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      Trump’s Answer to Harris’s Border Trip: Calling Her ‘Mentally Disabled’

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      The day after Vice President Kamala Harris visited the southern border and pledged to crack down on asylum and beef up security, former President Donald J. Trump unleashed a string of sharply personal attacks on her at a rally on Saturday, expressing contempt for her intelligence and calling her “mentally disabled.”In a dark, often rambling speech lasting longer than an hour, Mr. Trump — whose advisers have urged him to focus on policy issues rather than on personal jabs — notably escalated his attacks against Ms. Harris. Mr. Trump, who has often questioned President Biden’s mental abilities, told supporters at a rally in Prairie du Chien, Wis., that “Joe Biden became mentally impaired; Kamala was born that way.”Mr. Trump then tied Ms. Harris to the Biden administration’s border policies, adding, “And if you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country.” Later, he criticized her remarks at the border on Friday as “bullshit.”It was a startling series of broadsides in the midst of a presidential campaign, even for a candidate who seems to delight in offensive remarks. Mr. Trump’s speech in Prairie du Chien, a town of about 5,000 people along the Mississippi River, was meant to serve as a response to Ms. Harris’s border visit, in Douglas, Ariz., where she promised to crack down on asylum and called for tougher punishments against those who cross the border illegally. Those positions, an attempt to address a political vulnerability, made up the core of one of the toughest speeches on immigration and border policy that a Democrat has made in a generation.But Mr. Trump, who stood surrounded by posters of undocumented immigrants accused of violent crimes, attacked Ms. Harris for being a political opportunist. And he claimed that she bore responsibility for migrants who have come into the country illegally and committed crimes.“She is a disaster,” Mr. Trump said. “And she is not ever going to do anything for the border, and she didn’t even want to get tough now, except her poll numbers were tanking.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Fans Want to Watch Football. Trump and Walz Will Be There, Too.

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      Donald Trump and Tim Walz are attending college games on Saturday that will draw plenty of viewers in the swing states of Michigan and Georgia.For college football fans, they are temples of the sport: the University of Alabama’s Bryant-Denny Stadium and the Big House at the University of Michigan.But to the presidential campaigns, they are this Saturday’s soundstages: ready-made stops for former President Donald J. Trump and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the Democratic nominee for vice president, to try to prove their Everyman mettle to any battleground-state voters who might be in the stands or watching from afar.“College football in the fall is the only place where you can find 100,000 potential voters in one location and you don’t have to pay for it,” said Angi Horn, a Republican strategist and Alabama football loyalist.“To pay for the amount of coverage and publicity and a crowd like that would cost millions,” she added. “They’re getting it for free — and you get to see a really good football game.”Mr. Trump is headed to Tuscaloosa, Ala., where the second-ranked Georgia Bulldogs, the gridiron pride of the neighboring swing state, will meet the No. 4 Alabama Crimson Tide. Mr. Walz is scheduled to visit Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, trawling for votes in one of the country’s biggest battlegrounds as the 12th-ranked Michigan Wolverines, last season’s national champions, host Minnesota’s Golden Gophers.Mr. Trump and Mr. Walz cannot reliably assume they will be Saturday’s star attractions as the campaigns encroach on a sport that is a cultural mainstay and surpasses Washington for ancient feuds and partisan obsessives. But their visits have been designed to invite a crush of local news coverage and social media posts and, their allies hope, cameos during national broadcasts that will soak up viewers in Michigan and Georgia.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Criticizes Harris on the Border and the Economy in Michigan

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      Former President Donald J. Trump crisscrossed the battleground state of Michigan on Friday, casting himself as an economic protectionist to blue-collar voters while attacking Vice President Kamala Harris over immigration on the same day she visited the southern border. Mr. Trump used a pair of events to try to blame Ms. Harris for inflation and the migrant crisis, tapping into some of the populist themes that helped him win Michigan — and the presidency — in the 2016 election. In 2020, the state flipped for President Biden.In the afternoon, the former president visited a manufacturing facility near Grand Rapids before holding a town hall event in the Detroit suburbs that started around 90 minutes late and ended after just a half-hour. At the second event, in Warren, Mich., Mr. Trump vowed, if Congress did not act, to use executive action to enact protective tariffs to limit the flow of imports from China and other countries that he said were killing jobs in the state. “The word ‘tariff’ I love,” he said at Macomb Community College, where he was joined onstage by Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, one of his staunchest allies in the Senate who served as the town hall’s moderator. Mr. Trump fielded a handful of friendly questions from his supporters that set up familiar talking points and lines of attack. He said Americans were forgoing certain comforts because they could no longer afford them under the Biden-Harris administration.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Harris, at the Border, Shows Democrats’ Hard-Line Evolution on Immigration

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      On her first trip to the southern border as the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris delivered one of her party’s toughest speeches on immigration and border policy in a generation. Even as she did, she tried to paint former President Donald J. Trump as a feckless chaos agent without the ability to deliver the hard-line results he has promised.Ms. Harris vowed to carry on President Biden’s crackdown on asylum and to impose order on the southern border, demonstrating how much the politics of immigration have shifted for Democrats. Just one presidential cycle ago, Ms. Harris and most other candidates in the party’s primary race had promised to decriminalize illegal border crossings.Ms. Harris’s remarks on Friday in the border town of Douglas, Ariz., laid out a vision that makes clear that her party — and the nation — continue to back away from the long-held American promise of protection to desperate people fleeing poverty and violence abroad no matter how they enter the United States.“The United States is a sovereign nation, and I believe we have a duty to set rules at our border and to enforce them,” Ms. Harris said. “I take that responsibility very seriously.”In political terms, her visit to Arizona — a critical battleground state where she narrowly trails Mr. Trump in polls — represented an attempt to toughen her image on immigration, an issue on which surveys show that many voters favor the former president.On Friday, she spoke at a community college on a stage adorned with signs that read “Border Security and Stability.” Before her speech, she visited U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s port of entry in Douglas, walking along a section of border wall that the Obama administration built in 2012. Border agents also briefed her on efforts to stop fentanyl smuggling.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How JD Vance Turns Taking Questions Into the Show

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      He uses showdowns with reporters to cast himself as a pugnacious, unscripted defender of Donald J. Trump.“We’re a little behind on time, so I won’t take as many questions as I normally do,” the senator from Ohio said, before casually inviting local reporters to ask him whatever they’d like. “If you’ve got a microphone, just shout a question and I’ll answer it.”Usually, when candidates on the campaign trail take questions from the press, they do so before or after their events, far from the crowd. Vance holds gaggles like that, but he has also developed an unusual routine that has swiftly become a trademark of his campaign events: He has taken to parrying reporters’ questions in front of his voters — turning journalists into set pieces in a performance where he casts himself as former President Donald Trump’s pugnacious, unscripted defender while his raucous supporters tilt the playing field in his favor.That night, as Nick Ochsner, a reporter with the local broadcaster WBTV, began to speak — “I want to ask you about Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson,” he said, referring to the state’s embattled Republican candidate for governor — the crowd began to boo, drowning out Ochsner, who implored Vance’s supporters to let him finish. With a theatrical cough, Vance turned to the people behind him, well aware that they would share his exasperation.“I knew I’d get this,” Vance said, throwing one hand up with the air of a parent allowing a troublesome child to have his say, instead of a candidate for vice president answering a reasonable question.Ochsner pressed on, pointing out that Robinson, a Trump-endorsed candidate who campaigned alongside both Trump and Vance in happier times, wasn’t by Vance’s side after CNN reported that Robinson made lewd and racist comments on a pornography website.“Is there something disqualifying about the comments uncovered by CNN that wasn’t disqualifying about any of the previous comments he made?” Ochsner asked, as the crowd jeered some more.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      JD Vance Faces Scrutiny Over Past Criticisms of Trump and Car Seats

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      As Senator JD Vance of Ohio prepares for the vice-presidential debate next week, several past statements — including a private message in which he reportedly criticized former President Donald J. Trump near the end of his term and a video of him linking car-seat regulations to low birthrates — came back to haunt him on Friday.Long before he became Mr. Trump’s running mate, Mr. Vance had a well-known history of criticizing Mr. Trump, who he once said he feared could be “America’s Hitler.” But Mr. Vance later became a supporter and ally of Mr. Trump’s, attributing his change of heart to his appreciation of Mr. Trump’s presidency.The senator’s explanation came under scrutiny on Friday after The Washington Post reported that he had said in a private message on social media in February 2020 that Mr. Trump had “thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism.”Ammar Moussa, a spokesman for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, said in a statement that it was “hard to conceive of a more scathing and definitive rejection” of Mr. Trump.The Trump campaign responded to the messages reported by The Post by noting that Mr. Vance had voted for Mr. Trump for re-election in 2020. The campaign did not dispute the accuracy or the existence of the messages, attributing them to an exchange with a consultant. (The Post did not identify the recipient.)William Martin, a spokesman for Mr. Vance, said in a statement that “it’s no secret” that Mr. Vance had been a “critic of President Trump in the past.” He said that Mr. Vance’s criticism was not directed at Mr. Trump, but at “establishment Republicans who thwarted much of Trump’s populist economic agenda.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      McDonald’s, Pelosi, Debate Moderators: Trump Speech on Border Veers Off Course

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      Former President Donald J. Trump began his news conference on Thursday in the lobby of Trump Tower, standing in front of seven American flags. He laid a bound folder down on a lectern and declared that he was going to focus on the southern border, where his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, is headed on Friday.That lasted about 10 minutes.Mr. Trump quickly appeared to grow bored with the remarks he read from, and drifted repeatedly toward other topics. He talked about inflation, accused Ms. Harris of lying about working at McDonald’s years ago and nursed his fury over how the ABC News debate moderators handled his face-off with Ms. Harris nearly three weeks ago.At the beginning of the news conference, Mr. Trump struggled at times to articulate his thoughts or make a point clearly. He stumbled over some words as he read from remarks he had plainly not written. He bootstrapped one thought onto another based on whether the words associated with something else, as opposed to having a clear through line.After he accused Ms. Harris of ruining San Francisco while she was the district attorney, a recent favorite line of attack, Mr. Trump followed it up with tangents that related loosely to the city of San Francisco as opposed to the reason he was at the lectern.“And you know, you can go to California, where she ruined San Francisco,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “She destroyed. San Francisco may have been the greatest city in the world, 16, 18 years ago, and now it’s a practically unlivable place. And I hate to say that. I have property in San Francisco. It’s not a good thing to say, but this far supersedes my ownership of property. It’s an unlivable place. It was the best city. Bob Tisch, of Loews, a friend of mine. Great guy. Wonderful man. He was in San Francisco. He was in Chicago. He had big businesses all over, the Tisch family. Bob Tisch used to tell me that he thinks San Francisco is the greatest city in the country. He passed away, quite a while ago. But, and San Francisco probably was. And now it’s not even livable.”He then criticized Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, knocked Ms. Harris for not saying the phrase “illegal alien,” accused Democrats of a coup, then pointed to reports that Nancy Pelosi’s husband sold Visa stock before the Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit against the company as evidence that Ms. Pelosi “should be prosecuted.” He also said Ms. Pelosi should be prosecuted for security lapses at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when a pro-Trump mob overran the building, some of them hunting for Ms. Pelosi.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Biden, Eyeing His Legacy, Signs Executive Orders on Gun Safety

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      The president used a poignant White House ceremony to pass the baton to Vice President Kamala Harris, who has made gun safety an issue in her campaign.President Biden, frustrated with congressional inaction on gun violence and seeking to secure the issue as part of his legacy, said on Thursday that he was using his executive authority to improve school preparedness and to stem the tide of untraceable weapons and devices that make firearms more deadly.Mr. Biden made the announcement at a packed and poignant ceremony in the East Room of the White House, where he was introduced by the mayor of Birmingham, Ala., Randall Woodfin. Mr. Woodfin’s brother was killed by gun violence, and his city has been grieving after a mass shooting left four people dead last week. Scores of activists and gun violence survivors attended.The event was timed to the first anniversary of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which Mr. Biden created last year after signing the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the first major gun safety bill in nearly 30 years. It was also a chance for Mr. Biden to pass the baton to the official who heads that office: Vice President Kamala Harris, who is leaning into gun violence prevention as an issue as she campaigns to succeed Mr. Biden.“We know how to stop these tragedies, and it is a false choice to suggest you are either in favor of the Second Amendment or you want to take everyone’s guns away,” said Ms. Harris, who spoke before Mr. Biden and who has said while campaigning that she owns a firearm for self-protection. “I am in favor of the Second Amendment, and I believe we need to reinstate the assault weapons ban.”She was referring to a provision in the 1994 crime bill, spearheaded by Mr. Biden when he was a senator, that banned certain types of military-style assault weapons for 10 years. The ban expired in 2004, when Congress refused to renew it.The executive orders, which Mr. Biden signed at the conclusion of the ceremony, do not have the force of law. Should former President Donald J. Trump win the White House in November, he could easily reverse them.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More