Walz attacks Trump for saying no to second debate with Harris, saying he ‘does not have stamina’
Tim Walz laid into Donald Trump for the meandering tone of his recent speeches and for declining to debate Kamala Harris for a second time.
“It takes stamina to run for president. It takes stamina to be president, and Donald Trump does not have stamina,” Walz began. “He has been rambling more than the normal rambling.”
Noting that Trump has lately taken to describing his speaking style as “the weave”, Walz said: “We know there’s only one weave that you know anything about, and it is not this. It is not this … He’s ducks debates, but you can’t blame him. When you get your ass whip that hard, you don’t come back for seconds.”
Key events
Tim Walz has wrapped up his speech, after introducing Barack Obama.
The Democratic former president apologized for being late, saying he had an issue with his plane that forced him to drive to Madison from Chicago.
“So we board the plane … and then the pilot comes in and says, ‘Sir, there’s a pile of oil leaking out of the back of the plane’. Now, I do not know anything about planes, except for the fact that it should not leak oil. So we had a nice road trip instead, and I am glad I made it,” Obama said.
Walz warns that Trump could retaliate against him, if elected
Tim Walz encouraged the crowd not to grow sanguine about the possibility of a second Trump term, saying the Republican could retaliate against him if he returns to the White House.
“Here’s another reason that the stakes are so high in this election, something that I don’t think many of us have seen. You hear some version of this from the people in your life, neighbors, relatives, brothers, in some cases, who said, look, we made it through the first Trump term, we’ll get through a second. This Donald Trump … is far more dangerous … He is not the 2016 Donald Trump. This is a brand new version,” Walz said.
He elaborated on why he believes that:
As Kamala says, he is a very unserious person, but the consequences of putting him back in office are deadly serious. He’s talking about sending the military against people who don’t support him. He’s naming names. Look, I recognize I’m going to be at the top of that list. You think he’s stopping with me? He’s talking about you. He’s talking about using the United States military to go after people who disagree with his idiotic ideas, his unpatriotic ideas, his traitorous ideas. And he’s talking about using the military. He talks about the enemy from within.
Taking a page from Trump’s book, Walz insults Elon Musk with vulgarity
After Donald Trump recently called Kamala Harris a “shit vice-president”, Tim Walz just used similar language to describe Elon Musk’s enthusiastic campaigning for the former president.
Musk bounded onstage and briefly got airborne at a Trump rally in the Pennsylvania town where the former president nearly lost his life in an assassination attempt in July.
Here’s what Walz had to say about that:
So look, Elon is on that stage, jumping around, skipping like a dipshit on these things. You know it. Think about it … that guy is literally the richest man in the world spending millions of dollars to help Donald Trump buy an election.
Now, look, they’re saying the quiet parts out loud now, because Donald Trump has already promised that he would put Elon in charge of government regulations that oversee the businesses that Elon runs.
That’s a hell of a buy. He could spend billions to make more than $10bn on the back end. So in other words, Donald Trump, in front of the eyes the American public, is promising corruption. That’s what he’s promising you. And you know what? I don’t believe, I don’t believe he keeps many promises, but he’ll keep that one.
Walz says Trump’s McDonald’s appearance nothing but a ‘stunt’
Tim Walz then took Donald Trump to task for the staged campaign event he held at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s over the weekend, saying the appearance amounted to a “stunt”.
“He went to a McDonald’s and dressed up as the drive-thru worker. They found him an apron his size and put it on him. And I was thinking, it is possible he mixed up his weekends and thought that it was Halloween already. He’s been forgetting things lately, as you might have noticed,” Walz said.
Pressing the attack, the Minnesota governor continued:
That restaurant, that restaurant wasn’t even open. It was a stunt – fake orders for fake customers. They even staged the drive thru. We know that they won’t let you walk through the damn drive thru. We knew that. They saw that happening.
But look, everything about this guy is fake. Everything he does is fake. Next he’s going to be telling you he’s a cop or a construction worker because he dances to the Village People, so he knows the YMCA. And I’ll tell you this: so that five minutes he stood next to the deep fryer, I’ll guarantee you that’s the hardest that guy’s ever worked in his life. And that’s not a joke.
Walz attacks Trump for saying no to second debate with Harris, saying he ‘does not have stamina’
Tim Walz laid into Donald Trump for the meandering tone of his recent speeches and for declining to debate Kamala Harris for a second time.
“It takes stamina to run for president. It takes stamina to be president, and Donald Trump does not have stamina,” Walz began. “He has been rambling more than the normal rambling.”
Noting that Trump has lately taken to describing his speaking style as “the weave”, Walz said: “We know there’s only one weave that you know anything about, and it is not this. It is not this … He’s ducks debates, but you can’t blame him. When you get your ass whip that hard, you don’t come back for seconds.”
After the customary playing of Beyoncé’s Freedom – the song used at just about every Harris campaign event – Tim Walz strolled on stage.
He shouted out all the Democrats who introduced him, as well as the rally attendees: “But each of you, huge thank-you. Took time out of your busy lives, you came here, you came here because you believe in the promise of America and you believe in the democracy. Thank you.”
Next up was Tammy Baldwin, the state Democratic senator who is locked in an increasingly tight re-election battle against Republican Eric Hovde.
Like Tony Evers before her on the lineup, Baldwin centered her appeal to voters on her support for abortion rights and the Affordable Care Act.
“Just a little bragging here: I wrote the provision in the Affordable Care Act that allows young people to stay on their parents’ health insurance until they turn 26 and I will never stop fighting until all Americans have the quality, affordable healthcare that they need and deserve,” she said.
Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers, one of the early speakers at the Walz-Obama rally in Madison, didn’t hold back when describing what a second Donald Trump presidency would mean.
“We know Trump and Vance will try to pass a national abortion ban, roll back access to birth control, emergency contraception and even fertility treatments. We know that they’re going to repeal the Affordable Care Act and deny coverage to folks like me and so many others here in the audience, and people you care about who have a pre-existing condition,” he said.
The governor continued:
What Trump said about that – he’s got the concept of a plan. Now you take that concept for a plan and go pay a bill, it ain’t going to work. And they’re going to give more tax breaks for the ultra-rich and the big corporations instead of helping working families get ahead. And we know that a second Trump term would mean unchecked power with no guardrails to hold them back. That’s just bullshit.
Actor Bradley Whitford – you may remember him from The West Wing or the many movies and television shows he’s appeared in since that series concluded – is giving a lengthy introduction for Tim Walz and Barack Obama in his home town Madison, Wisconsin.
“Make sure five people who you may assume are with you, make sure they make a plan and make sure they vote,” Whitford told the crowd.
“Because I got news for you. If we spend the next two weeks knocking doors, manning phones, doing everything we can to get out every vote, with your help, we’re gonna win. We’re not, we’re not, we’re not moving back, we’re not going back, we’re moving forward. We’re gonna win with your help. We’re gonna hold this country up.”
Obama and Walz to hold joint rally in Wisconsin
Tim Walz is soon to take the stage along with Barack Obama in Madison, Wisconsin.
It’s the only joint appearance the two men will make today, though Obama will head to Detroit this evening, while Walz will hold a second event in Racine, Wisconsin.
The rally comes as Obama steps up his campaigning for Kamala Harris, with the general election two weeks away. The vice-president is meanwhile in Washington DC, where she has taped interviews with NBC News and Noticias Telemundo that will air in the evening.
We’ll let you know what Walz and Obama have to say.
Donald Trump has a small lead among likely voters in Georgia, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports in a new poll.
He leads Kamala Harris with 47% support to the vice-president’s 43%, just outside the survey’s 3.1 percentage point margin of error.
However, all signs point to a race that remains either candidate’s to win. Here’s more from the Journal-Constitution:
But with 8% of likely voters indicating they’re still undecided, the race could break either way as early voting enters its second week.
Among the most telling takeaways of the poll is the stability of the race. As both campaigns pour time and treasure into Georgia, Trump’s support remains virtually unchanged since the AJC’s last poll in September. Harris’ dropped a fraction of a percentage point. The number of undecided voters has hardly budged.
“It’s a really close race. Neither side has this in the bag,” said University of Georgia political scientist Trey Hood, who oversaw the poll. “And that makes the next two weeks even more important.”
The poll suggests that Harris may still be struggling to woo Black voters, the bulwark of the Democratic coalition. About three-quarters of Black voters say they’ll vote for her, far behind the 88% that Joe Biden won in 2020 when he narrowly flipped Georgia.
That doesn’t mean those voters are gravitating toward Trump. One in 5 Black voters are undecided, while only 8% say they will cast their ballot for Trump. It indicates that Harris’ campaign, which has stepped up efforts to bolster her Black support, should be more worried about apathy than losing those voters to the GOP.
In another sign of concern for Harris, 11% of Democrats say they’re undecided. While few back third-party candidates — the Green Party’s Jill Stein and others registered minimal support — the poll suggests she has more work to do to consolidate her base and little time to do so.
CBS News reports that Republican former prosecutors have asked the justice department to investigate Elon Musk’s effort to pay voters to cast ballots for Donald Trump:
NEW: Justice Dept confirms to @cbsnews that it has received inquiry from former federal prosecutors and GOP appointees to “request that (Justice Dept) review payments that are being made by the Elon Musk-founded America PAC to voters in Pennsylvania and other states that…
— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) October 22, 2024
Justice Dept confirms receipt of the letter… but declines to comment further
The former GOP-appointed officials want a DOJ review of Musk’s effort
— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) October 22, 2024
Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor Josh Shapiro made a similar suggestion over the weekend:
Donald Trump’s freewheeling, stream-of-consciousness style of delivering speeches doesn’t always hit the mark. The latest example is the daughter of golf legend Arnold Palmer, who did not like the way the former president talked about her late father’s penis, the Guardian’s Ramon Antonio Vargas reports:
Arnold Palmer’s daughter says Donald Trump disrespected her late father’s memory by fawning over the size of the champion golfer’s penis at a campaign rally over the weekend.
“Hackneyed anecdotes from the locker room … seemed disrespectful and inappropriate to me,” Peg Palmer Wears told ABC News on Monday, two days after the former president publicly suggested her father was well endowed.
Wears added that “people coming to these rallies” hosted by Trump as he seeks a second presidency “deserve substance about plans [he] has as a candidate”. She specifically called on him to address “some of the threats he’s made to people”, an apparent reference to how he recently suggested sending the US military against his political adversaries when voters go to the polls during the 5 November presidential election.
“These are important issues that should be discussed for people when they’re getting ready to vote, and using my dad to cover over the important things just seems unacceptable to me,” Wears said.
Trump was speaking to his supporters in Palmer’s home town of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, on Saturday at a regional airport named after him when the former president suddenly invoked the genitals of the renowned golfer, an old acquaintance.
“Arnold Palmer was all man,” Trump remarked. “When he took showers with other pros, they came out of there – they said, ‘Oh my God. That’s unbelievable.’”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says Trump’s McDonald’s shift was ‘making fun’ of workers
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic representative from New York, did not hold back in criticizing Trump’s minutes-long stint as a fry cook at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s on Sunday, saying he was “making fun” of workers.
“You’ve got Donald Trump putting on a little McDonald’s costume because he thinks that’s what people do,” she said Monday at a United Auto Workers event, per the Hill. “They’re not trying to empathize with us. They are making fun of us.
“Donald Trump thinks that people who work at McDonald’s are a joke.”
Trump stopped by the fast-food restaurant for a staged campaign event where employees showed him how to make fries. He then served pre-approved customers at the drive-through window.
Trump used the event to needle Kamala Harris, whom he has claimed lied about her time working at McDonald’s during college. Trump has made these claims without providing any evidence whatsoever.
Top Senate Democrats released a report today urging voters to cast their ballots as early as possible. The document also sought to answer questions about the election process.
The lawmakers – which include New York Senator Chuck Schumer, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar – reminded voters that the outcome might not be known on 5 November as different states have varying timelines for accepting and processing mail-in ballots.
Their document also emphasizes that voter intimidation, as well as violence, “is never acceptable and any attempts to suppress the vote will not be tolerated”. The report notes that under federal law, “it is illegal to intimidate, threaten, or coerce anyone in order to interfere with their right to vote”.
“In our democracy, every eligible citizen should be able to freely cast a ballot in the way that works best for them and should not face restrictions or barriers to voting,” the report says.
The document also appears to try addressing voters’ concerns about whether votes were safe from interference, noting that officials from both political parties have “confirmed the security of recent elections” and that the infrastructure “has never been more secure”.
These statements come as Donald Trump, who still makes the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him, has said that election fraud is unfolding in this race. (There is no evidence of massive voter fraud, including alleged irregularities surrounding mail-in ballots or non-citizens casting votes.)
“There have been efforts to stoke fear and chaos about the election with false allegations of voter fraud,” the report said. “The American people should beware of election misinformation.”
The day so far
Election day is exactly two weeks away. Gulp. While there’s no telling who is going to win, NBC News and CNN reported this morning that Kamala Harris’s campaign is bracing for a very close election that could potentially see the “blue wall” swing states not vote as a bloc for the first time in decades. They are deploying a variety of surrogates on the campaign trail to make the case for the vice-president in the final two weeks, with Eminem reportedly set to introduce Barack Obama when he appears in Detroit tonight, and Bruce Springsteen to headline two concerts as part of a series that will hit every swing state. Obama will also campaign with Tim Walz in Wisconsin later today, JD Vance will hold two events in Arizona, Donald Trump will campaign in North Carolina, and Walz will hold a second event in the Badger state before the evening is through.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
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Trump held a round table with Latino leaders but took his time in getting to issues of importance to the voting bloc.
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Harris will campaign in Houston on Friday, with an eye towards picking up Texas’s Senate seat and highlighting how abortion bans have affected women in the Republican bastion.
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The US economy is poised for stronger growth than many wealthy nations, the IMF said in forecasts released today.
Bruce Springsteen to appear with Harris, Obama as campaign launches battleground state concert series
Kamala Harris’s campaign will hold concerts in the seven swing states, with legendary performer Bruce Springsteen to appear alongside the vice-president and Barack Obama on Thursday in Georgia, a senior campaign official said.
The Atlanta concert is the first of what the campaign is calling the When We Vote We Win series, and is aimed at whipping up voter enthusiasm ahead of 5 November. It will continue on Monday of next week in Philadelphia, when Springsteen and Obama will appear together, and concerts in the five other swing states will be announced soon, the official said.
Springsteen has backed Democrats before, and endorsed Harris earlier this month:
Richard Luscombe
Donald Trump’s round table with Latino leaders in Doral, Miami, has just concluded. The audience livened a little as the former president turned his attention, briefly, to immigration.
He repeated baseless and often-aired claims that foreign countries, especially Venezuela, were opening their prisons to send “violent gang members” and drug dealers into the US with military weapons. He called Kamala Harris “a stupid person” as he falsely labeled her Joe Biden’s “border tsar”.
His remarks segued quickly into an attack on Democrats for allegedly allowing transgender men to play women’s sports and a somewhat fanciful tale of a “a man who transitioned into, congratulations, a woman” smashing a baseball so hard it hit a female player on the head and “these young ladies said they’d never seen anything like it”.
Perhaps sensing things were going off topic, event host Jennifer Korn, a former White House aide and executive director of the Hispanic Leadership Network, attempted to interrupt with a “Mr President … ”
“I’ll leave it at that,” Trump said. “Does anyone else have anything to say?”
Robert Unanue, the president of Goya Foods, the largest Hispanic-owned food company in the US, took the microphone for a lengthy speech praising Trump, then the event wound down with a prayer session.
Honduran televangelist Guillermo Maltonado, founder of Miami megachurch the King Jesus International Ministry, said Trump would be re-elected because “there’s a higher assignment for him to finish with this nation”:
God sets up kings. We’re praying for the will of God to make [Trump] the 47th president.
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