Trump Rally Filled With Racism, Harris Prepares For Jan. 6 Site Speech: Latest Updates

Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris both made high-profile campaign appearances over the weekend as the days until the election got down to single digits.
Trump echoed fascist talking points during a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday that also featured a wildly racist rant from comedian Tony Hinchcliffe. Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned with a slew of celebrities over the weekend, including Beyoncé.
Harris on Tuesday will deliver the closing message of her campaign at the site where Trump instigated the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol after losing the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.
Abortion rights, inflation, extremism, immigration and more — the stakes have never been higher. Catch up on critical 2024 election updates here.
The two and their running mates, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have been swarming battleground states in the final weeks of the race.
See previous election coverage here, and read the latest updates on the 2024 race below.
Obama excoriated Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, saying the warm-up speakers had peddled “the most racist, sexist, bigoted stereotypes.”“These are fellow citizens he’s talking about,” Obama said. “Here in Philadelphia they are your neighbors, they are your friends, they are your coworkers.”
“Here is a good rule: If somebody does not respect you, if somebody does not see you as fellow citizens with equal claims to opportunity, to the pursuit of happiness, to the American dream, you should not vote for them.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) posted a six-minute video to social media explaining to voters why opponents of the Biden-Harris administration’s policy on Israel and Gaza should still vote for Harris.
“Some of you are saying, ‘How can I vote for Kamala Harris if she is supporting this terrible war?’ and that is a very fair question,” Sanders, who’s been a vocal opponent of the United States’ support of Israel, said in the video. “And let me give you my best answer, and that is that even on this issue, Donald Trump and his right wing friends are worse.”
“We will have, in my view, a much better chance of changing U.S. policy with Kamala than with Trump, who is extremely close to Netanyahu and sees him as a like-minded, right-wing extremist ally,” Sanders continued, noting Republicans’ opposition to sending humanitarian aid to Palestinians.
See the full video here.
Harris ended her speech with a request for voters to imagine a White House occupied by the next president.
“Just imagine the Oval Office in three months,” she asked. “So either it’s Donald Trump sittin’ in there, stewing, stewing over his enemies list. Or me, with your help, working for you, checking off my to-do list.”
“We are here together because we love our country,” she said. “And you know when you love something you gotta fight for it.”
Harris is again painting her campaign as the antithesis to Trump’s, attacking the Republican Party for moving to make voting harder, restrict Americans’ access to abortion and roll back climate protections and the rights of LGBTQ+ people.
“The hypocrisy abounds, whatever happened to love thy neighbor?” Harris asked the crowd after noting that Georgia has a law on the books making it illegal to give those in line to vote food or water. “The baton is in our hands.”
Harris appeared to speak directly to some in the audience in Ann Arbor angered about the ongoing war between Israel and Gaza.
“Listen, hey, on the subject to Gaza, hey guys, I hear you,” Harris said. “We all want this war to end as soon as possible and get the hostages out and I will do everything in my power to make it so.”
The vice president has struggled to win over Arab Americans in Michigan angered over the Biden administration’s stance in Gaza.
Billionaire Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos claimed that newspaper endorsements are pointless to voters and only demonstrate bias, according to his Monday opinion article in the Washington Post, the newspaper he owns.
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Walz rallied the crowd before Harris took the stage in Ann Arbor, urging voters to step up and “leave it all on the field” with the remaining days before election day.
“A little bit of a pep talk: We gotta admit it, this game is tied,” Walz said. “So all gas no brakes for the next 8 days, plenty of time to sleep when you’re dead.”
“We’re moving this thing over the next 8 days, an inch at a time a yard at a time.”
On the heels of reports that he praised Hitler, Trump declared at his Atlanta rally that he’s “the opposite of a Nazi” and said his father told him to “never use the word Nazi” or mention Hitler.
He also accused Harris’ campaign of saying “that everyone who isn’t voting for her is a Nazi.” While her campaign has seized on Trump’s alleged comments, which his former chief of staff John Kelly told reporters about last week, it has never referred to Trump’s supporters as Nazis.
Trump made vaguely threatening comments toward Michelle Obama during his Atlanta rally, saying it was “a big mistake that she made” being so “nasty” about him during a recent speech.
“I always try to be so nice and respectful,” Trump said. “She opened up a little bit of a box.”
The singer Maggie Rogers is performing at Harris’ rally in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Rogers said she’d been overwhelmed by the “wild and unprecedented times” in the lead-up to the election next week.
“I can’t ignore the headlines that I’ve been seeing … I have to face the reality of what’s happening in the next eight days, and to tell you the truth, it’s terrifying,” the singer said. “But there’s something that is greater than fear, and that’s action.”
She encouraged those watching to vote for Harris, calling the vice president a candidate who would fight for reproductive freedoms, climate change and the “basic human dignity of all people.”
“In these next 8 days you can fight back against the fear of Donald Trump and everything that he creates,” Rogers said. “You can take action against his darkness, you can choose the light.”
Though offensive remarks from Trump and his supporters are nothing new, Harris’ presidential campaign is hoping the specificity of Hinchcliffe’s joke ― targeting a specific community of Latino voters ― and its proximity to the election means it can make a difference in swing states, especially Pennsylvania.
The joke came as part of Trump’s wild rally Sunday night at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. Speeches from a wide variety of Trumpworld operatives and supporters included now-standard attacks on migrants, suggestions that the United States has become a crime-riddled disaster and even echoes of an infamous 1939 Nazi rally at the same venue.
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The Harris campaign unveiled a new ad targeting Latino voters in swing states, which features audio from the racist comedy set at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday.
“Puerto Ricans deserve better,” the vice president says in the ad, after a montage of the offensive remarks and video footage of Trump throwing paper towels on the island. “As president I will always fight for you and your families, and together we can chart a new way forward.”
The campaign said the “Deserve Better” ad is part of a $370 million ad blitz in the final days of the election and will run in every battleground state. The ads will target Latino zip codes and play on social media networks.
The United States Postal Service has advised mail-in voters to send their ballots in a week early, according to a Monday statement.
While deadlines for the return of vote-by-mail ballots vary by state, the Postal Service has urged voters with a deadline of Nov. 5 to send their ballots in by Tuesday, a week prior.
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The Washington Post is hemorrhaging subscribers after its editorial page announced last week that it would no longer make presidential endorsements ― a decision critics say amounts to bending the knee to Trump.
Two sources with knowledge of the Post’s subscription base told NPR that more than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions by midday Monday, with more still coming in.
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OKMULGEE, Okla. — The television ads look and sound like any others that inundate voters’ living rooms in the final weeks before an election. Ominous music. Faded, unflattering official profile pictures. An authoritative voice attacking the ad’s subjects, saying they added “millions to the costs of doing business” in the state and are “activist” liberals. Then there’s the opposing ad praising the same people, saying they “protected our public schools” and “stood up for our children.”
But the hot race in Oklahoma is not the presidential election (Trump won handily in 2020 and will likely do so again in 2024), or even a race for a Senate or governor’s seat. No, the big election on the ballot this November is whether to oust three sitting justices on the nine-member state Supreme Court, something that has never been done since the vote on judges was first instituted in the 1960s.
Tossing the three judges — Yvonne Kauger, Noma Gurich and James Edmondson, all of whom were appointed by Democratic governors — would allow conservative Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt to name new ones, who would presumably be more favorable to his agenda, which includes favoring charter schools and challenging tribal legal authority on Native American reservation land.
Read more below:
More than a quarter million Michiganders cast early ballots in the state’s first two days of in-person voting, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said at a press conference. This is the first general election in the swing state with early in-person voting – something voters approved in 2022.
“This weekend, Michigan voters made history, turning out in massive numbers to cast their ballot at an early voting site,” saying the 250,000 figure “far-exceeded the expectations of state and local election officials.”
Historically, early voting favors Democrats, but there are some indications this election that more Republicans are casting ballots early. Trump has spoken out against early voting and called it “stupid,” but also encouraged his supporters to utilize the option.
This year, Californians have the opportunity to vote on Proposition 6, a ballot measure that, if passed, would eliminate the state’s constitutional provision that allows involuntary servitude for incarcerated workers. Under Prop 6, incarcerated workers could still work for little or no pay — but they would not be required to do so.
As he nears the end of his presidency, Biden has made no visible progress toward ending the federal death penalty. Abolition bills in the House and Senate have languished, with little push from the White House. The policy review is ongoing, and the Justice Department has continued to seek and enforce death sentences. For the first time since 2012, the Democratic Party platform does not call for abolishing the death penalty. Unless Biden uses his clemency power to commute the sentences of the people on federal death row, those who have exhausted their appeals will be vulnerable to execution if Trump is reelected.
Read more here.
Donald Trump spilled the beans last night on a “little secret” he has with House Speaker Mike Johnson, telling a crowd at Madison Square Garden that it’s “going to do really well with the House” as he pointed at Rep. Johnson offstage.
“Our little secret is having a big impact,” he said, smiling at the Louisiana Republican. “He and I have a secret, we’ll tell you what it is when the race is over.”
Asked about the not-so-secret-secret Monday, Johnson played coy — and blamed the Democrats.
“By definition, a secret is not to be shared — and I don’t intend to share this one,” he told New York Times’ congressional correspondent Annie Karni in a written statement.
He added: “Speaking of secrets, Harris knew Biden was physically and mentally impaired and kept it a secret. The FBI knew the Hunter Biden laptop was real and kept it a secret. They also knew Russia collusion was fake and kept that a secret too. It appears that all those secrets didn’t matter to the media because they all helped Democrats. But this one might help Donald Trump, and now they care?”
Abortion rights, inflation, extremism, immigration and more — the stakes have never been higher.
Catch up on critical 2024 election updates here.
President Joe Biden cast his ballot in the election that will choose his successor after waiting in line alongside other early voters in Delaware.
Biden reportedly stood for about 40 minutes before voting not far from his home in Wilmington, chatting with members of the public and helping push an older woman in a wheelchair who was ahead of him.
The president ended his reelection campaign in July amid fears over his health and concerns Trump was set for victory.