Speaking in Iowa on Thursday, Donald Trump told supporters that he had personally encouraged Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for Ohio governor, to keep running an attack ad featuring the mother of his Democratic rival, Dr Amy Acton, who had lost custody of her daughter at age 12 because her husband was charged with raping the young girl.
“They did an ad of the mother saying the daughter is incompetent, a liar and disgusting unreliable person,” Trump said, adding some claims that were not, in fact, in the ad.
“My mom would not say that about me – even if she believed it,” the president added, making light of the testimony of a woman who sided with the man charged with raping her own 12-year-old daughter.
“When I first saw it, I said, ‘Wow, that means Vivek easily will win the race’. And then I got a call from Vivek,” Trump said. “He said, ‘What would you recommend? Because I’m getting killed in the press.’ Why? He said, ‘Because they think I should immediately take the ad off.’”
“The mother said horrible things about your opponent,” Trump said. “I said, ‘You’ve got to ride with it’”.
The president made no mention of the fact that the Republican Senate candidate he was there to support, Ashley Hinson, denounced the ad earlier on Thursday. “I think it’s absolutely terrible, and I think they should take the ad down,” Hinson told ABC News ahead of Trump’s appearance.
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:
Donald Trump told supporters in Iowa he had encouraged Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for Ohio governor, to keep running an attack ad featuring the mother of his Democratic rival, Dr Amy Acton, who had lost custody of her daughter at age 12 because her husband was charged with raping the young girl. “I said, ‘You’ve got to ride with it’”, the president said.
Iowa Republican Senate candidate Ashley Hinson broke with the president by denouncing the attack ad, saying: “I think it’s absolutely terrible, and I think they should take the ad down.”
Attorney general Todd Blanche did not rule it out a scenario in which the justice department would try to block states from certifying midterm election results.
… or at least the stage, exiting to the live-blogger’s favorite tune, YMCA. The president just wrapped up 90 minutes of remarks, saying very little that he has not said before, but he did devote an extended portion of the speech to defending the attack ad his ally, Vivek Ramaswamy, is running in Ohio, to the dismay of many Republicans, including Iowa Senate candidate Ashley Hinson – the person Trump was there to promote.
“I’m asking you to pretend that I’m running… pretend I’m on the ballot,” Donald Trump told supporters in Iowa on Thursday, as he has at each stop on his “midterm blitz”.
“Remember, I’m on the ballot,” he said later in the speech. “Because I am on the ballot. Really, it’s our stuff, it’s going to be taken away. If we if we don’t win, it’s going to be taken away. So I am, really, on the ballot.”
Of course, if the president really wanted to make the midterms a referendum on himself, he could take a page from the leaders of parliamentary democracies and pledge to resign from office should Republicans lose the House and Senate, something he has not done.
Speaking in Iowa on Thursday, Donald Trump told supporters that he had personally encouraged Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for Ohio governor, to keep running an attack ad featuring the mother of his Democratic rival, Dr Amy Acton, who had lost custody of her daughter at age 12 because her husband was charged with raping the young girl.
“They did an ad of the mother saying the daughter is incompetent, a liar and disgusting unreliable person,” Trump said, adding some claims that were not, in fact, in the ad.
“My mom would not say that about me – even if she believed it,” the president added, making light of the testimony of a woman who sided with the man charged with raping her own 12-year-old daughter.
“When I first saw it, I said, ‘Wow, that means Vivek easily will win the race’. And then I got a call from Vivek,” Trump said. “He said, ‘What would you recommend? Because I’m getting killed in the press.’ Why? He said, ‘Because they think I should immediately take the ad off.’”
“The mother said horrible things about your opponent,” Trump said. “I said, ‘You’ve got to ride with it’”.
The president made no mention of the fact that the Republican Senate candidate he was there to support, Ashley Hinson, denounced the ad earlier on Thursday. “I think it’s absolutely terrible, and I think they should take the ad down,” Hinson told ABC News ahead of Trump’s appearance.
As he frequently does at campaign rallies, Donald Trump boasted to supporters in Iowa on Thursday that he “aced” what he called “an aptitude test” that is, in fact, a screening for mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer’s disease.
While the test does include a short test of basic mathematical ability, in which patients are asked to perform serial subtraction by 7 starting at 60, Trump claimed on Thursday that the mathematical test was much more complicated.
“The first question easy. The second question is easy. And by the time you get up to number 30, there are many people that can answer those questions. I’ll tell you,” the president said.
“They’ll say like: ‘Take a number, any number’. Say, 49, ‘triple it’, and they go pretty much in this speed, ‘triple it and divide by four; add 2,019; subtract 87; divide by three; multiply by nine. What is the number?’”
As supporters shouted out numbers, Trump just asserted that he solved the problem without saying what the answer is. “Not a lot of people are going to be able to do that,” Trump said. “Not a lot. I did it. I did it three times,” the president said.
The president has given similarly detailed descriptions of mathematical problems he says were on the test, and claims to have solved, in previous speeches, but never once provided an answer.
“These are tough questions, you know,” Trump told elderly supporters at The Villages in Florida in May. “They say, ‘Take a number, any number.’ Okay, I’ll take 99. ‘Multiply times nine.’ Okay. ‘Divide it by three.’ Good. ‘Add 4,293.’ That’s good. ‘Divide by two; subtract 93; divide by nine. What is your answer?’ Now they go a little slower than that, but not much. I don’t want to waste a lot of time, but there aren’t a lot of people that get it right. I got it right.”
Despite the fact that he is in Iowa, ostensibly to support Republican candidates, Donald Trump quickly turned to attacks on two candidates running in other states, Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, repeating false claims he has made before about two prominent Muslim Americans.
Making no effort to conceal the anti-Muslim racism and fear-mongering he has put at the center of his pitch to Republican voters, Trump claimed that El-Sayed is “a jihadist”.
He then recited multiple falsehoods about Omar, including the false claims that she married her brother and that she told an interviewer this week that she did not, “as far as I know”, which she did not.
Donald Trump started speaking, about 40 minutes late, to supporters in Sioux City, Iowa on Thursday by boasting about how well he had done in the state in his own three runs for office.
Unusually, the president acknowledged that his term in office is drawing (slowly) to a close. “You know, we only have a little more than two years left. Can you believe it?” Trump said, before adding: “But I’m going to have a lot of power when I leave.”
He then turned to reciting a litany of lies about Josh Turek, the Democrat running against Republican Senate candidate Ashley Hinson, casting him as a supporter of “taxpayer-funded transgender brutalization surgeries and in favor of men in girls bathrooms.”
Lebron James mimed a golf swing and took an imaginary jump shot, as the national anthem was performed during Tuesday’s Philadelphia 76ers and New York Knicks match-up. His gestures provoked the ire of Donald Trump, who berated him as “no good” and a “TOTAL DISGRACE” on social media.
“LeBron James should apologize to all of those Great American Warriors and Heroes who died for the American Flag, and all that our Country stands for!” Trump wrote in a Wednesday Truth Social post.
The NBA star and Trump have been at odds for several years.
In 2017, Trump rescinded a White House invitation to the Golden State Warriors, after Stephen Curry indicated he would not want to go. James famously called Trump a “bum,” saying his presidency took away from the customary honor.
The feud appeared to rekindle this summer, when in July, Trump suggested James was a “racist,” without much further explanation, after being asked to compare his career to that of Michael Jordan’s.
“I only like people that like me,” Trump said.
Donald Trump is expected to speak soon at a rally in Sioux City, Iowa in support of Republican Senate candidate Ashley Hinson, who broke with the president on Thursday by denouncing an attack ad he has supported in the Ohio governor race.
As Trump defended the ad, from Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, in which the estranged mother of the Democratic candidate, Dr Amy Acton, calls her daughter “a liar”, Hinson joined the bipartisan backlash against the ad triggered by the fact that Acton was removed from her mother’s custody at age 12, after her stepfather was charged with raping her.
In an interview ahead of today’s rally, Hinson was asked by Jonathan Karl of ABC News about the ad from Ramaswamy’s campaign. “It’s terrible,” Hinson said. “I think about it as a mom, and you think about kid surviving childhood sexual abuse and having to relive that trauma on TV again. I think it’s absolutely terrible, and I think they should take the ad down.”
Hinson also called the comment from vice-president JD Vance, that he was disgusted by Republican criticism of the ad, “ridiculous”.
“Again, I think it’s wrong and should come down.”
Hinson, who currently represents Iowa in the House, is campaigning to replace Republican senator Joni Ernst, who revealed in 2019 that she was a survivor of sexual assault who had been raped in college.
Hinson spoke at the rally on Thursday about 90 minutes before Trump’s schedule arrival time.
The US supreme court ruled on Thursday that New Hampshire students cannot use their school-issued ID cards as proof of identity to vote, handing a victory to the state’s Republicans.
The high court cited a previous ruling, “lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election,” in its decision to keep intact an April state law that struck high school and college IDs from a list of acceptable voter documents. House Bill 323, signed by New Hampshire’s Republican governor, Kelly Ayotte, requires government-issued IDs, such as a passport or driver license.
The Coalition for Open Democracy, a New Hampshire-based nonprofit, had sued to block the legislation, arguing that it raised unconstitutional barriers for the state’s young voting bloc.
Republican legislators nationwide have embraced stricter voter ID laws, framing them as a safeguard against alleged voter fraud. Voting rights groups have argued that the narrow range of acceptable forms of identification disenfranchises millions of voters.
According to the Brennan Center, “more than 49 million American adults don’t possess an unexpired driver’s license with their current name and address. Seniors, people of color, people with disabilities, low-income voters, and students are especially likely to lack such documents.”
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
