Trump doesn’t mention embattled GOP candidate Mark Robinson at North Carolina rally
(WILMINGTON, N.C.) — Former President Donald Trump returned to the key battleground state of North Carolina for a rally Saturday, but declined to mention Mark Robinson — his party’s nominee for governor in the state.
The rally went on amid the allegations surrounding the Republican lieutenant governor, who the former president had previously supported and called “Martin Luther King on steroids.”
Robinson, who did not appear at the rally, was accused of posting inflammatory comments on the message board of a pornography website more than a decade ago, according to a report published Thursday from CNN.
The embattled gubernatorial candidate had not been expected to attend Saturday’s rally. Trump has not given any indication that he intends to pull his endorsement of Robinson.
In a statement Sunday, Robinson’s campaign said four key staffers had “stepped down” from the campaign: general consultant and senior advisor Conrad Pogorzelski, III; campaign manager Chris Rodriguez; finance director Heather Whillier; and deputy campaign manager Jason Rizk.
“I appreciate the efforts of these team members who have made the difficult choice to step away from the campaign, and I wish them well in their future endeavors. I look forward to announcing new staff roles in the coming days,” Robinson said in a statement.
Trump has campaigned for Robinson multiple times during this election cycle, including inviting him to speak at his rallies in North Carolina this year and hosting him at his Mar-a-Lago estate for a fundraiser last year.
People close to the former president told ABC News that they were bracing for the Robinson story on Thursday. The campaign was planning to put more distance between Trump and Robinson, but initially did not have plans to push him to drop out, sources said.
Robinson’s beleaguered campaign, however, did come up at a rally headlined by vice presidential candidate Gov. Tim Walz in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Walz insinuated that Trump was no “different” from Robinson.
“We got folks running as Republicans for governor that are proud to refer to themselves as Nazis. Let’s not pretend that there’s a gradual difference between the folks that are running here– that they’re running together,” Walz said.
ABC News’ Isabella Murray and Katherine Faulders contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden said on Monday the Secret Service “needs more help” as he briefly addressed the apparent assassination attempt against Donald Trump while departing the White House.
Speaking to reporters before boarding Marine One, Biden said, “Thank God the president’s OK.”
“One thing I want to make clear, the [Secret] Service needs more help and I think the Congress should respond to their needs, if in fact they need more services,” Biden added. He said he believed the agency may need more personnel.
Secret Service agents accompanying Trump fired at a man armed with an AK-47-style rifle on or near the Trump International golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida on Sunday. The FBI said it is investigating the matter as a possible assassination attempt. The incident comes just two months after the former president was shot in the ear at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Trump thanked law enforcement, including the Secret Service, for keeping him safe during the incident.
Biden, in a written statement in Sunday, also commended the Secret Service and their partners “for their vigilance and their efforts to keep the former President and those around him safe” and denounced political violence.
“There is an active investigation into this incident as law enforcement gathers more details about what happened,” Biden said. “As I have said many times, there is no place for political violence or for any violence ever in our country, and I have directed my team to continue to ensure that Secret Service has every resource, capability and protective measure necessary to ensure the former President’s continued safety.”
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(CHICAGO) — Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton electrified the crowd on the opening night of the Democratic National Convention as she portrayed Vice President Kamala Harris as someone who could break barriers and reach a pinnacle that eluded her throughout her own political career.
“Together, we’ve put a lot of cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling,” Clinton said in her rousing remarks after receiving a warm welcome from the crowd at the United Center in Chicago. “And tonight so close to breaking through once and for all.”
Harris will be the second woman in history to accept a major party’s nomination for president following Clinton, whose monumental 2016 run made history but ended with a general election loss to Donald Trump.
Clinton began her remarks by thanking President Joe Biden for his leadership and for returning decency to the White House. But she quickly switched gears to lay out the historic progress that’s led to this moment, recalling Shirley Chisholm’s presidential run and Geraldine Ferraro being the first woman to be nominated as vice president.
“And then, there was 2016 when it was the honor of my life to accept our party’s nomination for president,” Clinton said of her own experience. “And nearly 66 million Americans voted for a future where there are no ceilings on our dreams. And afterwards, we refused to give up on America. Millions marched. Many ran for office. We kept our eyes on the future.”
“Well, my friends, the future is here,” she said to cheers.
Clinton said she wished her mother and Harris’ mother could see them, and believed they would tell them to “keep going.” The audience then echoed back shouts of, “Keep going!”
Comparisons of Clinton and Harris’ campaigns have begun to emerge as Harris ramped up her operation in the weeks after Biden’s decision to step aside.
Several Democrats told ABC News they are feeling buoyed by Harris’ candidacy and how she’s reenergized the party, but are worried about being overconfident against Trump after what transpired with Clinton eight years ago.
Clinton, who first ran for president in 2008 but lost in the primary race to Barack Obama, was successful in 2016 in clinching the nomination after defeating independent Sen. Bernie Sanders.
A bitter, ugly general election contest ensued between Trump and Clinton. Trump took to calling Clinton “Crooked Hillary” and the “devil.” Clinton called half of Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables,” which critics called a mistake that alienated some voters.
A Trump fundraising email sent out Monday hours ahead of Clinton’s DNC remarks highlighted her past “deplorables” comment and claimed she was “about to unleash hell on MAGA.”
In her speech, Clinton took a shot at Trump for being convicted on 34 felony counts (a verdict he’s vowed to appeal) saying he “made his own kind of history” and “fell asleep at his own trial.”
After those comments, the crowd broke into chants of “Lock him up!” to which Clinton smiled and nodded her head. Trump called for Clinton to be imprisoned multiple times in the 2016 campaign, with “Lock her up!” calls frequently emerging at his rallies.
Polls in 2016 had shown Clinton ahead leading up to Election Day, but when results came in they showed Trump leading a stunning upset by grabbing several key battleground states. Clinton conceded the next morning.
Clinton referenced polls in her speech, noting that while Harris has been polling better against Trump than Biden, Democrats can’t take their foot of the gas.
“No matter what the polls say, we can’t let up,” she said. “We can’t get driven down crazy conspiracy rabbit holes. We have to fight for the truth. We have to fight for Kamala as she will fight for us. Because you know what? It still takes a village to raise a family, heal a country and win a campaign.”
Clinton recounted her loss in greater detail and what went wrong with her campaign in her 2017 memoir What Happened. She wrote that she bore responsibility ultimately for the loss to Trump but described it being difficult to overcome stereotypes. She also directed some blame at former FBI director James Comey for reopening the investigation into her private email server 11 days before the election.
After the 2016 election, Clinton maintained a relatively low profile until 2020 when she campaigned for Biden after his success in the Democratic primaries.
Clinton spoke at the 2020 Democratic National Convention, saying she wish Trump had been a “better president” and praised Biden’s character and his choice of Harris to be his running mate. She said they were a team who could “pull our nation back from the brink and build back better.”
More recently, she penned a New York Times op-ed offering Biden advice on how to debate Trump before the June CNN showdown. Clinton called Trump a bully who “stalked” her on the debate stage in 2016 and urged Biden to be “direct and forceful.”
After Biden dropped out of the race, in large part because his poor debate performance ignited Democratic fears about his age, Clinton wrote another Times op-ed offering a full-throated endorsement of Harris.
Clinton said that Harris can defeat Trump but warned she will face similar prejudices — a theme she continued in her DNC speech.
“On her first day in court, Kamala said five words that still guide her. Kamala Harris for the people,” Clinton said, referencing Harris’ record as a prosecutor.
“That is something that Donald Trump will never understand,” Clinton went on. “So, it is no surprise, is it, that he is lying about Kamala’s record. He’s mocking her name and her laugh. Sounds familiar. But we have him on the run now.”
Describing Harris as someone who would “always have our backs,” Clinton praised the vice president for her work on reproductive rights, support for military service members and commitment to the rule of law.
At times, some in the crowd appeared emotional as she spoke.
“I want my grandchildren and their grandchildren to know I was here at this moment, that we were here, and that we were with Kamala Harris every step of the way,” Clinton said. “This is our time, America. This is when we stand up. This is when we break through. The future is here. It’s in our grasp. Let’s go win it.”ble.”
(WASHINGTON) — Republicans and Democrats agree: Ohio Sen. JD Vance has had a rocky rollout as former President Donald Trump’s running mate. What’s less clear is how much it matters to voters.
Since Vance was picked to join Trump on Republicans’ ticket, he’s been hit with a cascade of stories about past comments regarding childless women, stringent abortion stances, dislike of police and more. The drip, drip, drip has given Democrats an opening to peg Vance and Republicans at large as “weird,” phrasing that has become a cornerstone of Vice President Kamala Harris’ messaging.
Yet while the remarks are driving a prolonged news cycle, Vance is running in a cycle when his running mate is a former president famous for sucking up political oxygen and his Democratic counterpart will be picked by a likely nominee who herself was chosen as her party’s candidate in an unprecedented series of events.
“It’s hard to say,” one source close to Trump’s campaign said when asked how much voters will care about Vance’s introduction. “I don’t know if a vice presidential candidate ever is the driver of why someone votes for the principal. And so, that is to be determined.”
The conventional wisdom is that running mates historically don’t move the needle with voters in presidential races despite the intense calculus equation done by each presidential candidate to pick the right person. The most recent time a pick threatened a ticket was in 2008, when then-Alaska GOP Gov. Sarah Palin found herself in hot water as John McCain’s running mate, though the two also ran at a time of terrible poll numbers for outgoing President George W. Bush.
Vance was picked after a weekslong search among several contenders, keeping both the media and much of the GOP in suspense as to who will join Trump on Republicans’ ticket.
The Ohio senator was rolled out as the nominee the first day of the GOP convention to much fanfare, and after the confab ended, was immediately hit with headlines over his past comments, many of which focused on his remarks on women without kids, including saying in 2021 that the country was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.”
The controversy has pushed Vance to play defense, arguing that “the media wants to attack me” and that reporters are too focused on “sarcasm.”
But at the end of the day, it’s still the Trump show, Republicans argued, and support for the GOP ticket likely hinges on his appeal.
“Generally speaking, the vice presidential candidates don’t typically matter too much, especially when you have a candidate on the Republican side like Trump, who is the lightning rod, is the icon. A lot of voters are going to be voting for Trump. I just don’t buy much stock into somebody would have been a Trump voter and is now going to pull off of Trump because of the JD Vance pick,” said GOP pollster Robert Blizzard.
Republicans likened the headlines over Trump’s past comments as inside baseball rather than a campaign earthquake.
“They call him weird and all that stuff, this is rollout stuff. It’s just inside pollster, baseball stuff. When they find out that’s not working, the campaign will have moved on,” said a second source close to Trump’s campaign, arguing that Vance will maintain his appeal to voters in the Rust Belt given his roots in the region.
Trump himself said on Wednesday at the National Association of Black Journalists conference that “you have two or three days where there’s a lot of commotion … and then that dies down.”
The former president’s comments seemed particularly prescient Thursday, when the news cycle was dominated by his questioning during the NABJ interview of Harris’ race — rather than Vance’s comments about childless women.
Beyond that, headlines about Vance are competing with news stories about the Democratic ticket.
Democrats are locked in a whirlwind of their own, with Harris jolting to the top of the ticket after President Joe Biden ended his own campaign. She will soon pick her own running mate, which will likely set off a whole new news cycle.
And that’s on top of other national discussions, including over the recent assassination attempt on Trump.
“It’s just been such a chaotic, turbulent time period that I’m not sure many voters have really homed in and focused on it,” Blizzard said.
In addition to the cavalcade of stories, Vance has still been able to raise money and sell out events on the campaign trail, and print copies of his novel “Hillbilly Elegy” and a movie based off of it have spiked in popularity, suggesting some voters are also digesting a more positive depiction of him.
And through it all, Vance is expected to have the full support of the Trump campaign.
“President Trump is thrilled with the choice he made with Senator Vance to be his running mate, and they are the perfect team to take back the White House,” Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.
That doesn’t necessarily mean Vance’s introduction on the national ticket has been smooth.
Even those close to the Trump campaign admitted Vance’s rollout hasn’t been ideal, and a 538 average of polls gauging Vance’s popularity found the Ohio Republican’s disapproval rating at almost 38%, while his approval rating sat 6 points under that, at 32%.
“This has been, statistically speaking, the single worst rollout of the last 100 years,” the first source close to the Trump campaign said. “It makes Sarah Palin look like a f—— Mensa candidate.”
That has Democrats sensing an opening.
The universe of undecided voters is small but critical, and it’s unclear what factors could persuade someone still on the fence — particularly if the two people at the top of each ticket remain unpopular.
“Political people who work in politics, I think, are much too dismissive of the impact of a vice presidential pick. Swing voters are extremely low-information, they have often very contradictory views. The notion that they would not decide on who they’re going to vote for based on the second-most important person in the world is, frankly, absurd,” said one source familiar with the Harris campaign’s strategy.
“Political professionals and pundits who dismiss the impact of a vice presidential pick as not possibly factoring into a swing voter’s calculations for who they’re gonna vote for need to watch some focus groups of swing voters.”
Harris’ campaign and its allies are already seizing on the “weird” attack lines. The language is dominating surrogate interviews on cable news, and Vance’s comments are the frequent focus of press releases.
Democrats also said the line of attack layers onto existing messaging over “freedom,” including on abortion and families’ rights to make decisions for themselves.
And if upcoming polling showing the attack sticking, the rhetoric is expected to become a mainstay of the race.
“The Democrats just need to continue bottling up and holding up a mirror to them,” one Democratic pollster said. “Harris and her running mate are going to be speaking about what the polling says is critical to get them to 270” Electoral College votes.
“Keep paying the opposition researchers, is what I would suggest,” the person added. “Because it’s not like he’s only said three controversial things in the last 10 years.”