.”
“That type of language is hateful, it’s disgusting, it’s inappropriate, and has no place in our country,” Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters.
“This comes from the same vile statements that we’ve heard about (how) migrants poison the blood, that’s disgusting.”
Jean-Pierre added: “We’re going to continue to forcefully reject this kind of vile, disturbing, hateful, hateful speech.”
Trump was misconstruing data released in September by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.
The figures cover a period spanning decades, including when Trump was president, and also don’t include people incarcerated in places other than ICE facilities — in state, local or other federal facilities, for example.
– Election issue –
Illegal immigration into the United States, especially over the southern border with Mexico, is a major issue in the November 5 US presidential election.
Polls show it remains a major vulnerability for Harris, with border crossings having risen to record highs at the end of 2023 under President Joe Biden, whom she replaced as the Democratic standard-bearer in July.
But US media reported Monday that migrant apprehensions at the US-Mexico border fell 75 percent year-on-year in September — to the lowest level since the Trump administration — citing Department of Homeland Security statistics.
Trump, who is neck-and-neck with Harris in nationwide and swing-state polling ahead, has spent much of his campaign demonizing both undocumented immigrants and those in the United States legally.
During a rally last month, the 78-year-old former reality TV star said Harris should be prosecuted over Biden’s border policies and called illegal immigrants “animals,” out to “rape, pillage, thieve, plunder and kill.”
“They will walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat,” he said.
And he repeatedly threatened legal Haitian residents in Ohio with deportation, falsely accusing them of eating locals’ pets.
Trump — the oldest major-party White House candidate in history and the first convicted felon to run — accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country” in December in a phrase that earned him comparisons to Adolf Hitler.
Donald Trump wants to reinstate a spoils system in federal government by hiring political loyalists regardless of competence
Sidney Shapiro, Wake Forest University and Joseph P. Tomain, University of Cincinnati – October 5, 2024
Then-President Donald Trump standing underneath a portrait of Andrew Jackson in November 2017. Oliver Contreras – Pool / Getty Images
If elected to serve a second term, Donald Trump says he supports a plan that would give him the authority to fire as many as 50,000 civil servants and replace them with members of his political party loyal to him. Under this plan, if he eventually deemed those new employees disloyal, he claims he could fire them too.
The United States has tried such a plan before.
As we write in our book “How Government Built America,” newly elected President Andrew Jackson, after he took office in 1828, fired about half the country’s civil servants and replaced them with loyal members of his political party.
The result was not only an utterly incompetent administration, but widespread corruption.
Swearing allegiance
Jackson’s actions that rewarded political loyalists and punished enemies were a dramatic departure from what the founders had envisioned by establishing an independent civil service whose members were literally pledged to uphold the country’s laws.
In passage of its very first law, on June 1, 1789, Congress required newly appointed federal officials to take the oath of office to uphold the laws of the country and faithfully carry out their duties.
Congress also passed conflict-of-interest legislation at that time to prevent employees from making decisions based on personal financial considerations.
When President George Washington – and the next five U.S. presidents – hired a new employee, reputations mattered. Each of the presidents looked at how an appointee’s neighbors regarded him and whether he had been elected to local office, an indication that the man – and they were all men – was competent and an honest employee.
That’s not what Jackson, the nation’s seventh president, and his system aimed to do; he wanted loyalists in government jobs.
The spoils system
While the first presidents were concerned with the competence and honesty of civil service employees, Jackson quickly set aside those concerns.
Instead of hiring those who wanted to work for the public interest and the good of the nation, Jackson employed members of his political party who pledged to march in lockstep with him and his policies. This became known as the “spoils system.”
Like Trump, Jackson also had a version of the “deep state” that he opposed. He claimed that the appointment process was aristocratic and blocked the appointment of the ordinary people he represented. He also insisted that experience and competence were unnecessary.
A cartoon of President Andrew Jackson atop a pig depicts his spoils system, which rewarded party members with government jobs. Bettmann / GettyImages
Jackson was quite wrong about some of his political appointments.
One of his worst was Samuel Swartwout, a longtime Army friend and political sycophant. Jackson named him to two consecutive terms as collector of customs at New York, where he served from 1829 through 1837.
Considered a plum assignment, the job at the time was the highest paid in federal government and involved collecting taxes and fees on imported goods that arrived in the nation’s busiest port.
But a congressional investigation showed that Swartwout had stolen a little more than US$1.2 million during his tenure, or about $40 million in today’s dollars.
Swartwout had fled to London, but he returned to the U.S. after he was assured that he would not face criminal charges.
Jackson also learned that his power to influence federal agencies with high-level appointments was limited. Such was the case with the U.S. Postal Service.
As a slaveholder, Jackson was disturbed by the mailing of antislavery flyers in 1835 by the American Anti-Slavery Society. Fearing the flyers would lead to a Black insurrection, Jackson instructed his postmaster general, Amos Kendall, an enslaver himself, to fix their problem by limiting the mailings and asking Congress to prohibit the U.S. Postal Service from mailing all abolitionist material.
Congress refused, citing freedom of speech and expansion of presidential authority as the main reasons.
Long after Jackson had left the White House, Congress, between 1864 and 1883, debated making “merit” a key condition of hiring new employees, but nothing happened until after a disgruntled office seeker assassinated President James Garfield.
Congress then passed the Pendleton Act in 1883, which established the merit appointment system still used today. It also put a virtual end to a system that allowed whichever party that won the White House to reward its supporters with tens of thousands of jobs.
But the law exempts about 4,000 federal employees whose appointment requires the Senate’s advice and consent and who have been determined by the president to hold a “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating character.”
The idea is to give a new president the capacity to influence his policymaking by hiring top-level federal officials.
People seeking government jobs crashed the White House on the day of Andrew Jackson’s inauguration. Library of Congress
The plan that Trump supported would extend the president’s authority under the previous exemption to hire and fire tens of thousands of civil servants without regard to merit.
In short, he intends to reestablish the spoils system.
This is no idle threat.
Near the end of his administration, then-President Trump signed an executive order establishing a new job classification within the government’s career civil service called Schedule F for “employees in confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating positions.”
Under that designation, employees would lose virtually all of their civil service protections and could be fired without cause. It’s unclear how much effect Trump’s order had on the federal government because it was enacted two weeks before the 2020 election and was in effect for only a few months.
In our view, if political loyalty replaces merit as the basis of key federal appointments, Americans can expect government to be less competent – as Andrew Jackson learned during his administration.
While this might not matter to those who regard government as unimportant to the country – or worse, the enemy of the country – our book “How Government Built America” tells a much different story about the thousands of federal employees who provide everything from health services to protection from natural disasters.
Not every civil servant is a great employee, nor is every employee of private industry.
But there is ample proof that government works because of the many people behind the scenes in Washington and across the country who serve the American people – and uphold their oaths of office.
Sidney Shapiro is affiliated with the Center for Progressive Reform. .
Joseph P. Tomain does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Your left-leaning ‘protest vote’ is much worse than useless. It will reelect Trump | Opinion
Jeremy Fryberger – October 4, 2024
Imagn Images file photos
In recent months, the 2024 presidential election campaign has included more twists than a Chubby Checker tribute tour. Yet, at least one thing remains constant: When it comes to third-party candidates, older voters — and plenty of younger ones — have seen this story play out before.
In 2016, for example, an extraordinary number of centrists and left-leaners who normally would have supported the Democratic Party‘s presidential nominee — but who had been influenced by decades of disinformation against Hillary Clinton — instead chose Jill Stein or Gary Johnson (or simply didn’t vote). Some even championed the Republican candidate. Thus, many such third-party supporters, “protest votes” and no-shows not only wasted their ballots, but very much assisted putting Donald Trump and his cohort into the White House.
In 2000, Americans similar to those noted above backed not Democratic Party nominee Al Gore, but third-party option Ralph Nader — or just stayed home. And, in light of that election’s incredibly narrow outcome, these specific voters undeniably helped kick-start the eight-year George W. Bush administration — which included the 9/11 terror attacks, the commencement of two foreign wars and the Great Recession, which lasted from December 2007 to June 2009.
Were Bush or Trump even the second choices of these particular third-party or no-show voters? For almost all, it seems the answer is a resounding no — another reminder that elections are not games.
Meanwhile, aside from the relatively rare occurrence of a third-party presidential candidate joining a major party president’s Cabinet, it remains true in our country that the sole period during which third-party candidates (and their supporters) can influence Democratic or Republican policy positions is only before the general election. Yet, once November arrives — or whenever one casts a general election ballot — a third-party vote does nothing but distort the general election race.
As such, citizens who don’t live in one of the few places with ranked-choice voting and choose a third-party presidential option in November (or who don’t participate) will once again not only squander the moment — many of these voters will also inadvertently help their least-preferred candidate become president. And this time, that winning candidate could be a pathological lying, nonstop grifting, constantly crime-ing, twice impeached, quadruple indicted (so far), justice obstructing, society defrauding, court corrupting, national security compromising, alliance crushing, U.S. military disparaging, authoritarian loving, democracy dismantling, fascism-adjacent, anti-woman, sexual abusing, serial philandering, rabidly racist, white supremacist and nationalist, religiously bigoted and intolerant (but nonreligious), anti-science, environment destroying, always whining, vengeance seeking malignant narcissist and convicted felon (which, by the way, says nothing — or perhaps everything — about his 40-year-old running mate who would take charge if a certain 78-year-old couldn’t finish his term).
While none but men have led our nation throughout the U.S. presidency’s 235-year history — 45 of them white, and one African-American — citizens this year have the opportunity to elect not just our first woman president. And Kamala Harris would not be just our first Asian-African-American president, but a spectacularly qualified and prepared Asian-African-American woman president. Don’t miss this chance to be part of it.
Regardless, while tens of millions of Americans recognize the third party trap for what it is, every voter should trust history and avoid wasting their vote on any candidate who won’t possibly win — or even influence policy — yet could clear a path for another candidate and presidency that these very same voters want least of all.
Jeremy Fryberger is an architect living in Ketchum, Idaho, with his wife, their two children and dog.
Trump claims Hurricane Helene response ‘going even worse’ than Katrina
Brett Samuels – October 3, 2024
Former President Trump on Thursday repeatedly attacked Vice President Harris and the Biden administration’s response to Hurricane Helene by claiming that the federal response so far has been worse than Hurricane Katrina in the latest instance of him turning a natural disaster into a political advantage.
Trump held a rally with supporters in Saginaw, Mich., where he repeatedly claimed the federal government did not have enough funds to respond to the devastation in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina because the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had spent its money on migrants, a notion the White House pushed back heavily on.
“There’s nobody that’s handled a hurricane or storm worse than what they’re doing right now,” Trump said. “Kamala spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants. Many of whom should not be in our country.”
The White House spent the last 24 hours pushing back on Republicans who echoed similar, unsubstantiated claims.
“This is FALSE. The Disaster Relief Fund is specifically appropriated by Congress to prepare for, respond to, recover from, and mitigate impacts of natural disasters,” White House spokesperson Angelo Fernández Hernández said in a statement. “It is completely separate from other grant programs administered by FEMA for DHS.”
Biden has also called on Congress to return from recess to pass additional funding to assist with the recovery efforts. The House and Senate are not due to return to Washington until after the election.
Despite that, Trump went on to call the federal response to Helene “the worst response in the history of hurricanes.”
“A certain president, I will not name him, destroyed his reputation with Katrina,” Trump said, referring to former President George W. Bush. “And this is going even worse. She’s doing even worse than he did.”
The Biden administration has deployed more than 4,800 federal officials to support response efforts, and the president directed the deployment of up to 1,000 troops to assist in North Carolina’s recovery.
President Biden traveled Wednesday to North Carolina to tour storm damage, and he visited Florida and Georgia on Thursday to do the same. He was notably not joined by either Republican governor of either state. Harris traveled to Georgia on Wednesday and is expected to visit North Carolina in the coming days.
The federal government has also been working with states to provide housing assistance for those who need it and to restore power amid widespread outages. Biden has approved major disaster declarations for Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia to free up additional resources.
It’s only fed Trump’s history of politicizing responses to natural disasters.
He repeatedly feuded with officials in Puerto Rico as multiple hurricanes hit the island in 2017, the first year he was in office when he claimed without evidence that Democrats had inflated the death toll from Hurricane Maria to make him look bad.
Trump in 2019 insisted Alabama could bear the brunt of Hurricane Dorian, which ultimately landed on the East Coast. In making his claim, Trump used a marked-up projection map produced by the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration that conflicted with information given by weather forecasters.
During devastating wildfires in California in 2018, E&E News reported Thursday that White House officials had to show then-President Trump voter data to convince him to release funding for California wildfire victims, hesitating to give money to a blue state.
“You can’t only help those in need if they voted for you,” Biden posted on the social platform X in response to the report. “It’s the most basic part of being president, and this guy knows nothing about it.”
Sickening Report Reveals How Trump Played Politics With Disaster Aid
Hafiz Rashid – October 3, 2024
Donald Trump’s attempt to politicize the devastation left by Hurricane Helene isn’t the first time he’s tried to exploit a natural disaster. While he was president, Trump was hesitant to send aid to areas where people voted against him, such as wildfire-stricken California, according to two former White House staffers.
E&E News spoke to Mark Harvey, Trump’s senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council, who said that Trump didn’t want to send wildfire aid to California in 2018 because the state voted Democratic. But after Harvey showed him voting data from Orange County, California, showing more Trump supporters there than in all of Iowa, Trump changed his mind.
“We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas … to show him these are people who voted for you,” Harvey, who recently endorsed Kamala Harris along with other GOP national security figures, told E&E News.
Former White House Homeland Security adviser Oliva Troye concurred, saying that she would field calls from local politicians around the country asking for disaster relief because Trump refused to provide aid, leading her to frequently ask Vice President Mike Pence to pressure the president. She warned that Trump will play politics with disaster aid again if he returns to the White House.
“It’s not going to be about that American voter out there who isn’t even really paying attention to politics, and their house is gone, and the president of the United States is judging them for how they voted, and they didn’t even vote,” Troye said.
Trump eagerly sent aid to Florida in 2019 after Hurricane Michael hit the state’s Panhandle, according to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s autobiography, The Courage to Be Free. “They love me in the Panhandle,” Trump told DeSantis after he asked for federal assistance.
“I must have won 90 percent of the vote out there. Huge crowds. What do they need?” Trump asked, before directing FEMA to pay 100 percent of the state’s disaster costs. The emergency management agency ended up paying about $350 million more than it would have without Trump’s directive. In contrast, Trump only months earlier threatened to veto a bill in Congress that would have paid 100 percent of the disaster costs in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.
Since Hurricane Helene hit the American Southeast, Trump has pushed conspiracy theories that Democrats are neglecting Republican areas hit hard by the storm, doubling down after being called out. Even Republican politicians, like Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, are pushing back against him. But as is often the case with Trump, every accusation is just a confession.
Trump Refused to Approve Wildfire Aid Until He Learned Affected Areas Were MAGA: Report
Nikki McCann Ramirez – October 3, 2024
As the death toll from Hurricane Helene surpasses 200 people and the Southeast continues to reel from the disaster, Donald Trump is working overtime to politicize the tragedy into an attack against his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Despite governors from both political parties lauding of the Biden administration’s response, Trump is insisting the federal government has abandoned affected communities.
Earlier this week, Trump baselessly claimed that “the Federal Government, and the Democrat Governor of [North Carolina are] going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas,” ahead of a visit to a disaster zone in Valdosta, Georgia. But for all of the former president’s posturing as a capable leader who would better handle the crisis, his record in the White House says otherwise.
According to a Thursday report from E&E News, in 2018 — as wildfires ravaged large swaths of California — Trump initially refused to approve aid to the state because he felt some of the affected regions didn’t like him enough.
Mark Harvey, then Trump’s senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council staff, told E&E News, a subset of Politico, that the former president only approved the aid after being shown data proving that the affected counties contained a sufficient amount of his supporters.
“We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas … to show him these are people who voted for you,” Harvey recalled. His account was backed up by former Trump White House Homeland Security Adviser Olivia Troy.
It’s not the only time Trump based his response to a national disaster on the politics of those caught in its wake. A 2021 report found that the Trump administration blocked nearly $20 billion in hurricane relief to Puerto Rico in the aftermath of 2017’s Hurricane Maria, which devastated the island. Trump publicly bashed San Juan’s mayor at the time — Carmen Yulín Cruz, who had been critical of Trump — as “incompetent,” and downplayed the severity of the storm that killed nearly 3,000 people.
Last year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in his memoir described speaking to Trump in 2019 after Hurricane Michael swept through northern Florida. DeSantis requested that Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) foot the entire bill for recovery efforts instead of the standard 75 percent.
“This is Trump country — and they need your help,” DeSantis pitched Trump.
“They love me in the panhandle,” the former president said. “I must have won 90 percent of the vote out there. Huge crowds. What do they need?” Shortly after the conversation took place, Trump signed an executive order commanding the federal government to cover “100 percent of the total eligible costs” related to the hurricane response.
According to an analysis by E&E news, the decision resulted in FEMA paying “roughly $350 million more than it would have without Trump’s intervention.”
Trump’s impulse to make his responsibilities to Americans contingent on their politics has not vanished since he left office. Shortly before he took it upon himself to politicize the response to Helene, he threatened to withhold aid for natural disasters from Democratic strongholds.
“We won’t give him money to put out all his fires,” Trump said of California Gov. Gavin Newson, a Democrat, in September. “And, if we don’t give him the money to put out his fires. He’s got problems. He’s a lousy governor.”
Newsom countered that Trump had effectively threatened to “block emergency disaster funds to settle political vendettas.”
“Today it’s California’s wildfires. Tomorrow it could be hurricane funding for North Carolina,” he added.
A hurricane in North Carolina is exactly what happened, and Trump’s focus has not been on aiding the disaster response, but on basing his political rivals.
Sam Elliott in pro-Harris ad: ‘Are we really going back down that same f‑‑‑ing broken road?’
Sarah Fortinsky – September 24, 2024
Sam Elliott in pro-Harris ad: ‘Are we really going back down that same f‑‑‑ing broken road?’
Actor Sam Elliott, known for his deep and resonant voice, urged Americans to back Vice President Harris’s presidential bid in an ad released Monday by The Lincoln Project.
The celebrated Western actor narrated the approximately minutelong ad, called “Choose Change,” a title illustrating Harris’s effort to present herself as the change candidate in the race even though she is part of the current administration. Former President Trump, the GOP nominee, is also seeking the mantle of the change candidate.
The ad draws on themes of masculinity and the great outdoors to make the case for the Democratic nominee.
“I can’t believe we’re having this conversation again. So here we go. You know who the candidates are,” Elliott says in the video, as a photo of a serene American landscape transitioned to a depiction of an American farmer walking down a dirt path between his crops.
“You know what’s at stake,” Elliott says. “One candidate promises a divided America filled with lies and hate, and one stands for change. Kamala Harris has more courage, more honor, more guts than this guy ever had.
“So you decide: Are we really going back down that same f‑‑‑ing broken road? Or are we moving forward towards hope, towards freedom, towards change?”
The video showed three side-by-side images from Trump’s presidency: The first photo depicted rioters holding “TRUMP” flags while they attacked police officers at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021; the second was the photo Trump took holding up a bible in front of a church, after threatening military action against protesters; the third depicted men marching and carrying torches, in what appeared to be the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va.
After quoting Harris advocating for “a strong middle class,” Elliott invoked gender explicitly, challenging skeptics to overcome their reservations about a female president.
“There’s promise that lies in change, and the time for change is now. So what the hell are you waiting for? Because if it’s the woman thing, it’s time to get over that. It’s time for hope, for change,” Elliott said.
“It’s time to be a man and vote for a woman,” he continued.
That line is notable, as Harris has also largely avoided discussing her race and gender on the campaign trail.
Trump praises Russia’s military record in argument to stop funding Ukraine’s fight
Adriana Gomez Licon – September 24, 2024
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks about the tax code and manufacturing at the Johnny Mercer Theatre Civic Center, Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2024, in Savannah, Ga. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrives for the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2024, at UN headquarters. (AP Photo/Stefan Jeremiah)
SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) — Donald Trump on Tuesday praised Russia’s military record in historical conflicts and derided U.S. aid to Ukraine as he again insisted he would quickly end the war launched by Moscow’s invasion if elected president.
Speaking in Savannah, Georgia, Trump mocked President Joe Biden’s frequent refrain that the U.S. would back the Ukrainian armed forces until Kyiv wins the war. He raised two long ago conflicts to suggest Moscow would not lose — the former Soviet Union’s role in defeating Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in World War II in the 1940s, and French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte’s failed invasion of Russia more than a century earlier.
Trump insisted that the U.S. had “to get out,” though he did not specify how he would negotiate an ending to U.S. involvement in the war.
“Biden says, ‘We will not leave until we win,’” Trump said, lowering his voice to mimic the Democratic president. “What happens if they win? That’s what they do, is they fight wars. As somebody told me the other day, they beat Hitler, they beat Napoleon. That’s what they do. They fight. And it’s not pleasant.”
An official on Trump’s campaign also said Tuesday that the Republican nominee will not meet this week with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is visiting the U.S. to attend the opening of the U.N. General Assembly.
No meeting had been scheduled between the two, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal planning, despite a statement from Ukrainian officials last week that said Zelenskyy had planned to see the former president.
Trump on Tuesday repeated his characterization of Zelenskyy as “the greatest salesman on Earth” for winning U.S. aid to help Ukraine.
“Every time Zelenskyy comes to the United States, he walks away with $100 billion,” Trump said, erroneously. The U.S. has provided more than $56 billion in security assistance since Russia invaded in 2022, according to the State Department.
Trump and Zelenskyy have a long history dating back to the former U.S. president’s time in the White House. The then-president pressured Zelenskyy to open investigations of Biden and his son Hunter as well as a cybersecurity firm Trump falsely linked to Ukraine. That call — and the hold placed by the White House on $400 million in military aid — led to Trump’s first impeachment.
Zelenskyy plans to meet with Biden and Harris in Washington.
Earlier this week, in an interview with The New Yorker, Zelenskyy implied Trump does not understand and oversimplifies the conflict, and said his running mate JD Vance is “too radical” and essentially advocates for Ukraine to “make a sacrifice” by “giving up its territories.”
On Monday, Trump’s son Donald Jr. criticized Zelenskyy on X, reminding his followers that the suspect in his father’s second assassination attempt had lambasted Trump’s approach to foreign policy, including the war in Ukraine.
“So a foreign leader who has received billions of dollars in funding from American taxpayers, comes to our country and has the nerve to attack the GOP ticket for President?” he posted.
Associated Press writer Michelle L. Price in New York contributed to this report.
