Trump’s Pennsylvania town hall, interrupted by medical emergencies in crowd, turned into an impromptu concert
Former President Donald Trump’s town hall in Oaks, Pennsylvania, on Monday evening was interrupted twice by medical emergencies in a very warm Greater Philadelphia Expo Center and Fairgrounds before he pivoted — turning the concert into an impromptu concert where he stood on stage swaying to music for nearly 45 minutes.
There was a medical emergency that required an attendee to be placed on a stretcher about 30 minutes into the event. As the crowd started singing “God Bless America,” Trump requested that “Ave Maria” be played on the loudspeakers as medics tended to the man.
Moments later, there was a second medical emergency.
“The safety and well-being of President Trump’s supporters is always his top priority,” Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s campaign press secretary, said in a statement to ABC News after the event. “The two individuals who fainted were immediately given medical attention. As President Trump said tonight, they are great patriots,” Leavitt added.
Trump took four questions, before the first medical emergency occurred.
Following the medical emergencies, Trump requested that the doors be opened but he was advised that for security reasons that wasn’t possible. Both Trump and moderator South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem commented on the heat in the room.
“Open the doors. I wish we could open those doors to outside,” Trump said. “For security reasons, they can’t. But you know what I suggest? Open them. Because anybody comes through those doors, you know what’s going to happen to them.”
“Personally, I enjoy this. We lose weight, you know. No, you lose weight. We could do this — lose four or five pounds,” Trump quipped.
Trump then requested that “Ave Maria” be played again and remained on stage as more music was played.
He continued, “Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music fest. Who the hell wants to hear questions right? Isn’t that beautiful?”
The former president, adamant about playing his music, stood on stage for nearly 45 minutes swaying to several songs on his playlist as the crowd sang and danced along.
The crowd slowly dispersed, but many stayed for the entirety of the campaign event.
“To lighten the mood, President Trump turned the town hall into an impromptu concert and the crowd loved it,” Leavitt told ABC News, adding, “The room was full of joy.”
On Tuesday, Trump addressed the town hall on his social media platform, calling the event “so different.”
“It ended up being a GREAT EVENING!” Trump wrote on social media.
The Trump campaign has classified those who fell ill as “great patriots” and suggested, “the room was full of joy.”
Notably, with 22 days until Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris was also in Pennsylvania on Monday evening stumping to voters in the critical battleground swing state whereas Trump largely dodged answering questions during the actual town hall portion of his event.
In a post on X early Tuesday morning, Harris reposted a video from her campaign’s Kamala HQ account of Trump swaying to music for nearly 45-minutes at his Oaks town hall on Monday, writing “Hope he’s okay.”
Following the concert, Trump made his way to the front row, signing red MAGA hats and 47 signs.
Trump’s movement was noteworthy as he hasn’t interacted with a large crowd to that extent since his attempted assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania.
(WASHINGTON) — Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Ohio Sen. JD Vance are set to hold their only scheduled vice-presidential debate on Tuesday.
The pair will face off just a few weeks after former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris sparred at the ABC News presidential debate.
The vice-presidential debate is a chance for both Walz and Vance to show their political chops, tout their running mates’ plans for the nation and introduce themselves to Americans after months spent crisscrossing the country campaigning.
Here’s what to know about the debate and how to tune in:
How to watch the debate
The vice presidential debate hosted by CBS News is set for 9 p.m. ET Tuesday, Oct. 1 in New York City.
The 90-minute debate will air on CBS and be simulcast on the ABC network and stream on ABC News Live.
ABC pre-debate coverage begins at 8 p.m. ET; post-debate ABC News coverage will go on until 11 p.m. ET.
ABC News Live, ABC News’ 24/7 streaming news channel, will provide full coverage beginning at 7 p.m. ET and run through 12 a.m. ET.
Who is moderating the VP debate?
The debate will be moderated by CBS Evening News anchor and managing editor Norah O’Donnell and Face the Nation moderator and CBS News chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Brennan.
VP debate rules
CBS News announced the debate rules on Friday.
The Walz-Vance debate, like the Harris-Trump debate, will be in a studio without an audience but unlike that debate, the candidates’ mics will not be routinely muted when it’s not their turn to speak — but the moderators will retain the ability to do so.
How are the candidates preparing?
To prepare for the debate, Vance has turned to Minnesota Rep. Tom Emmer to help him in debate rehearsals by playing Walz, sources told ABC News. The Ohio senator has also had sessions with his team and Jason Miller, a senior advisor on Trump’s campaign.
Also, Vance has spent the last month reviewing debate plans, strategies and potential questions, according to a source familiar with the senator’s debate preparations.
Walz has also held some mock debates with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg acting as a Vance stand-in, sources told ABC News. Walz has also held policy sessions with his own longtime aides, Biden White House alumni and members of the Harris-Walz campaign team.
Walz has also been practicing on the road as he campaigns, sources said.
(NASHVILLE, Tenn.) — An unexpected challenge in Tennessee’s first week of voting involved touchscreens in the state’s two largest counties resulted in no recorded irregularities and an unlikely fix: coffee stirrers that allow voters to choose with precision their preferred candidate, local officials told ABC News.
The stirrers, which since 2020 have been doled out to voters to use as styluses, were ditched for environmental reasons – then readopted after the first days of early voting led some Tennesseans to accidentally select their undesired candidate because of small boxes next to the candidates’ names.
Some voters in Davidson and Shelby County, home to Nashville and Memphis, respectively, tried to pinprick that small box with their thumb or pointer finger, but – it being so near to the name of an opponent on a line above – they hit another candidate’s name.
The county has not experienced “any issues” in the last few days since poll workers reinstituted the stirrers and reminded voters they should check they’ve chosen their preferred candidate before printing their ballot – and a second time before scanning and submitting it, Davidson County Administrator of Elections Jeff Roberts told ABC News.
(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?”