Trump does not commit to vetoing national abortion ban
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(PHILADELPHIA) — Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump presented different visions for the future of abortion rights during their presidential debate Tuesday.
Harris promised to sign a bill that reinstates protections for abortion rights that existed under Roe v. Wade if it reaches her desk as president while Trump would not commit to vetoing a national abortion ban if it comes to his desk.
During the debate, Trump — who claimed he wouldn’t have to veto a national ban — said he believes in exceptions for abortions in cases of rape, incest and to protect the life of the mother.
“There’s no reason to sign a ban because we have gotten what everyone wanted,” Trump said, referring to leaving the regulation of abortion up to state governments.
At least 22 states have abortion bans or restrictions in effect since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe — ending federal protections for abortion rights. Of those states, 14 have ceased nearly all abortion services and four have six-week bans in effect, prohibiting abortion care before most women know they are pregnant.
Three of the five U.S. Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe were appointed by Trump when he was president.
Ten states will have reproductive rights-related questions on the ballot this November, nine of which specifically address abortion.
Voters in all six states that have had abortion questions on the ballot since Roe was overturned have voted to uphold abortion rights.
During the debate, Trump also falsely claimed that some states allow for the killing of an infant after birth. Killing a baby after birth is illegal in all 50 states.
Most states that allow abortions do so until fetal viability. But, there are no gestational limits on abortion in 9 states — including Colorado, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont and Gov. Tim Walz’s state of Minnesota — and Washington, DC.
Advocates for abortion rights say the absence of legal consequences after fetal liability doesn’t mean doctors will try to terminate full-term, healthy pregnancies. In fact, access to third-trimester procedures is limited, costly and medically complex — typically done only when a woman’s life is threatened or the fetus isn’t expected to survive.
Many Democrats say they want to pass legislation that would codify the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe vs Wade, which protects abortion rights up until viability.
(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.”
(WASHINGTON) — Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Friday kicks off new push to reach male voters in swing states, Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign confirmed to ABC News.
As part of the push, the campaign is highlighting ABC’s Michael Strahan exclusive interview with Walz that aired on “Good Morning America” Friday morning.
Walz travels to Michigan, where he will deliver remarks on “protecting workers and investing in manufacturing, and then join a political engagement with Black male voters,” the campaign said.
Walz will do a round of local TV interviews in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin that will be taped on Friday — focused on hunting and high school football.
Later in the day, Walz will return to Mankato West — the Minnesota high school where he taught and also coached football.
He will attend the school’s homecoming game and deliver a pep talk before the team takes on rival Mankato East.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of Mankato West’s state championship win, according to the campaign.
The campaign will also release a video on Walz’s social media channels featuring what it says is never-before-aired footage from the state championship game and interviews with Tim and Gwen Walz’s former students and players.
Saturday marks the Pheasant Opener in Minnesota and a group of outdoors digital creators will join Walz for an early morning hunt in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota.
(WASHINGTON) — Senators grilled Novo Nordisk CEO Lars Jørgensen Tuesday at a hearing over the costs of Ozempic, Wegovy and similar weight loss drugs, requesting explanations for why the U.S. faces a higher list price than other countries.
Since first entering the market nearly six years ago, the drugs have risen in popularity for diabetic patients and others looking to combat obesity. But doctors and patients have faced challenges in access and affordability.
Sitting in front of a chart showing the lower prices for Wegovy and Ozempic in other countries, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., the chair of the Senate Health Committee, pressed Jørgensen on why it’s fair to charge more in the U.S.
“All we are saying, Mr. Jørgensen, is treat the American people the same way that you treat people all over the world. Stop ripping us off,” Sanders said to Jørgensen.
Sanders asked Jørgensen why the U.S. faced higher prices. Novo Nordisk charges $969 per month for Ozempic in the U.S., compared to $155 per month in Canada and $59 in Germany. For Wegovy, the price is $1,349 per month in the U.S., but $265 in Canada and $137 in Germany.
“Bottom line is, you are charging the American people substantially more for the same exact drug than you are charging people in other countries. And my question is, why?” Sanders asked.
The CEO said the company was spending $30 billion to increase its production and access to the drugs. He also highlighted a 40% decrease in cost since Ozempic came on the market and a sliding scale of costs for people across the U.S., including programs for low-income Americans to access the medicine for cheaper.
But ultimately, Jørgensen cast the blame on the complexities of the U.S. health care system.
“Senator, we are very committed to make sure that Americans have access at an affordable price point for our medicines. There’s nothing we would rather see happen. We have just announced $30 billion in investments to increase capacity to serve these patients. There is a market we have to operate in, and we negotiate hard to make sure that Americans have access,” he said.
“With that said, it is clear that patients too often struggle to navigate the complex US health care system. It’s also clear that no single company alone can solve such vast and complicated policy changes,” Jørgensen added.
Novo Nordisk isn’t responsible for deciding what price patients pay their insurance companies, he said, and he argued that pharmacy benefit managers, or companies that help oversee prescription drug benefits and control costs, get in the way of companies passing discounts on directly to patients.
But Jørgensen didn’t provide a direct answer to why the U.S. faces a higher list price than other countries, instead pointing to “a very complex market and very complex health care system that creates a lot of misunderstandings.”
“Everyone blames everyone else,” Sanders said, from pharma companies to PBMs to insurance companies.
Sanders connected the high prices of Wegovy and Ozempic to something he’s made the center point of his career, including his 2016 and 2020 campaigns: corporate greed.
“Are they acting illegally by charging us some such high prices? Are they violating the law? No, they’re not. What they’re doing is perfectly lawful. They are simply taking advantage of the fact that, until very recently, the United States has been the only major country on earth not to negotiate the cost of prescription drugs,” Sanders said.
“In other words, Novo Nordisk and other drug companies, not just Novo Nordisk, can charge us as much as the market can bear, and that is precisely what they are doing,” he added.
Jørgensen and a handful of Republican senators, including ranking member Sen. Bill Cassidy, pointed out that wholesale prices don’t offer a completely apples-to-apples picture because, in the U.S., insurance and rebates typically reduce the price patients pay by a significant amount.
“There is a tension, a tension between the need to incentivize innovation and the ability to afford that innovation. We are here struggling with that balance,” Cassidy, who is a physician, said. “If anyone thinks going after big pharma is the silver bullet that if you do that, boom, health care costs or drug costs go down, they don’t understand what happens with pricing a drug.”
Sanders dismissed that argument, however, saying it’s still unfair for the initial list prices to be higher in the U.S. It trickles down to the U.S. patient, Sanders said, leaving Americans with higher prices even with rebates or insurance. Of course, uninsured Americans — around 8% of the country — also pay the full list price.
“Even factoring in all of the rebates that [pharmacy benefit managers] receive, the net price for Ozempic is still nearly $600 — over nine times as much as it costs in Germany. And the estimated net price of Wegovy is over $800 — nearly four and a half times as much as it costs in Denmark,” Sanders said.
When it comes to insurance coverage, drug prices become a “pass through to the insurance companies” resulting in higher plan prices, Sanders argued.
“What must also be understood is that not everybody can take advantage of the net price of these drugs. If you are uninsured, you pay the full list price. If you have a large deductible, you pay the full list price. If you have co-insurance, the percentage of the price you pay at the pharmacy counter is based on the list price,” Sanders said.
Novo Nordisk continued to place the blame on health insurance middlemen for the high drug prices in a statement released after the hearing.
“Our hope is that the conversation with the HELP Committee will result in real and tangible solutions that benefit patients and allow millions of people living with these serious and chronic diseases to be the direct beneficiaries of real change,” the company said. “While no single company can fix the American healthcare system alone, we look forward to continuing to work with policymakers and other stakeholders toward meaningful solutions for the people who rely on our medicines.”
ABC News’ Eric Strauss contributed to this report.
