Biden tells Trump ‘get a life’ over hurricane misinformation

(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.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(PENNSYLVANIA) — From the moment he arrived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, after being named former President Donald Trump’s running mate, it was clear that one of Sen. JD Vance’s primary roles was to help deliver battleground Pennsylvania for the former president.

The day Vance was announced as Trump’s vice presidential pick in July, Trump told ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jon Karl that he was “going to leave [Vance] in Pennsylvania.”

Pennsylvania’s importance in this election can’t be overstated — it’s a crucial swing state with 19 coveted electoral votes where Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are neck and neck. Whoever wins the state is very likely win the presidential election. During the 2020 election, Pennsylvania was the state that sealed the presidency for President Joe Biden.

It is essentially a dead heat between Harris and Trump, with the former president barely leading Harris 47.9% to 47.8%, according 538’s latest polling average in the state.

The importance of Pennsylvania and other critical Rust Belt battleground states was reiterated in Vance’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in July.

“I promise you one more thing, to the people of Middletown, Ohio, and all the forgotten communities in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio and every corner of our nation, I promise you this: I will be a vice president who never forgets where he came from,” Vance, and Ohio native, said at the RNC.

Vance’s background is similar to those who live in Pennsylvania, which he shared in his book, “Hillbilly Elegy” and talks about often on the campaign trail.

Over the past few months, Vance has worked hard to court voters in Pennsylvania. When visiting the state, he often emphasizes his background growing up in the Rust Belt state of Ohio, which borders Pennsylvania, and touches on the top issues important voters in the state. That Rust Belt connection is something the Trump campaign is banking on to help the former president win in the state.

“JD Vance is more than just an eloquent voice on the campaign trail to break down how Kamala broke everything from our economy to our southern border, and how President Trump will fix it and get our country back on track,” Kush Desai, the Trump campaign’s Pennsylvania spokesperson, told ABC News in a statement.

“His upbringing and life story are an inspiration to countless working-class Americans left behind in Kamala’s America who want a better life for themselves, their families, and their communities — Sen. Vance is personal testament to the future that a Trump-Vance administration has in store for our country.”

In the final two days before Election Day, Vance will have visited Pennsylvania twice. It will also be the state where he will hold his final campaign event before Election Day.

Similarly, Harris will also be holding her final campaign event in the state, signifying the critical role the state plays in securing the presidency.

“Harris will spend the day crisscrossing Pennsylvania, making her final pitch to Pennsylvania voters and mobilizing them to return their ballots and get to the polls on Tuesday. The final swing marks the Vice President’s 18th trip to Pennsylvania since launching her candidacy in July,” a campaign spokesperson said in a statement to ABC News.

Since joining the Republican ticket, Pennsylvania is the state Vance has visited the most, making 16 visits to the state and taking part in a total of 19 campaign events, according to ABC’s tracker of the senator’s campaign schedule. (Harris’ running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, has visited the state nine times, according to ABC’s tracker of his events.)

While campaigning in Pennsylvania, one of the issues Vance often hits on is fracking, an important industry in the state. During her 2020 presidential run, Harris supported a ban on fracking, but has backed away from that stance since becoming the Democratic nominee.
Vance has also emphasized the loss of manufacturing jobs, bringing them back from overseas, often arguing that unleashing American energy would drive down the cost of manufacturing.

Will Martin, a spokesperson for Vance, told ABC News in a statement that American working families have been hit hard by the policies of the Biden-Harris administration and has worked to bring Trump’s message to voters in Pennsylvania.

“Under Donald Trump’s leadership, we are going to unleash a new golden age of American prosperity and Pennsylvania will be at the center of it all,” Martin told ABC News.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(DOUGLAS, Ariz.) -Vice President Kamala Harris will visit the U.S.-Mexico border on Friday — her first trip there in more than three years — to call for tougher security measures and attack former President Donald Trump on an issue that has plagued her, a senior campaign official said.

Harris plans to deliver remarks in Douglas, Arizona, a border town in the critical battleground state, where she will continue to criticize Trump for his role earlier this year in tanking a bipartisan bill that was the result of months of negotiations.

“The American people deserve a president who cares more about border security than playing political games,” Harris plans to say, according to the senior official, who was granted anonymity to discuss a speech the vice president has yet to deliver.

She will take a strong line in her remarks Friday and make the case that “American sovereignty requires setting rules at the border and enforcing them,” the senior official previewed.

As part of her trip, Harris will also meet with border patrol agents, the senior official said, and tout the pay raises the Biden administration gave agents and argue they “need more resources to do their jobs to keep America safe.”

Harris’ trip comes as immigration is a top issue for many voters ahead of the election. A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll found that 70% viewed immigration at the southern border as an “important” issue for them, and Trump led Harris by 10 points on who voters thought was best suited to handle it.

In 2021, President Joe Biden tasked Harris with the likely doomed-from-the-start assignment of solving the root causes of migration amid surges of migrants arriving at the southern border. Republicans have used this to label Harris the “border czar” though her task did involve U.S. policy at the border itself.

The last time Harris made a trip to the border was in June 2021. Her infrequent visits have also been another source attacks from her opponents.

The senior official said the campaign hopes Harris’s trip to the border will help close the gap between Trump on the issue.

Trump held what amounted to a preemptive attack at a news conference in New York on Thursday.

“She should save her airfare,” Trump said. “She should go back to the White House and tell the president to close the border. He can do it with the signing of a – of a – just a signature on a piece of paper to the border control; instead, she’s going there to try to convince people she wasn’t as bad as everybody knows she was.”

Harris’ campaign is is releasing a new ad on Friday tied to her trip to the border. The 30-second ad, titled “Never Backed Down,” highlights Harris’ work as a prosecutor.

“She put cartel members and drug traffickers behind bars, and she will secure our border,” a narrator says in the ad. The ad says Harris’ plans for the border include hiring more law enforcement agents, boosting technology and to “stop fentanyl smuggling and human trafficking.”

In her remarks at the border, Harris will say tackling fentanyl will be “a top priority” for her as president and will propose installing new fentanyl detection machines at the border, a senior campaign official said. She will also continue to call on China to quash Chinese companies’ manufacturing of fentanyl precursor chemicals, the official added.

“We need a leader with a real plan to fix the border and that’s Kamala Harris,” the narrator says at the end of the ad.

ABC News’ Kelsey Walsh contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.