Category Archives: JD Vance

Trump to hold first public campaign event since assassination attempt

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The former president and his running mate, JD Vance, will hold a joint rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan

Republican nominee Donald Trump will hold his first public campaign rally since a shocking assassination attempt a week ago by appearing in a crucial rust belt battleground state alongside his new running mate, Ohio senator JD Vance.

The return to the campaign trail by Trump comes after the attempted killing of the former US president at a Pennsylvania rally last Saturday when a 20-year-old gunman opened fire, injuring Trump and others and killing one rally-goer.

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When is Trump’s RNC speech? How to watch and what’s at stake

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The former president will speak from the Republican national convention in Milwaukee on Thursday night

The biggest event of the Republican convention kicks off Thursday night, with Donald Trump’s address to thousands of party loyalists in attendance.

Trump appeared at the opening night of the Republican national convention on Monday, when he was greeted with thunderous applause, marking his first public appearance since surviving an assassination attempt at his campaign rally. Earlier in the day, Trump announced JD Vance, the Ohio senator and once vocal critic of Trump, as his running mate.

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Donald Trump to give RNC speech as Joe Biden faces ongoing pressure to stand aside – US politics live

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Former president to address RNC after his running mate JD Vance gave populist-tinged speech on Wednesday

Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has written a column for the Guardian, arguing that Trump’s near assassination transformed his theology, giving the decidedly earthly ex-president a powerful spiritual sheen.

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump has transformed the theology of Trump. He has long portrayed himself as an innocent lamb falsely accused, the target of slings and arrows to bear the suffering of believers. Now the bullet and the blood of Butler, Pennsylvania, have sanctified him for the faithful and brought forth a new gospel.

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Lammy says Christianity and class give him common ground with JD Vance

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UK foreign secretary says he has talked to Trump running mate as he seeks to build bridges with senior Republicans

• UK politics live – latest updates

David Lammy has said he is already engaging with Donald Trump’s controversial running mate, JD Vance, and can identify with him because of their common working class and Christian backgrounds.

The British foreign secretary was speaking just hours after the possible future US vice-president reiterated his “America first” views, pledging to the Republican national convention (RNC) that he would not send US soldiers to war abroad unnecessarily.

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JD Vance fires salvos at Democrats in first speech as Trump’s running mate

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Junior senator of Ohio leaned into his own background and attacked Biden in Republican national convention address

JD Vance formally accepted the Republican vice-presidential nomination on Wednesday with a deliberate, and at times divisive, pitch to re-elect Donald Trump in November.

Addressing delegates in Milwaukee on the third night of the convention, Vance, the junior senator of Ohio, presented the Republican party as a champion of working-class Americans while denouncing Democrats as out of touch and ineffective. The populist-tinged rhetoric offered the latest sign of how Trump has reshaped the Republican party and rejected much of the traditional conservatism of its past.

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JD Vance tells Republican convention ‘people who govern this country have failed and failed again’ – as it happened

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This live blog is now closed. You can read some of our latest stories on the RNC below:

In his speech to the Republican convention, Greg Abbott gave a strenuous and well-received defense of his state’s forays into immigration enforcement, and vowed to keep up his controversial practice of bussing migrants from the state to cities nationwide.

“When Biden took 50 acres of Texas border property to illegally process up to 5,000 illegal immigrants a day, I directed the Texas National Guard to take back our land and wire it shut,” Abbott said, in an apparent reference to a legal clash between the state government and the Biden administration earlier this year.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris refused to even come to Texas and to see the border crisis that they created. I took the border to them. I began bussing illegal immigrants to Washington DC, and we have continued bussing migrants to sanctuary cities across the entire country, and those busses will continue to roll until we finally secure our border.

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Biden hasn’t done enough to ease age concerns, former top Obama adviser says – live

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David Axelrod, former top Obama adviser, says the question of whether Biden can survive is ‘entirely in his hands’

Today’s theme at the Republican national convention will be “Make America Strong Once Again,” and many of the speeches are expected to focus on foreign policy.

“Each one of these has a theme, like last night was ‘bend the knee and grovel’ apparently,” Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, said at a Democratic press conference in Milwaukee. “And today is ‘celebrate Russia day,’ I guess.”

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Nikki Haley says Donald Trump ‘has my strong endorsement’ as she is greeted by boos and cheers at Republican convention – live

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Former rival for Republican presidential nomination takes to stage in Milwaukee to formally endorse Trump

In addition to getting Donald Trump back in the White House, Republicans really want to retake the majority in the US Senate in the November elections, and have dedicated much of the convention tonight thus far to promoting their candidates for crucial seats.

In addition to Kari Lake, who is vying for Arizona’s open senate seat, the convention has heard from Eric Hovde, the party’s candidate to beat incumbent Democrat Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin. Here’s what Hovde told the crowd:

Tammy Baldwin called the Biden administration the most successful in generations. Can you believe that one? I mean, seriously, this shows how detached she is from everyday Wisconsinites. It doesn’t have to be this way. Under President Trump, family budgets were more secure, our border was secure, our world was secure. Where Biden and Baldwin have failed, President Trump and I will get the job done.

I love America, and I’ve lived the American dream. I married my best friend, raised a family, built successful businesses and created thousands of jobs for hard-working Americans. But the American dream that I lived is under attack from Joe Biden and his enablers in the Senate like Sherrod Brown.

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Republican convention speakers ramp up anti-Democratic rhetoric despite campaign promise of unity

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Kari Lake attacks media as ‘fake news’ as Elise Stefanik calls Biden ‘feckless and failed’ and says he’s caused ‘chaos’

Speakers at the Republican national convention ramped up their rhetorical attacks on Democrats on Tuesday night despite Donald Trump’s presidential campaign signalling that the party would adopt a serious tone and message of unity in the face of political violence.

Kari Lake, a Trump ally and Republican candidate for senate in Arizona, used her speech time to launch an attack on the media, which she called “fake news”, and said more Americans were no longer tuning in to mainstream media.

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Vaughan Gething quits as Welsh first minister but hits out at ‘pernicious’ claims of wrongdoing – UK politics live

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His resignation comes after four Welsh ministers stepped down from their posts in an apparently calculated move to force his hand

The JD Vance comment about Britain supposedly becoming an Islamist country under Labour (see 8.42am) is an example of the extreme political rhetoric that has coarsened politics on both sides of the Atlantic in recent years. Yesterday Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, announced that she will chair a meeting of the Defending Democracy taskforce to consider how election candidates are being exposed to more aggression and intimidation than in the past.

This morning Brendan Cox, whose wife, the Labour MP Jo Cox, was murdered by a far-right terrorist during the Brexit referendum in 2016, told the Today programme that he thought the problem was getting worse. He said:

There was a wide range of intimidation, but I do think it was another level.

Having spoken to lots of MPs about it, there was a sense that something had changed, that they felt hunted, that they felt unable to go about campaigning – that there were men in balaclavas, there were fireworks being thrown, there were tyres being slashed …

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Labour rejects JD Vance ‘first Islamist country with nuclear weapons’ remarks

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Deputy PM Angela Rayner says she does not recognise Donald Trump running mate’s ‘characterisation’ of Britain

Senior Labour figures have rejected comments by Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, that the UK could become the first “truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon” under the party.

They were reacting to comments that were made by Vance, a junior senator for the state of Ohio who has been announced as Trump’s running mate, at a conference for US conservatives.

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