Former Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger set to round out slate of GOP speakers at DNC supporting Harris
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(CHICAGO) — Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger is in a unique position as a Republican: On Thursday, he is set to deliver a prime-time speech on the final day of the Democratic National Convention, speaking in support of Vice President Kamala Harris before she accepts her party’s nomination for president.
Kinzinger, who retired from the House in 2023, has been a vocal critic of former President Donald Trump over the years, and although he describes himself as a “proud conservative,” he endorsed then-candidate Joe Biden for reelection in June.
“Donald Trump poses a direct threat to every fundamental American value,” Kinzinger said in his Biden endorsement video, mentioning Trump’s role in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
The former Illinois congressman sat on the House’s Jan. 6 select committee that investigated the attack. He was also one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump on a charge of inciting the Jan. 6 attack.
“To every American of every political party, and those of none: I say now is not the time to watch quietly as Donald Trump threatens the future of America,” Kinzinger said in support of the Democratic ticket.
Since Harris replaced Biden as the Democratic nominee, Kinzinger has supported the vice president, saying she stands for democracy.
Kinzinger’s speech will round out a slate of Republicans who have spoken at the DNC this week, including former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, Mayor John Giles of Mesa, Arizona, former Trump White House national security official Olivia Troye and former Trump White House press secretary Stephania Grisham.
In what’s expected to be a close contest between Harris and Trump in November, the Harris campaign is leaving no stone unturned, targeting Republicans and independents in their messaging and outreach.
GOP speakers at the DNC appear to be doing the same.
“The sometimes awkward alliance between the left, center, and sane right will prevail! We’re not going back,” Kinzinger posted to X on Wednesday.
(CHICAGO) — Vice President Kamala Harris raised $82 million the week of the Democratic National Convention, bringing her total haul since launching her candidacy last month to $540 million, her campaign said.
The sum is buttressed by nearly $40 million raked in during and after Harris delivered her acceptance speech at the convention on Thursday night, campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement, which noted the campaign crossed the half-billion-dollar mark moments before she took the stage.
The hour after the vice president’s remarks was the campaign’s best fundraising hour, O’Malley Dillon said.
The total reflects what was raised between the campaign, the Democratic National Committee and their joint fundraising committees.
In addition to growing its financial war chest, a third of which was from new donors last week, the Harris campaign also saw its foot soldiers sign up for nearly 200,000 volunteer shifts during the convention—more than any other week, O’Malley Dillon said, with 90,000 shift sign-ups coming Thursday and Friday.
“We head into September with a virtual army of volunteers ready to do the hard work of talking to their neighbors, friends and colleagues,” O’Malley Dillon wrote in the memo. “Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s battleground infrastructure remains incredibly sparse.”
“The Convention was a galvanizing moment for the Harris-Walz coalition throughout the country, energizing and mobilizing volunteer and grassroots donors alike,” she later added, saying they will use the resources to reach voters “while Trump is focused on very little beyond online tantrums and attacking the voters critical to winning 270 electoral votes.”
(WASHINGTON) — When former President Donald Trump was shot in the ear at a campaign rally in July, he made an initial pitch for unity. It didn’t last long.
And he’s taken a decidedly different tack after a second apparent assassination attempt Sunday at his Florida golf club.
Less than 24 hours later, Trump laid blame for the political violence on Democrats, telling Fox News Digital the rhetoric of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris was “causing me to be shot at” while also asserting they are “destroying the country — both from the inside and out.”
Harris, he posted on social media, “has taken politics in our Country to a whole new level of Hatred, Abuse, and Distrust. Because of this Communist Left Rhetoric, the bullets are flying, and it will only get worse!”
He also claimed, without evidence, that the suspects in both cases were “radical left” despite their motives not having been publicly determined. (Investigators are currently examining Florida suspect Ryan Wesley Routh’s frustration with Trump’s position on Ukraine, sources told ABC News. In the Pennsylvania rally shooting, the suspected gunman, Thomas Mathew Crooks, was a registered Republican but had also made a small donation to a progressive group in 2021.)
Regardless, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, doubled down on the “blame Democrats” strategy at a campaign stop in Michigan on Tuesday.
“I think that it’s time to say to the Democrats, to the media, to everybody that has been attacking this man and trying to censor this man for going on 10 years, cut it out or you’re going to get somebody killed,” Vance said.
Susan Benesch, founding director of the Dangerous Speech Project, said Trump’s statements are “impossible not to put it in the context of his relentless use of violent rhetoric.”
“So, he’s a pot calling the kettle black,” Benesch said. “At the same time, that doesn’t mean that it is false when he says his political opponents are describing him as a threat to democracy.”
Harris and Biden condemned Sunday’s incident and shared their relief that Trump was safe. Biden called Trump and they had a “nice” conversation, the former president told ABC News. Harris said she also checked in with Trump and “told him what I have said publicly, I said there is no place for political violence in our country.”
“We can and should have healthy debates and discussion and disagreements, but not resort to violence to resolve those issues,” Harris said.
Still, Trump’s campaign has shared a list of over 50 quotes from Democrats they suggested lead to the second assassination attempt. Most of them include language from Biden, Harris and other party leaders that cast Trump as a “threat to democracy.”
The statements were often made when the lawmakers were discussing Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election, what unfolded on Jan. 6, 2021, or Trump’s pledges to take political retribution if elected in November.
Republican leaders are also pointing to a 2023 comment from Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman in which he said Trump was “destructive to democracy” and should be “eliminated” — which Goldman apologized for, saying while he believed Trump should be defeated in the election he “certainly wish no harm to him and do not condone political violence.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked on Tuesday if President Biden would stop calling Trump a “threat to democracy” given recent developments. Jean-Pierre suggested he would not, saying he had a responsibility to “be honest with the American people” about the possible dangers posed by the former president.
Others have also noted a contrast between Democrats’ criticism of Trump and Trump’s more inflammatory — and sometimes patently false — statements on everything from election integrity to immigration to his targeting of perceived political enemies.
In one more extreme example, Trump appeared to defend the Jan. 6 Capitol rioters who were chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” telling ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl “the people were very angry.” Though Trump has adamantly denied claims from former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson that she heard Trump say “hang” repeatedly while watching the attack unfold on television, and she did not provide further evidence for the assertion.
“He has used rhetoric to attack the peaceful transition of power. He has used rhetoric to attack his opposition. No president has ever done that before. It’s not normal and it’s not democratic,” said Jennifer Mercieca, a historian of political rhetoric at Texas A&M University.
“So, when Democrats point that out, those are true facts, right?” she told ABC News.
Benesch, whose independent research team working on rhetoric that inspires violence, agreed there “is no question that the bounds of mainstream American political discourse shifted” since Trump entered politics.
“I think it is really important to recognize that he and his supporters are not the only ones who now speak in ways that normalize or even encourage violence, but he and his supporters have been doing it and are doing it much more than anybody else on the American political scene,” Benesch said.
Former Trump White House aide Alyssa Farah Griffin, who is now a co-host of “The View,” wrote on X that everyone has “a duty to take the temperature down” but that it was “simply dishonest for Trump [and] his allies to say his opponents shouldn’t use the very language he regularly uses: fascist, enemy within, vermin, traitors, you won’t have a country.”
The Trump campaign, in response to experts who say his own history of inflammatory rhetoric plays a large role in what’s become a heightened threat environment, told ABC News: “Only one candidate in this election has been shot at twice, and it’s not Kamala Harris.”
“The violence is coming from the political left and it’s the responsibility of Kamala Harris, as the Democrat Party nominee, to condemn the false inflammatory lie that President Trump is an alleged threat to democracy,” said campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt. “He is not, and she knows it.”
Benesch said the solution to deescalate the current atmosphere would be for leaders or influencers to convincingly condemn their own party’s language. But she expressed little confidence that would happen before the election.
“Unfortunately, nobody has a political incentive to denounce such rhetoric on their own side or in their own group, but that’s what it’s going to take,” she said. “Or such severe violence that it frightens leaders and influencers into demanding that their own supporters tone it down.”
(INDIANA, Penn.) — Former President Donald Trump appears to be trying out a new line in an effort to appeal to women — a group where polls show he is behind.
In a rally in battleground Pennsylvania on Monday, Trump said that he will be a “protector” of women and repeated a claim that they “will no longer be thinking about abortion” if he wins the White House — though he often brags about his role in the Supreme Court’s decision to overrule Roe vs. Wade, which secured the constitutional right to abortion. He said similar remarks on social media and a rally over the weekend.
In an effort to court women voters, Trump said at his rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania, Monday evening that he will make the country safer for women and claimed that women are “poorer, less healthy, less safe, more stressed, depressed and unhappy” than they were four years ago.
“I want to be your protector. As president, I have to be your protector,” Trump said.
He touted his abortion policy suggesting that women will no longer be thinking about it — and celebrated his appointment of three U.S. Supreme Court justices who helped overrule Roe vs. Wade.
“You will no longer be thinking about abortion,” Trump said. “Because we’ve done something that nobody else could have done. It is now where it always had to be, with the states and a vote of the people.”
Abortion remains a top issue for voters — especially women — in the upcoming election. Both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are working to connect with voters on the topic in what’s expected to be a close contest in November.
And polling shows Trump has some ground to cover with women. Harris leads Trump by nine points (53% to 44%) among women, according to a recent ABC News/Ipsos poll.
Monday was not the first time Trump has said women will “no longer be thinking about abortion” if he becomes president again. Trump made the same claim in a social media post late Friday night, which he then repeated during a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, on Saturday afternoon.
“Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free,” Trump said at the North Carolina rally of winning the election. “You will no longer be thinking about abortion, because it is now where it always had to be with the states and with the vote of the people. The people are now voting, and many of those votes are far more liberal than we thought.”
Trump added that women’s “lives will be happy, beautiful, and their lives will be great again. So women, we love you. We’re going to take care of you.”
Trump is working to appeal to women, which come after a jury last year found him liable of sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll. Also, the former president has made demeaning comments about women in the past.
In response to Trump’s latest comments about protecting women, the Harris campaign said “Trump snapped” and that “women aren’t stupid.”
“Trump thinks he can control women — he’s wrong,” Harris campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said in a statement Saturday. “He’s terrified that women across the country will vote like our lives and freedoms depend on it, because they do. Women aren’t stupid.”
Harris, who could become the first female president, focused on abortion policy during campaign events in Georgia last week. During them, she slammed Trump on his abortion stance, arguing that it’s impossible to do what’s in the best interest for women and children and also enforce abortion bans.
Polling suggests Harris is gaining momentum nationally, leading Trump 48.3% to 45.6%, according to 538’s polling average. However, a set of New York Times/Siena College polls show a tighter race with Trump leading in the battleground states of Arizona and North Carolina.
Women at Trump’s North Carolina event shared their reactions to the former president’s remarks on the topic.
Sarah Cooper from Wilmington, North Carolina, said that “abortion is an important topic, but we’re glad that he has brought it back to the state level. It really shouldn’t be a federal issue.”
Laura Hinton from Rocky Point, North Carolina, told ABC News that she has “mixed emotions” on abortion.
“I have mixed emotions on the abortion topic in general, because I had to do a medical procedure. So when that happens, I think it definitely needs to be there to protect us, allowing us to make that decision, to keep us safe,” Hinton said.
Still, she said her feelings on abortion would not prevent her from voting for Trump.
“As far as the ballot box this time, I don’t know that would stop me from voting for him, even if that were the case, because, again, he’s put it back in the state’s hands, not in the federal aspect of it.”
-ABC News’ Fritz Farrow, Gabriella Abdul-Hakim, Will McDuffie and Sarah Beth Hensley contributed to this report.
