Doug Emhoff attacks Donald Trump over antisemitic comments
(NEW YORK) — Second gentleman Doug Emhoff has slammed Donald Trump over antisemitic comments made by the former president.
In a new interview with GMA anchor Michael Strahan, the second gentleman, who is Jewish, accused Trump of having a “record” of saying “vile, antisemitic things.”
Strahan asked Emhoff what he thought of Trump’s July interview with WABC in which he claimed Vice President Kamala Harris, Emhoff’s wife and Democratic candidate for president, “doesn’t like Jewish people.”
“It’s typical Donald Trump gaslighting,” Emhoff told Strahan. He “is a guy who has had a record of saying incredibly vile, antisemitic things. So, for him to say that — I just almost laugh at — at how– the chutzpah, as we would say.”
Emhoff has repeatedly attacked Trump over his rhetoric towards Jewish Americans, calling him an antisemite in May after Trump claimed Jewish people who voted for President Joe Biden needed to “have to have their head examined.”
On Wednesday, Emhoff headlined two separate fundraisers for the Harris-Walz campaign, where he defended his wife against comments made by Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who said at a Trump town hall on Tuesday in Michigan that Harris “doesn’t have anything to keep her humble” because she does not have biological children.
“We know that all parents, no matter how you become one, make the same sacrifices and revel in the same joys of raising children as any parent anywhere,” Emhoff said, adding, “Women in this country will never humble themselves before Donald Trump.”
(WASHINGTON) — Special counsel Jack Smith has charged former President Donald Trump in a superseding indictment in his federal election subversion case.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(WASHINGTON) — A Fox News interview from 2021, in which Sen. JD Vance smeared Vice President Kamala Harris as a “childless cat lady,” has resurfaced since he became the Republican vice presidential nominee, sparking widespread anger.
In the clip, Vance questioned Democrats — including Harris, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — for not having biological children.
“We are effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too,” Vance said.
“How does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?” he asked.
The 2021 interview began circulating widely after Hillary Clinton shared the clip on X. “What a normal, relatable guy who certainly doesn’t hate women having freedoms,” she wrote.
Vance did not immediately respond to a request for comment from ABC News.
Though Harris does not have biological children, she does have two stepchildren — Cole and Ella Emhoff — who have lovingly referred to her as “Momala.”
Kerstin Emhoff — second gentleman Doug Emhoff’s ex-wife, and mother to Cole and Ella Emhoff — has been a vocal supporter of Harris, and defended her against attacks about her parental status.
“These are baseless attacks. For over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a co-parent with Doug and I,” she said. “She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.”
Ella Emhoff shared her mother’s statement on Instagram, writing, “I love my three parents.”
“How can you be ‘childless’ when you have cutie pie kids like Cole and I?” she added.
Buttigieg also hit back against Vance’s comments, saying in a CNN interview that Vance should not speak about other people’s children.
“The really sad thing is he said that after Chasten and I had been through a fairly heartbreaking setback in our adoption journey,” Buttigieg said. “He couldn’t have known that, but maybe that’s why you shouldn’t be talking about other people’s children, and it’s not about his kids or my kids or the vice president’s family. It’s about your family, people’s families whose well-being will depend on whether we go into a future led by somebody like Kamala Harris, who is focused on expanding the prosperity, the freedom, the well-being of our families.
Actress Jennifer Aniston, who has spoken about her struggles with fertility, made a post on Instagram slamming Vance, who has voted against establishing federal protections for in vitro fertilization.
“I truly can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of The United States,” Aniston wrote. “All I can say is … Mr Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day. I hope she will not need to turn to IVF as a second option. Because you are trying to take that away from her too.”
Vance’s comments have even struck a nerve with some prominent conservative women.
“One of my best friends did rounds and rounds of unsuccessful IVF wanting to have a child. It is still painful to talk about,” Meghan McCain said in an X post. “This ‘childless women’ comment by JD Vance has made so many waves with so many different friends of mine for its insensitivity and cruelty to women.”
Beverly Hallberg, a fellow with the conservative nonprofit Independent Women’s Forum, replied to McCain’s post.
“I’m childless on earth, but I have a baby in heaven due to an ectopic pregnancy,” Hallberg said. “Not all women who don’t have children are childless by choice. It adds insult to injury, to put it mildly, when these comments are said.”
Corie Whalen, media relations director at a Republican think tank and former congressional staffer, said on X she was disgusted by Vance’s comments.
“I’m a right-leaning woman who agrees with almost nothing the Biden-Harris administration has done, but the primal hatred and disgust Vance stokes in me transcends politics,” she wrote. “I suspect I am not the only woman of my vintage, so to speak, who feels this way.”
The head of a major infertility nonprofit also spoke out against Vance, calling his comments “painful and tone-deaf.”
“People are childfree for many reasons — from grieving the pain of miscarriage to experiencing failed adoptions or rounds of fertility treatments to making their own choice not to have children,” said Barbara Collura, president and CEO of RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association.
“For some, living without children doesn’t feel like a choice that they made, but a choice that they live with, despite trying to grow their families,” Collura added. “Under no circumstances, should living childfree be weaponized in a way that degrades people or their value to society.”
In an interview with ABC News at the American Teachers Federation Conference in Houston, Briget Rein — a former Brooklyn teacher, who wore a pink shirt that said “Cats Against Trump” — proudly identified herself as a “cat lady” and said she thought Vance’s remarks were “stupid.”
“Vance also is unprepared to be a vice president, he’s not prepared. Because he’s busy looking at the surface. He’s not looking at the full picture,” she said.”You know, this cat lady went to college. This cat lady went to work … but he’s busy talking about cat ladies, and talking about women in a very derogatory fashion.”
(NEW YORK) — Former President Donald Trump told a Long Island, New York, rally crowd on Wednesday night that he is going to Springfield, Ohio, the town he said on the debate stage two weeks ago, is where “people are resorting to eating dogs, cats and other household pets.”
“I’m going to Springfield, and I’m going to Aurora,” he told the rally attendees, adding that he plans to go within the next two weeks.
Trump did not specify the ethnicity of the migrants he claimed were eating pets in Springfield when he made those remarks, but on X, his running mate JD Vance continuously raised the issue of Haitian undocumented immigrants draining social services.
“Kamala Harris dropped 20,000 Haitian migrants into a small Ohio town, and chaos has ensued,” Vance previously said on X.
Trump’s reason for his Long Island rally on Wednesday night was to appeal to voters in New York, a blue state. Wednesday night’s event was Trump’s second rally in the state, on top of the multiple campaign stops he made in between his court appearances for his New York civil fraud trial.
As he addressed the crowd, Trump said a Harris win in November would turn New York “into a third-world country, if it isn’t already.”
Speaking at the Nassau Coliseum — a venue that holds 16,000 spectators — Trump thanked law enforcement that thwarted an apparent assassination attempt on him on Sunday and praised the woman who captured a picture of the suspect’s vehicle, saying he’d like to meet her.
Then he turned to his Democratic opponent, “the radical left Democrat politicians and the fake news media.”
“The message is it’s time to stop the lies, stop the hoaxes, stop the smears, stop the lawfare or the fake lawsuits against me, and stop claiming your opponents will turn America into a dictatorship,” Trump said. “Give me a break. Because the fact is that I’m not a threat to democracy. They are.”
He also pledged to restore SALT (state and local deductions), which his 2017 tax cut capped at $10,000.
Outside the Coliseum ahead of Trump’s event, vendors lined up selling various Trump merchandise. The celebration, which included music blaring through speakers, featured golden cars with Trump’s face on the front and bedazzled Trump jackets. Trump’s campaign claimed that 60,000 tickets were requested, which would make it one of Trump’s largest rallies during this campaign cycle.
The line for attendees stretched around the building hours before doors opened.
Trump’s rally was on the same day he was initially scheduled to be sentenced in his New York civil fraud trial. The judge in the case delayed his sentencing from Sept. 18 until Nov. 26 — after the presidential election.
Ahead of his Wednesday rally, Trump worked to court New Yorkers by promising to reverse a tax policy he signed into law in 2017. In a post on his social media platform, Trump claimed he would “get SALT back,” suggesting eliminating the cap on state and local tax deductions. In his 2017 tax law, Trump capped deductions at $10,000.
A majority of New York’s congressional Republican delegation has been pushing to reverse the SALT deduction cap on Capitol Hill, spearheading the ongoing debate around the issue.
However, while many local Republicans have celebrated Trump’s posture change, it also comes as he has recently rolled out a series of tax breaks, raising concerns about significant increases to the deficit.
“WHAT THE HELL DO YOU HAVE TO LOSE? VOTE FOR TRUMP! I will turn it around, get SALT back, lower your Taxes, and so much more,” the former president posted on his social media network ahead of his Wednesday rally.
In May, Trump pledged to turn New York red during a campaign rally in deep-blue South Bronx, New York, attempting to court the Hispanic and Black voters that make up a majority of the area’s population.
“We have levels of support that nobody’s seen before … Don’t assume it doesn’t matter just because you live in a blue city. You live in a blue city, but it’s going red very, very quickly,” Trump said at the time.
The Trump campaign has worked to court New Yorkers this campaign cycle, attempting to at least pull enthusiasm away from Democrats and help make down-ballot races more competitive.
This is also his first large-scale campaign rally after an apparent assassination attempt on Trump while he was golfing in West Palm Beach on Sunday. The day prior, Trump held a town hall where nearly 4,000 Michigan voters attended; the Nassau rally is expected to be four times the size.
Trump had also made multiple smaller campaign stops in New York City before and after his mandated court appearance throughout his seven-week hush money payment criminal trial earlier this year to highlight several campaign messaging at each stop.
In mid-April, he visited a small bodega in Harlem that was the scene of a fatal stabbing two years earlier to highlight what he claimed was the failure of Democratic prosecutors in New York to ensure public safety as they prosecute him. Later that month, he visited a construction site in midtown Manhattan to boast support from union workers and working-class voters.