Trump and Harris trade jabs at Al Smith Dinner, though Harris wasn’t there
(NEW YORK) — A presidential election tradition dating back to 1960 brought some laughs in New York City on Thursday night, but for the first time in 40 years, only one candidate will be on the dias.
Former President Donald Trump spoke at the New York Archdiocese’s annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner at the New York Hilton, where he was joined by his wife Melania Trump. Vice President Kamala Harris announced last month that she could not attend due to a conflicting campaign event but appeared at the dinner in a video.
“She is going to be campaigning in a battleground state that day, and the campaign wants to maximize her time in the battlegrounds this close to the election,” a campaign official told ABC News on Sept. 23.
The vice president campaigned in Wisconsin on Thursday.
Trump alternated between making jokes about Harris and some of the other attendees and the regular lines that he uses while campaigning, but he did acknowledged the event’s tradition of self-deprecating jokes and said one was coming before admitting, “Ah, I got nothing.”
Harris appeared in her video with “Saturday Night Live” character Mary Katherine Gallagher, played by Molly Shannon as an awkward Catholic school girl who dreams of being a superstar.
Harris asked Mary Katherine for advice on how to address the Catholic gathering.
“Is there anything that you think that maybe I shouldn’t bring up tonight?”
“Um, well, don’t lie,” Mary Katherine replied. “Thou shalt not bear false witness to thy neighbor.”
“Indeed, especially thy neighbor’s election results,” Harris said.
Trump chastised Harris in a Truth Social post before the event for not showing up.
“They didn’t give me the option of a video message, nor would I have done it. This is very disrespectful to everyone involved,” he said adding that Harris should lose the Catholic vote over this.
After Harris’ video played, Trump repeated that sentiment.
“It’s been a long tradition for both Democrat and Republican candidates for president of the United States to attend this dinner. Always. It’s a rule. Otherwise, bad things are going to happen to you from up there,” he said. “You can’t do what I just saw on that screen. But, my opponent feels like she does not have to be here, which is deeply disrespectful to the event and in particular, to our great Catholic community. Very disrespectful.”
Later, mentioning the charity behind the dinner, Trump took another shot at Harris, saying, “I guess you should have told her the funds were going to bail out the looters and rioters in Minneapolis, and she would have been here, guaranteed.”
Since 1960, the black-tie event has hosted both the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates and allowed them to “share self-deprecating humor” and raise money for the archdiocese’s charitable organizations.
It is named in honor of Alfred E. Smith, the former New York governor who was the first Catholic to be nominated to a major party’s presidential ticket.
The last time a presidential candidate could not attend the dinner was in 1984, when Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale bowed out.
The event was emceed by comedian Jim Gaffigan, who currently plays Gov. Tim Walz on “Saturday Night Live.”
Trump confirmed his attendance in a Truth Social post on Sept. 23, not long after Harris’ campaign announced she would not show up.
“It’s sad, but not surprising, that Kamala has decided not to attend,” he said in the post.
In the same post, Trump accused Harris of being anti-Catholic and repeated past claims, without evidence, that the administration was persecuting Catholics. President Joe Biden is the second Catholic president in American history and attends mass weekly.
In the past, the presidential candidates have roasted each other and appeared to be in good spirits throughout the night. However, things were different in 2016, the last time both of the presidential candidates attended the event in person.
Trump was booed during his 2016 Al Smith dinner speech for repeatedly attacking Sec. of State Hilary Clinton.
During Clinton’s remarks, the Democratic nominee made some self-deprecating jokes about her stamina and paid speeches, before turning her attention to Trump, where she jabbed him on everything from his temperament to his ties to Russia.
Trump did not laugh or appear to be amused by his opponent’s jokes.
ABC News’ Soo Rin Kim, Fritz Farrow, Gabriella Abdul-Hakim and Will McDuffie contributed to this report.
As part of its ongoing investigation into Rep. Matt Gaetz, the House Ethics Committee recently issued a subpoena for documents from a civil lawsuit brought by one of the Florida congressman’s longtime friends against several third parties, ABC News has learned.
The subpoena, which has not been previously reported, requests all documents related to Gaetz that are part of a lawsuit brought last year by Gaetz’s longtime friend, prominent Florida lobbyist Chris Dorworth, who alleged he was defamed by several third parties over the course of the yearslong sex trafficking probe into Gaetz, sources told ABC News.
The documents from the lawsuit, which include witness depositions and affidavits, could provide Congress with new details regarding allegations that have dogged Gaetz for years, including the allegation he had sex with a minor who was introduced to him by his onetime friend Joel Greenberg, who pleaded guilty to sex trafficking and is serving an 11-year prison sentence.
Gaetz has long denied any wrongdoing. Last year, following a yearslong investigation, the Justice Department declined to bring any charges against the congressman.
Last week, Gaetz stated that he would no longer voluntarily participate in the House Ethics probe, which he blasted as a “political payback exercise,” and said that he had recently learned that the committee had issued — but not yet served him — a subpoena for his testimony.
The Florida congressman also reiterated his denial that he ever had sex with a minor. “Your correspondence of September 4 asks whether I have engaged in sexual activity with any individual under 18. The answer to this question is unequivocally NO. You can apply this response to every version of this question, in every forum,” Gaetz said in a statement to the committee posted on social media.
Members of the House Ethics Committee declined to comment to ABC News. Representatives for Gaetz did not respond to a request for comment.
When reached for comment, Greenberg’s attorney, Fritz Scheller, told ABC News, “While I am reluctant to comment on a pending congressional investigation, Joel Greenberg’s position remains the same. He will fully cooperate with all congressional inquiries, whether by subpoena or not, and regardless of whether the cooperation occurs in the rain or on a train, with a fox or in a box. Yes, Mr. Greenberg will fully cooperate here or there, he will cooperate anywhere.”
Among the documents related to the civil lawsuit, according to court filings, is the deposition of the woman who Gaetz allegedly had sex with when she was a minor, as well as testimony from another woman who was a witness in the DOJ investigation, plus Dorworth’s deposition and an affidavit from Gaetz’s former girlfriend. Those documents could be turned over to Congress as part of its ongoing probe into related allegations.
The documents Congress is seeking stem from a lawsuit brought last year by Dorworth, who alleged that the onetime minor, identified in the lawsuit only as “A.B.,” and others, including Greenberg and his family, worked to defame him amid the Justice Department’s probe.
Gaetz, who was not a party in the suit, was scheduled to sit for his own deposition as a witness in the lawsuit prior to Dorworth dropping the suit in early September. Dorworth has a separate ongoing defamation lawsuit against the Greenbergs in state court.
It is unclear if and what documents have been handed over to Congress. And while many of the lawsuit’s documents, including depositions and sworn statements, remain sealed, recent public court filings shed some light on what alleged details could be included in the underlying documents requested by Congress.
One filing, Exhibit 23 in a motion for attorneys fees filed by attorneys representing the Greenbergs, details some of the allegations made during discovery in the lawsuit, including that Gaetz was allegedly among the guests at a July 2017 party that “A.B.,” who was 17 years old at the time, also attended. The filing states that according to a woman who attended the party, there was “alcohol, cocaine, ecstasy also known as molly, and marijuana” present, that there was “access to the bedrooms” for “sexual activities,” and that A.B. was seen naked at the gathering.
In July, the House Ethics Committee released a rare statement updating the status of its probe into Gaetz. The committee stated that it had stopped looking into certain claims, including whether the Florida congressman misused state identification records or accepted a bribe or improper gratuity, but that its investigation had found that other allegations “merit continued review.”
The committee said that it would continue to review claims that Gaetz “engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use” and that he “sought to obstruct government investigations of his conduct.”
In Gaetz’s statement last week regarding the committee probe, he reiterated his denial of any wrongdoing while seemingly responding to a string of questions the committee issued to him earlier in the month.
In response to whether or not he had ever used illicit drugs, Gaetz stated, “I have not used drugs which are illegal, absent some law allowing use in a jurisdiction of the United States. I have not used ‘illicit’ drugs, which I consider to be drugs unlawful for medical or over-the-counter use everywhere in the United States.”
(WASHINGTON) — Democrats and Republicans have proposed vastly different policies on education – and one key difference highlights a battle that has been happening on the ground in states across the country.
Education Savings Accounts, or ESAs, and school vouchers have spurred debates at the local level for years.
ESA programs allow families to divert a designated amount of per-student public school spending to pay for expenses for private schools, microschools and homeschooling — including tuition, books, tutoring, transportation and more.
School vouchers similarly use public funds to allow students to pay for tuition.
Arizona passed the country’s first ESA program in 2011, and at least eight other states have followed its lead: Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah and West Virginia.
Former President Donald Trump has expressed support for ESAs and has proposed a plan that will allow parents to spend up to $10,000 a year per child in taxpayer money, “completely tax-free,” on alternative education or homeschooling costs.
The Democratic 2025 platform opposes using private school vouchers and tuition tax credits, opportunity scholarships, “and other schemes that divert taxpayer-funded resources away from public education.”
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a former public school teacher who is running for vice president on Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential ticket, has opposed private school vouchers in the past.
In opposition to a school voucher policy proposal from Republicans in his state amid the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, Walz stated: “We are not going to defund our public schools at this time, when especially those hardest hit need them more than ever,” MPR News reported at the time.
The start of vouchers
Scholars trace the origins of school choice to the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, where the United States Supreme Court ruled that segregating public school students based on race was unconstitutional.
Anti-segregation efforts led to state-funded school voucher programs in some states like Virginia and Georgia, offering financial assistance to white students to attend all-white private academies known as segregation academies.
However, the first modern private school voucher program started in Milwaukee in 1990, as some communities of color saw vouchers as a chance to help low-income students of color attend private schools.
Vouchers also have been geared toward disabled students; however, vouchers often force students with disabilities to forfeit some Individuals with Disabilities Education Act protections because they are considered “parentally placed” in private schools.
These schools are not legally required to provide individualized or “appropriate” education to students and are not held to the same nondiscrimination standards as public schools.
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, microschools, private schools, and homeschooling have seen a boom — and so has the availability for families to use vouchers or ESAs to fund tuition at these institutions or fund alternative forms of education and their expenses.
According to pro-ESA organization EdChoice, the number of students using ESAs has increased seven-fold between 2022 and 2024 to a total of more than 328,000 students.
As these programs continue to gain momentum, the debate about these policies continues.
The debate about ‘school choice’
How much ESA programs cost has varied from state to state — in Arizona, the ESA program has been estimated by the state governor’s office to cost the state $943,795,600 for the 2024 fiscal year for roughly 79,728 students. Meanwhile, in West Virginia, it could cost over $10 million for roughly 2,333 applicants to the 2022-2023 academic year of the program, according to the scholarship program report.
This has been one major source of contention around ESAs.
Critics of school choice, including West Virginia Education Association President Dale Lee, say that public schools are already under pressure due to underfunding and poor staffing. Shifting funds away from public schools will make it harder for them to thrive, Lee said.
“Because of the loss of funding, we’ve reduced the opportunities in the curriculum areas that they have,” said Lee, adding that vocational and technical schools have reduced the number of offerings they have and reduce the number of courses that secondary students have available.
In some cases, that includes the arts.
“As a high school teacher myself, the arts are one of the areas that for many students, that’s what drew them into the school, and that’s why they were continuing,” Lee said.
He said public education is supposed to be “the great equalizer” … “if you go back to the system of the haves and have nots, you eliminate that opportunity for students.”
Emily Kirkland, communications director at the Arizona Education Association, slammed some ESA programs for funding controversial purchases. These purchases have been dubbed “welfare for the wealthy” by critics, after a CNN analysis of state and federal data found that wealthy communities are disproportionately benefiting from these programs.
ABC affiliate KNXV-TV in Arizona analyzed ESA data for the 2022-2023 school year and found that some of the money was used for purposes that have been condemned by critics, including ski resort passes, trampoline parks and ninja warrior training centers, aeroponic indoor gardens, pianos and more.
Expenses in some states, like Arizona, are approved by program staffers.
Supporters of school choice, including president and CEO of pro-school choice EdChoice Robert Enlow, applauds the transparency, arguing that its more insight into specific expenditures than is publicly known from public schools. He adds that the expenses allow families to tailor their education to their individual needs.
“You can see in Arizona, every single minute of every single day where every single dollar is going in the ESA program, I challenge you to do that in public schools, right?” said Enlow. “You may not like where the dollars are going. There may be an issue of whether you like it, but the reality is, you know exactly where they’re going.”
Enlow adds that these programs allow students to take an individualized approach, noting that those who may have different needs based on disability, neurodiversity, and other needs can make adjustments based on those needs.
He adds that criticism over spending doesn’t take into account that, in some cases, families are buying what schools would buy: “It’s OK if a government system buys $1,000 per classroom Lego set, but it’s not OK if a family does it?”
It is unclear how successful alternative education like microschooling or homeschooling can be. Rules and regulations dictating microschool and homeschool requirements are determined by each state’s Department of Education. For example, the National Microschooling Center notes that some microschool educators do not need to be licensed teachers and some institutions do not need to follow state academic standards.
Enlow notes that as these kinds of educations become more popular, the question about what regulation should look like and how success is measured is being asked: “You can’t put a one-size-fits-all system of regulation on a system that is meant for families to have individual options and choices.”
“Successes are in children making progress towards what makes them a successful human being, a successful strategy for coping and for living and for being successful right in life,” Enlow said. “We believe, for example, that families want to have knowledge about how their kids are doing on a test, but we don’t think this is the only way to go.”
Critics are concerned about the lack of regulations and accountability about the quality of education, success of the institution and the stability of the institution.
“I called microschools the food trucks of the education industry, because they can open up, go wherever they want, and close down very quickly,” said Josh Cowen, author of “The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers.”
Cowen calls alternative education “a predatory environment where private schools and microschools are promising the world to each of these kids,” making it hard for families to know what the truth is because of the lack of oversight and measures of success.
He continued, “It could take months, if not years, for a parent to understand that they’ve gone to a school that has substantially altered their child’s academic trajectory. Or worse, it could take three or four years, and by then, it’s too late. And so that’s where you need oversight.”
In West Virginia, Lee argues that the school choice program has contributed to a teacher shortage, citing poor teacher pay, poor school funding and poor resources that contributes to low moral “when you’re seeing the dollars go to these microschools and learning pods where there’s no accountability.”
Enlow argues that adding more education paths for students could lead to improvements in public schools: “Who’s going to really buy a system where we’re just trying to let it continue the way it is without any kind of challenge?”
(WASHINGTON) — Vice President Kamala Harris, in an appearance on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, slammed Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders recently suggesting the presidential candidate isn’t humble because she doesn’t have biological children.
Speaking to “Call Her Daddy” host Alex Cooper, who asked about Huckabee Sanders’ remark, “My kids keep me humble. Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble,” Harris suggested the governor is caught in the past.
“I don’t think she understands that there are a whole lot of women out here who, one, are not aspiring to be humble, two, a whole lot of women out here who have a lot of love in their life, family in their life, and children in their life,” Harris told Cooper on “Call Her Daddy,” which Spotify says is the most-listened-to podcast by women. “And I think it’s really important for women to lift each other up.”
Harris, who is stepmother to two now-adult children from her marriage to second gentleman Doug Emhoff, said family comes in many forms.
“We have our family by blood, and then we have our family by love, and I have both, and I consider it to be a real blessing,” she said. “And I have two beautiful children, Cole and Ella, who call me Momala. We have a very modern family. My husband’s ex-wife is a friend of mine.”
She continued, “Family comes in many forms and I think that increasingly, all of us understand that this is not the 1950’s anymore. Families come in all shapes or forms and they are family nonetheless.”
During the 40-minute interview, Cooper also asked Harris about Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, having previously complained he didn’t want the country run by “childless cat ladies.”
“I just think it’s mean and mean-spirited,” Harris told Cooper. “And I think that most Americans want leaders who understand that the measure of their strength is not based on who you beat down; the real measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you lift up.”
Harris spent much of the interview discussing abortion rights and what statewide abortion bans can mean for people living in those states — including mothers, who may need to arrange childcare and travel out of state for the procedure.
“Let’s talk about how it affects a real person. The majority of women who receive abortion care are mothers,” Harris said. “So imagine she’s in a state with an abortion ban — one out of three women are, by the way, in our country — and she’s a mom. She’s going to have to figure out, one, God help her if she has affordable childcare, God help her if she has paid leave, and then she’s going to have to go to the airport, stand in a TSA line, sit on a plane next to a perfect stranger, to go to a city where she’s never been to receive the care she needs … and that’s all if they can even afford a plane or a bus ticket.”
Harris made her appeal to listeners who might not personally believe in abortion, emphasizing that women should have the right to choose for themselves.
“You don’t have to abandon your faith or deeply held beliefs to agree that government shouldn’t be telling her what to do. If she chooses, she’ll talk to her priest, her pastor, her rabbi or Imam, but not the government telling you what to do,” Harris said. “And that’s what’s so outrageous about it, is a bunch of these guys up in these state capitals are writing these decisions because they somehow have decided that they’re in a better position to tell you what’s in your best interest than you are to know what’s in your own best interest.”
She continued: “This is not about imposing my thoughts on you in terms of what you do with your life or your body. … It’s actually quite the opposite. It’s saying the government shouldn’t be telling people what to do.”
She also hit back against Trump’s false claim at last month’s presidential debate that some states allow post-birth abortions.
“That is not happening anywhere in the United States. It is not happening, and it’s a lie — it’s a bald-faced lie that he is suggesting,” she said. “Can you imagine, can you imagine — he’s suggesting that women in their ninth month of pregnancy are electing to have an abortion. Are you kidding? That is so outrageously inaccurate, and it’s so insulting to suggest that that would be happening and that women would be doing that. It’s not happening anywhere. This guy is full of lies.”
Harris railed against Trump’s baseless claims about abortion, calling him “careless and irresponsible and reckless.”
Asked by Cooper how she was feeling in the last few weeks of the campaign, Harris said she was feeling both “great” and “nervous.”
“You know, there’s this old adage: there are only two ways to run: without an opponent or scared. So there you go,” Harris said. “The only thing that matters is really just spending as much time as I can, as much time as I possibly can, meeting with people and talking with them about the stakes and their future.”