Trump says he won’t run again if he loses in November
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(WASHINGTON) — Former President Donald Trump said Sunday that he doesn’t see himself running for president again if he loses in November.
“No, I don’t. No, I don’t,” Trump responded to Sinclair Broadcast Group’s “Full Measure” host Sharyl Attkisson’s question about another run. “I don’t see that at all. I think that, hopefully, we’re going to be successful,” he said.
With President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 election, Trump is now the oldest presidential nominee in history as age and mental acuity have become focal points in this year’s election cycle.
During his third presidential bid, Trump has balanced his courtroom appearances in the four criminal cases he faces with campaign stops.
As he lays out the stakes for the 2024 election, Trump often emphasizes his point by describing the turmoil that has he and his campaign have faced over the course of the cycle.
“I didn’t need this. I had a very nice life. I didn’t need to go through court systems and go through all the other stuff and run at the same time,” Trump told tech entrepreneur Elon Musk during a livestream conversation in August when asked why he decided to launch another presidential bid.
“But if I had to do it over again, I would have done it over again, because this is so much more important than me or my life,”
Trump was also asked about the possibility of Tulsi Gabbard or Robert F. Kennedy Jr., two former Democrats that have become surrogates for the Trump campaign, serving in his cabinet during a potential second administration and claimed that he made no promises to them.
“It doesn’t mean anything. It means it could be, but I didn’t make deals with anybody,” Trump said about when asked about Kennedy serving as Health and Human Services secretary, as Kennedy’s former running mate Nicole Shanahan suggested. “It’s not appropriate to do it. It’s too early.”
Trump briefly talked about unity after an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July, but now blames rhetoric from Democrats for political violence.
“They are a danger. They’re destroying our country,” Trump said in the interview which aired Sunday.
Trump again repeated his claims that he feels that “only consequential” presidents are in danger as he talked about the close call he had with a would-be shooter on his golf course in Florida last week.
“Well, I think we just have to do what you have to do,” he said, praising his Secret Service protection.
“I think that I will feel safe I think I’m going to feel safe.”
“I can’t be scared, because if you’re scared, you can’t do your job, so I just can’t be I have, thus far, had somebody protecting me,” he said.
(WASHINGTON) — With the economy the top issue for many voters in the home stretch of the election, Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to announce record lending from the federal government to small business owners on Thursday, according to a White House fact sheet shared exclusively with ABC News.
The Small Business Administration (SBA) provided a record $56 billion in loans to small businesses from October 2023 through September 2024, the fact sheet said, with more than 100,000 small businesses receiving the loans — the highest number in 16 years — while lending to Black-owned businesses has tripled in the past four years.
The SBA lends money to small businesses as a way for them to get off the ground, expand or rebuild — especially when other financing options might not be available — and companies must meet eligibility requirements, such as being based in the United States or only having a certain number of employees, to qualify for the loans.
“Small businesses are the backbone of our economy. And we know that small business owners need access to capital to hire more employees, grow their businesses, and advance innovation,” Harris said in a statement to ABC News. “Today I am proud to announce that the U.S. Small Business Administration has made record lending to over 100,000 small businesses in the last year, the most by the agency in over 15 years. When small businesses thrive, our local economies thrive.”
The agency has been under pressure after the White House said last week that its disaster loan program, which provides low-interest lending to disaster survivors, ran out of funds in the wake of Hurricanes Helene and Milton.
The announcement from Harris comes as she seeks to dispel voters’ doubts over the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the economy and inflation. Polls consistently show former President Donald Trump outranks Harris in handling the economy.
The latest report from the National Federation of Independent Business, which represents small businesses nationwide, found uncertainty among its members is at an all-time high ahead of the election.
Last month, Vice President Harris unveiled a proposal to increase the tax deduction for new small businesses ten-fold, from $5000 to $50,000.
Senator JD Vance, a Republican from Ohio and Republican vice-presidential nominee, left, and Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota and Democratic vice-presidential nominee, during the first vice presidential debate at the CBS Broadcast Center in New York, US, on Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2024. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump praised their respective running mates — Gov. Tim Walz and Sen. JD Vance — as their campaigns worked to spin how well they performed at Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate.
Despite several missteps from both candidates over the course of the debate, Harris said in a fundraising email Wednesday morning that Walz “offered a powerful showcase of the kind of leadership we deserve,” and Trump said in an interview Wednesday there was “brilliance” in Vance’s debate performance.
With just over 30 days until Election Day, the debate stage offered both candidates an opportunity to appeal to undecided voters and share their running mates’ visions for America — and now the Harris and Trump campaigns and surrogates are working to smooth over any moments where the vice-presidential candidates stumbled.
Harris campaign communications director Michael Tyler told CNN Wednesday morning that the campaign is “excited” by Walz’s performance.
“I think Vice President Harris’ reaction is the same as voters across the country, independent voters in particular, and those undecideds who saw Gov. Walz lay out a very clear vision for where he and the vice president want to take this country,” Tyler said.
Tyler called Vance a “slick debater,” but said “Gov. Walz clearly articulated the case in a plain-spoken way.”
But Walz struggled to explain why he had in the past “misspoke” about being in Hong Kong and witnessing the Tiananmen Square protests in the spring of 1989, despite the weekslong protest concluding in June, months before he traveled there.
Walz argued “my community knows who I am” and that he’s “not been perfect” and can be “a knucklehead at times.”
“No, I think he was pretty clear,” Tyler said when asked if Walz needed to go further than his comments during the debate in clearing up his misstatement on the protests.
“He said he misspoke. He was there in August. I think he’d earlier said it was June. This is a matter of months, 35 years ago. He was there during the summer of protests,” Tyler added.
In a play-by-play live commentary on social media, Trump painted Walz as appearing “nervous,” incompetent and even “weird.” Trump in particular seized on Walz struggling to answer for the alleged discrepancy in his visit to Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protests, portraying him as a liar.
Walz’s performance at times was shaky, with some suggesting if Walz did more news interviews since becoming the vice-presidential pick, he’d have been better prepared. When pressed on that, Tyler said “no,” it would not have helped, before pointing to a more aggressive strategy in campaign’s final weeks.
“I think what you will see him and the vice president continue to do over the course of the final month of this stretch is use every tool that we have at our disposal to continue to reach the voters,” Tyler said. “Yes, that will be inclusive of more media appearances, more interviews.”
On the campaign trail on Wednesday, Walz graded his debate performance: “Not bad for a football coach,” he said at a York, Pennsylvania, rally.
“I did not underestimate Sen. Vance as a slick talker,” Walz said. “But I also called out there — you can’t rewrite history. You can’t rewrite history.”
Trump, who said in a video posted before the debate that he planned to call out his own running mate if he made a “mistake,” praised Vance’s performance throughout Tuesday night.
“JD crushed it!” Trump posted on his social media following the conclusion of the debate.
And on Wednesday morning, in a phone call with Fox News Digital, Trump doubled down on his praise, saying Vance’s performance “reconfirmed” his choice of vice-presidential candidate.
“JD was fantastic last night — it just reconfirmed my choice,” Trump told Fox News Digital. “There was a brilliance to what he did.”
Trump campaign’s senior advisers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita immediately claimed victory following the debate, saying in a statement that Vance “unequivocally won tonight’s debate in dominating fashion,” and claimed “it was the best debate performance from any vice-presidential candidate in history.”
Walking into the spin room right Tuesday night, the former president’s eldest son Donald Trump Jr., who had strongly supported Vance as Trump’s running mate, told reporters that “there’s nothing to spin.”
Asked about the moment when Vance refused to say if Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump Jr. insisted that the American public are “not worried about that.”
Yet the Harris campaign was quick to zero in on the exchange.
A Harris campaign official claimed a focus group of undecided battleground-state voters they conducted said this back-and forth was the “biggest gap” between the two candidates. The campaign clipped the exchange for a new ad released Wednesday morning.
Jason Miller, senior Trump campaign adviser, in the spin room Tuesday night said, “JD’s a very likable guy. I think his life experience connects with voters.”
“I think Sen. Vance helped us win today because he had a tremendous performance,” Miller said.
(WASHINGTON) — Postmaster General Louis DeJoy on Thursday said former President Donald Trump and others are “wrong” to question the Postal Service’s ability to deliver ballots ahead of the presidential election.
Asked by a reporter, at a virtual preview of the 2024 election, to respond specifically to Trump’s claim that the Postal Service might deliberately misplace mail-in ballots, DeJoy responded tersely: “My response is like my response to everyone who says that we’re not prepared for the election — it’s that they’re wrong,” he said. “I don’t know that I need to comment any more than that. They’re wrong.”
At the top of his prepared remarks, DeJoy pushed back on those engaging in rhetoric that undermines the public confidence in the Postal Service, which, DeJoy reminded reporters, had been delivering ballots since 1864.
“We recognize that election officials are under an extreme amount of pressure, and will remain so for at least the next two months,” he said. “We also recognize that the American public will become increasingly alarmed if there is ongoing dialogue that continues to question the reliability of the Postal Service for the upcoming elections.”
“Let me be clear,” DeJoy continued. “The Postal Service is ready to deliver the nation’s mail in ballots.”
DeJoy said the Postal Service delivered 99.89% of ballots from voters to election officials in the 2020 election, which he called a “highly sensitive, sensationalized environment.”
In an interview with right-wing outlet Real America’s Voice from Las Vegas last week, former President Donald Trump escalated false and baseless claims about mail-in voting, even suggesting a possible lawsuit.
“I read the post office is saying how bad it is. The post office is critiquing themselves, saying we’re really in bad shape. We can’t deliver the mail. And they’re not even talking about mail in ballots, right? We’re going to dump millions and millions of dollars,” Trump said, repeating false claims that the last election was “rigged” and that the U.S. voting system is “bad.”
