Trump running mate made remarks to Catholic group in 2021, the same year he criticized ‘childless cat ladies’
In remarks to a Catholic group, JD Vance attacked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for having “a sociopathic attitude” about families and children.
“One of the politicians that I criticised is AOC,” said Vance in 2021, while campaigning for the US Senate seat in Ohio he would win the following year.
Continue reading...Trump says ‘you’re voting for the president … you’re voting for me’ when asked about vice-presidential pick
Donald Trump has said that vice presidential picks have “virtually no impact” on elections when asked about JD Vance’s fitness for office, in an apparent attempt to downplay his running mate’s role on the Republican ticket.
Trump made the comments during a combative interview at the annual convention of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) in Chicago. Asked by the Fox News journalist Harris Faulkner whether Vance would be ready to take over “on day one, if he has to be”, Trump avoided answering directly and instead downplayed the significance of the Vance’s role.
Continue reading...Zoom call – with pets included – organized as riposte to comments made by JD Vance about ‘childless cat ladies’
A group of pet lovers and self-described “cat ladies” came together for the latest in a series of Zoom calls in support of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. The Tuesday evening call was hosted by Christine Pelosi, a political consultant and the daughter of Nancy Pelosi, and Nikki Fried, the chair of the Florida Democratic party.
The call was not organized around racial and ethnic identity, but as a rebuff to comments made in 2021 by JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, who told the then Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the US was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs and “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too”.
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Kamala Harris’s campaign has announced a $50m advertising blitz ahead of the Democratic national convention next month with a television ad that portrays the presumptive Democratic nominee as “fearless”.
The 60-second ad will be the first in a series of paid media efforts ahead of the convention, which begins 19 August in Chicago.
We believe in a future where every person has the opportunity not just to get by, but to get ahead. Where every senior can retire with dignity. But Donald Trump wants to take our country backward. To give tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations and end the Affordable Care Act. But we are not going back.
Continue reading...Former friend releases messages largely from 2014-2017 in which Republican VP nominee also says: ‘I hate the police’
Questions continued to mount about the political transformation of Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, after the release of emails from a former friend in which Vance called Trump a “morally reprehensible human being” and said: “I hate the police.”
The messages between Vance and Sofia Nelson, who sent them to the New York Times, were largely dated between 2014 and 2017. In one, Vance sent Nelson a section of Hillbilly Elegy, his bestseller about his Appalachian boyhood.
Continue reading...Ohio senator’s ratings are at a record low and his hardline views on issues might prove to be a liability than an asset
He was supposed to be his master’s mini-me, his elevation as Republican vice-presidential nominee hailed as a virile celebration of Donald Trump’s near-total conquest of the GOP.
Now – days after receiving a rapturous response at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee – JD Vance is being lamented within party circles as a potentially fatal liability in Trump’s quest to recapture the White House.
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Kevin McCarthy, the former Republican House speaker, has described attacks by his former colleagues on Kamala Harris claiming that she was hired as part of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are “stupid and dumb”.
McCarthy, speaking to NBC News’ Meet the Press NOW last night, said:
I disagree with DEI, but she is the vice-president of the United States, she is the former US senator. These congressmen saying it, they are wrong in their own instincts.
If President Biden is committed to passing the torch to his vice president, and wants to be able to seed her campaign with the current Biden for President campaign war chest, he’ll first have to become his party’s legal nominee. After shuffling through the Democratic National Committee’s planned roll call vote he’d be free to drop out. Ms Harris could seamlessly slip into the driver’s seat.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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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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.
Continue reading...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.”
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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 …
Continue reading...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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