JD Vance tells Arizona crowd late Sen. John McCain wouldn’t have supported Harris
(PHOENIX) — Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, said that although he never met the late Arizona Sen. John McCain, he is certain McCain would not support Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential bid.
“John McCain, I’m sure, disagreed with Donald Trump on a whole host of issues. And yes, Donald Trump disagreed with John McCain on a whole host of issues. I do not believe for a second that if John McCain were alive today and he sees what’s going on at the American Southern border, that he would support Kamala Harris and all the destruction that she’s brought,” Vance told a crowd at a rally event in Phoenix on Thursday night.
The McCains came up when a local reporter asked Vance for his thoughts on Jimmy McCain, youngest son of John and Cindy McCain, saying he will vote for Harris.
“I mean, look, who cares what somebody’s family thinks about a presidential race,” Vance later said. “I care about what these people care about.”
While answering the reporter’s question, Vance also suggested that Trump, who in 2015 said of McCain, “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured,” and the Vietnam vet were able to work together.
“Look, one of the things I love about Donald Trump — and I never knew John McCain, but I suspect that one of the things that I would have loved about John McCain is that they didn’t let their personal grievances get in the way of serving the country,” Vance said.
Vance’s comments come after Jimmy McCain’s comments about supporting Harris and, more recently, former Rep. Liz Cheney, also saying she will vote for the vice president.
(WASHINGTON) — In a social media post on Sunday, former President Donald Trump falsely accused Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign of using artificial intelligence to fabricate crowds a campaign rally in Michigan last week.
The picture referenced by Trump shows a large crowd waiting to see Harris speak at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport on Aug. 7
A Harris campaign official told ABC News that the photo Trump called into question was taken by a Harris campaign staffer and that it was “not modified by AI in any way.”
“The photo in question was taken by a staffer on their iPhone 12 Pro at 6:28PM on August 7, at the rally at the Detroit Airport,” the campaign official told ABC News in a statement.
ABC News obtained the original image and was able to verify the metadata matched with the timing of the event.
Harris’ Aug. 7 rally in Detroit, Michigan, was the third event of her battleground blitz since Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz joined the ticket. The campaign touts that more than 15,000 people attended the rally.
By comparison, the first public appearance that Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance shared had more than 12,000 spectators in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Trump’s campaign said.
The Harris campaign said there were more than 10,000 supporters at each stop on Harris and Walz’s battleground state blitz last week.
The Harris campaign also disputed Trump’s accusations in multiple social media posts and attacked Trump for not campaigning in a swing state as the former president spent the weekend campaigning and fundraising in Western states.
In recent weeks, Trump has continued to make baseless claims that the Harris campaign pays for her crowd as his Democratic rival gains momentum with large-scale rallies.
The former president has long boasted about his crowd size. In a news conference last week, Trump claimed that “nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me.”
He grew increasingly angry when asked about Harris’ crowd size — comparing them to his own.
“Oh, give me a break,” Trump replied to the reporter.
“I have 10 times, 20 times, 30 times the crowd size. And they never say the crowd was big. That’s why I’m always saying, turn around the cameras,” Trump said.
Trump then went on to compare the crowd that gathered for his speech in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021, to Martin Luther King Jr. ‘s 1963 March on Washington, which the civil rights leader delivered to an estimated crowd of 200,000 people, according to the U.S. Census.
“I’ve spoken to the biggest crowds. Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me. If you look at Martin Luther King when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours, same real estate, same everything, same number of people. If not, we had more. And they said he had a million people, but I had 25,000 people,” Trump said.
Trump’s next rally is on Wednesday at Harrah’s Cherokee Center in Asheville, North Carolina, which has a maximum capacity of 7,200 people; however, Trump’s venues often vary in size. After that, he is set to have a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, at Mohegan Arena at Casey Plaza — a venue that holds nearly 10,000 people.
(WASHINGTON) — Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Monday gave her much-anticipated endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, the most significant endorsement yet in the high-stakes political drama.
Her public backing of Harris came about 24 hours after President Joe Biden’s announcement he was bowing out of the 2024 race.
“America has been truly blessed by the wisdom and leadership of President Joe Biden. With love and gratitude, I salute President Biden for always believing in the possibilities of America and giving people the opportunity to reach their fulfillment. As one of our country’s most consequential presidents, President Biden has been not only on the right side of history, but on the right side of the future,” Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a statement.
“Today, it is with immense pride and limitless optimism for our country’s future that I endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for President of the United States. My enthusiastic support for Kamala Harris for President is official, personal and political,” she continued.
“Officially, I have seen Kamala Harris’s strength and courage as a champion for working families, notably fighting for a woman’s right to choose. Personally, I have known Kamala Harris for decades as rooted in strong values, faith and a commitment to public service. Politically, make no mistake: Kamala Harris as a woman in politics is brilliantly astute – and I have full confidence that she will lead us to victory in November.”
While Pelosi, 84, did not publicly call on Biden to withdraw from the race, her ambiguous public comments created the space over the past three weeks for rank-and-file Democrats to pressure the president to drop out. She and other leading members of the Democratic Party told Biden that they were concerned about his staying in the race, and how that could have an impact on Democratic candidates down-ballot.
Despite turning over the reins of the Democratic caucus to Rep. Hakeem Jeffries in 2023, Pelosi still has significant influence over members given her unmatched fundraising prowess that’s shaped Democratic politics and candidates for decades.
“In the Democratic Party, our diversity is our strength and our unity is our power. Now, we must unify and charge forward to resoundingly defeat Donald Trump and enthusiastically elect Kamala Harris as the next President of the United States. Onward to victory!” Pelosi said.
(WASHINGTON) — After the supreme leader of Iran signaled a willingness to return to nuclear negotiations with the United States, the Biden administration cast doubt on the likelihood of resuming talks in the near future.
“We will judge Iran’s leadership by their actions, not their words,” a State Department spokesperson said Tuesday.
“If Iran wants to demonstrate seriousness or a new approach, they should stop nuclear escalations and start meaningfully cooperating with the IAEA,” they added, referencing the International Atomic Energy Agency, an intergovernmental watchdog that Tehran has often subverted.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gave Iran’s newly installed president, reformist Masoud Pezeshkian, the go-ahead to relaunch talks with the U.S. on Tuesday while warning the country’s government against putting any trust in Washington.
“This does not mean that we cannot interact with the same enemy in certain situations,” Khamenei said, according to the official transcript of his remarks. “There is no harm in that, but do not place your hopes in them.”
The State Department spokesperson said the administration still saw a negotiated solution as the best way to contain Iran’s nuclear program, but that Iran’s failure to cooperate with the IAEA and its escalatory actions made diplomacy impossible.
“We are far away from anything like that right now,” they said.
Members of the administration also largely view the prospect of returning to indirect talks with Iran as a politically unfavorable step that could prove detrimental to Vice President Kamala Harris’ and other Democrats’ chances at winning in November, several officials told ABC News.
The doubtful outlook for resuscitating negotiations in the coming months further diminishes the already low odds of securing a deal with Iran before President Joe Biden’s time in the White House comes to an end, all but pushing his promise to negotiate a “longer and stronger” agreement out of reach.
Khamenei’s comments Tuesday echo the position he took around the time Tehran signed off on the 2015 nuclear pact known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or the JCPOA — a landmark accord that granted Iran relief from economic sanctions in exchange for limiting its nuclear program.
Former President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the agreement in 2018, calling it “a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made,” and reimposing financial restrictions on Iran.
In the years since, Khamenei’s public comments on the matter have oscillated between encouraging negotiations with the U.S. and outright dismissing the possibility of a renewed pact.
Foreign policy observers say the upcoming U.S. presidential election is injecting even more uncertainty into the prospects of reaching another nuclear agreement with Iran.
Trump has previously made unsubstantiated claims that Iran was ready to accept conditions that were highly favorable to the U.S. at the end of his term and that he was “ready to make a deal.” But on the campaign trail, Trump — a sworn enemy of the Iranian regime — has taken an increasingly hawkish stance against the country, which reportedly carried out a cyberattack targeting his campaign and has plotted against him and his former Cabinet officials.
Harris has also promised to take an aggressive approach to curbing Iran’s malign influence in the Middle East, but she supported the JCPOA, as well as the current administration’s efforts to cut a new deal. However, she has not clearly said whether she would attempt to pick up where Biden left off.
Indirect talks with Iran under the Biden administration officially kicked off in April 2021. Despite mediators’ initial optimism, talks eventually sputtered out after multiple rounds of stop-start diplomacy failed to move both sides toward an agreement.
So far, Biden has made good on another of his major promises regarding Iran: his declaration that the country would “never get a nuclear weapon on my watch.”
However, officials within his administration say Tehran has made substantial progress toward that goal in recent years.
In July, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Iran was likely only “one or two weeks away” from having breakout capacity to produce fissile material for a nuclear weapon, and that the U.S. was watching “very, very carefully” to see whether the country would move toward weaponizing its nuclear program, a step the administration says the regime has not yet taken.
The U.S. shutting down the possibility of any renewed talks with Iran right now comes amid heightened tensions in the Middle East, including Israel’s preemptive strike Saturday night on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon.