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      in US Politics

      FBI investigating Trump supporters who swarmed Texas campaign bus

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      [embedded content]
      The FBI has confirmed it is investigating an incident in which a convoy of vehicles flying flags in support of President Donald Trump’s re-election bid surrounded a tour bus carrying campaign staff for Democratic challenger Joe Biden on a Texas highway.
      Friday’s incident prompted the Biden campaign to cancel at least two of its Texas events as Democrats accused the president of encouraging supporters to engage in acts of intimidation.
      “FBI San Antonio is aware of the incident and investigating,” special agent Michelle Lee, a spokeswoman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in San Antonio, told Reuters in an email. “No further information is available at this time.”
      In response to news of the FBI’s investigation, Trump tweeted on Sunday night that the people involved in running the bus off the road were “patriots”.

      Donald J. Trump
      (@realDonaldTrump)
      In my opinion, these patriots did nothing wrong. Instead, the FBI & Justice should be investigating the terrorists, anarchists, and agitators of ANTIFA, who run around burning down our Democrat run cities and hurting our people! https://t.co/of6Lna3HMU

      November 2, 2020

      A state representative and a witness said the caravan of Trump supporters in pickup trucks had come armed.
      “Armed Trump trolls harassing Biden Bus on I35, ramming volunteer vehicles & blocking traffic for 40 mins,” Texas state representative Rafael Anchía wrote on Twitter.
      The historian Eric Cervini, who had flown to Texas to help with get-out-the-vote efforts, posted a video on Instagram that showed a long line of cars with Trump paraphernalia stalled along the highway, waiting for the Biden-Harris bus.
      “These Trump supporters, many of whom were armed, surrounded the bus on the interstate and attempted to drive it off the road,” he wrote, adding: “As a historian who studied the rise of the Third Reich, I can tell you: this is how a democracy dies.”
      The ambush, which took place on Friday as the bus traveled from San Antonio to Austin to conclude a three-day tour, included a crash between a white SUV and a black truck, police in San Marcos confirmed, though it was still unclear who caused the collision. Officers there had tried to provide a police escort for the Biden-Harris bus but were not able to catch up because of traffic.
      Even as dramatic footage from the scene caused widespread alarm, President Donald Trump threw his support behind the so-called Trump train, tweeting “I LOVE TEXAS!”
      Earlier on Sunday, he asked supporters at a rally in Michigan: “Did you see the way our people … were… protecting this bus … because they’re nice. They had hundreds of cars. Trump! Trump! Trump and the American flag.”
      Trump also said Biden supporters lacked such spirit and enthusiasm.
      One Texas Republican official, Naomi Narvaiz, applauded the caravan’s tactics to force the bus to leave: “Your kind aren’t welcome here!”
      “Funniest thing I’ve ever seen, man!” a Facebook user recording from New Braunfels guffawed in a video posted on Friday. “They’re, like, literally escorting him out of town.”
      A spokeswoman for Living Blue in Comal county, a local progressive group, told the Guardian the incident was a reflection of larger problems in the area, where “racist” locals “just kind of run this town, like the Klan did”.
      The spokeswoman, who asked to remain anonymous because she feared being targeted, added: “They’ve dragged the BLM flag. They’ve called people the N-word from their truck. So it’s straight up harassment and intimidation. And then, to see President Trump validate them by retweeting their video and saying he loves Texas, he’s basically endorsing domestic terrorism.”
      Amid safety concerns, Democrats in Texas cancelled multiple events. According to the Texas Tribune, the FBI was investigating.
      The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr, had previously encouraged members of the Trump train in Texas to “get out there” and “have some fun” at the expense of vice- presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who was campaigning in the state but was not on the bus when the incident occurred.
      Two days out from election day, Texas is close, Trump leading Biden by 1.5 points, according to the FiveThirtyEight.com polling average.
      Tariq Thowfeek, Texas communications director for the Biden campaign, said in a statement: “Rather than engage in productive conversation about the drastically different visions that Joe Biden and Donald Trump have for our country, Trump supporters in Texas instead decided to put our staff, surrogates, supporters, and others in harm’s way.”
      US representative Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat who represents constituents from San Antonio to Austin, said: “This aggressive, abusive conduct by his supporters results from Trump continuing to incite acts of intimidation and violence. We have to stand up to these bullies just as we seek to protect the right of every last Texan to vote out the Bully-in-Chief.” More

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      in US Politics

      Biden campaign says Trump supporters tried to force bus off highway

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      Trucks with Trump signs and flags surrounded a Biden campaign bus on a Texas highway on Friday and attempted to slow the vehicle down and run it off the road, the Biden campaign said on Saturday.
      Several video clips posted on social media by both Biden and Trump supporters showed the trucks surrounding the bus. The trucks then tried to slow the bus down and run it off the road before staff called 911, according to the Biden campaign.
      The president himself appeared to endorse the behavior of his supporters, tweeting a video of the incident on Saturday evening along with the comment “I LOVE TEXAS!”
      “They’re literally escorting him out of town,” one man says, laughing as he narrates one clip of the incident shared by Trump supporters.
      Some of the Trump supporters surrounding the Biden campaign bus were armed, according to Democratic state representative Rafael Anchía and other observers.
      While the vice-presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, was campaigning in Texas that day, she not on the bus, a spokesman for a state Democratic representative confirmed.
      The incident happened on the I-35 highway in Texas as the bus was traveling from San Antonio to Austin, the Biden campaign said, adding that local law enforcement responded to the campaign’s calls and assisted the bus in reaching its destination.
      The campaign did not identify the law enforcement agency.

      Donald J. Trump
      (@realDonaldTrump)
      I LOVE TEXAS! pic.twitter.com/EP7P3AvE8L

      November 1, 2020

      A group of the same 12 cars has been following the Biden bus all over the country, CBS News Austin reported, citing Texas Democrats.
      Texas state Democrats also said they cancelled a campaign event on Friday evening for “public safety and security reasons.”
      A Democratic campaign event scheduled for Friday evening in Pflugerville was cancelled due to security concerns related to the cars following the Biden bus, Sheryl Cole, a Democratic state representative, tweeted on Friday.
      “Unfortunately, pro-Trump Protesters have escalated well beyond safe limits,” she wrote.
      The decision to cancel the Pflugerville event came after Democrats received reports in the late afternoon that there had been some kind of collision between a pro-Trump vehicle and another vehicle on I-35, André Treiber, a spokesperson for Cole, told the Guardian. The details of the incident on the highway are still not clear, Treiber said, including whether the collision turned out to be “an accident or an escalation”.
      “When you have two hours to make the call, you make the safe call,” Treiber said. “We wanted to make sure everyone was safe.”
      An event with Democratic politicians in Austin was also cancelled on Friday and law enforcement were present to ensure staff could leave the bus safely, the Biden campaign said.
      When the Biden-Harris bus stopped briefly in Austin earlier on Friday, Trump supporters heckled and faced off with Democrats, with Trump supporters calling Biden a “Chinese communist”, CBS Austin reported.
      The cars following the bus include a pro-Trump hearse emblazoned with the slogan, “Vote like your life depends on it,” according to social media and news reports.
      Republicans apologized after Trump supporters brought a casket to a Biden event outside Houston, with a dark-haired mannequin that some viewers saw as representing Kamala Harris, a local Fox News affiliate reported.
      Texans have flocked to the polls in recent days with more than 9.6 million having voted ahead of election day, surpassing the total number of votes cast four years ago.
      In what has been a reliably red state with low voter participation, 30.4% of this year’s ballots have been cast by voters who didn’t participate in 2016 at all, according to Tom Bonier, chief executive of political data firm TargetSmart. Turnout has surged especially among Asian, college-educated white and young Texans.
      “You can definitively say now, more voters under the age of 30 have voted already in Texas than have ever voted in any election, and that’s remarkable,” Bonier said.
      Trump is still slightly favored to win Texas – a state he took by nine points in 2016 – though polls showing a close race have ignited a firestorm of speculation about whether this is the year the state turns blue.
      “We feel good with where we’re at, but we need to keep on going, and you know, we’re not there yet,” said Abhi Rahman, communications director for the Texas Democratic party. More

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      in US Politics

      How Texas went from low voter turnout to nation's top early voting state

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      “Donald Trump needs to be goin’ bye-bye,” Ann Wolfe said as she approached one of Austin’s Holiday Inn hotels, now doubling as a polling place.
      Although the man in the White House claims he’s pro-life like her, she said, “under his watch, over 200,000 people are dead”. So while Wolfe was open to candidates from both parties down ballot, she planned to throw her support behind Democratic nominee Joe Biden, who she thought was at least “a normal human being”.
      “It seems like it’s the most important vote that we’ll ever have to have in this lifetime,” she said.
      [embedded content]
      In a tidal wave of political engagement, more than 7 million Texans have already cast a ballot during the general election, the vast majority in-person. The numbers are propelling what is historically one of the lowest voter turnout states to the top of the nation’s leaderboard in terms of the sheer number of people who have voted thus far. That groundswell of participation is even more striking in context, as democratic hurdles remain ever-present at the polls while fears of Covid-19 also loom large.
      “What we’re seeing is that Texans will crawl through broken glass to be able to make sure their voices are heard this election,” said Abhi Rahman, communications director for the Texas Democratic party.
      In the midst of the early voting period, extended by Governor Greg Abbott amid the coronavirus pandemic, approximately 43% of registered voters statewide had voted as of Sunday, logging more than 80% of the total turnout from four years ago with over a week left in the election.
      “It is really quite something that people are turning out in the numbers that they are. And that they’re standing in line for hours when this is early voting, this is not Election Day, and many Texans have never done that before because it is such a low voter turnout state,” said Brittany Perry, an instructional associate professor in political science at Texas A&M University.
      In Harris and El Paso counties, more than two-fifths and roughly a third of registered voters respectively had cast ballots by Sunday, despite sometimes encountering three-hour-long waits, according to Election Protection. Broken machines thwarted residents in Travis and Fort Bend counties on the first day of early voting, yet both have already experienced turnout around 50% of registered voters as of last weekend. And, while there have been curbside voting issues in Bexar and Hidalgo counties, that hasn’t stopped more than 600,000 people from participating in the electoral process, long before 3 November.
      Donald Trump and his broader agenda are likely at least part of what’s driving so many voters to the polls, said Emily M Farris, an associate professor of political science at Texas Christian University. “Trump’s path to the White House is basically impossible without winning Texas’ 38 electoral votes,” she said.
      And the president’s handling of the coronavirus crisis is weighing on people’s minds in the state, where cases persist and 17,700 people have died. “Obviously, the way, you know, this whole pandemic has panned out, I think it’s important for us to have support from our government. I just don’t feel that,” said Ileanna Mercado, a school counselor on her way to vote for Biden in Austin. “I just would like for our country to go in a very different direction.” More

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      in Elections

      Republican senator tries to distance himself from Trump: 'He is who he is'

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      A member of Republican leadership in the US Senate has likened his relationship with Donald Trump to a marriage, and said that he was “maybe like a lot of women who get married and think they’re going to change their spouse, and that doesn’t usually work out very well”.The Texas senator John Cornyn’s comments, to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, are the latest instance of a Republican under electoral pressure seeking to distance himself from an unpopular president, however gingerly, as polling day looms. Democrats are favoured to take the Senate, potentially leading to unified government in Washington.“I think what we found is that we’re not going to change President Trump,” Cornyn said. “He is who he is. You either love him or hate him, and there’s not much in between.“What I tried to do is not get into public confrontations and fights with him because, as I’ve observed, those usually don’t end too well.”Trump spent some of the weekend in a public fight with Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska. Sasse criticised Trump in a call with constituents, lamenting among other things his treatment of women and the way he “kisses dictators’ butts” and “flirts with white supremacists”.Trump fired back with insults, forcing Republican National Committee chair, Ronna McDaniel, on to the defensive on the Sunday talkshows.Sasse is more or less assured of re-election in two weeks’ time but his prediction of a “bloodbath” for Senate Republicans with an unpopular president at the top of ticket may have stung Trump – and McDaniel – the most.Cornyn, a former Senate majority whip, certainly knows what Sasse meant. He leads his Democratic challenger in the usually safe Republican state – but not by much, some polls showing MJ Hegar within the margin of error.Cornyn told the Fort Worth paper that “when I have had differences of opinion” with Trump, “which I have, [I] do that privately. I have found that has allowed me to be much more effective, I believe, than to satisfy those who say I ought to call him out or get into a public fight with him.”Cornyn said he was happy to praise Trump publicly when they agreed, such as on judicial nominations and tax cuts. Subjects of disagreement included Covid-19 response; efforts to secure another relief bill; and the use of defense funds for border security.On trade policy, Cornyn added: “I applaud him for standing up to China but, frankly, this idea that China is paying the price and we’re not paying the price here at home is just not true.”The comment was mild enough not to immediately rile Trump, who was campaigning in battleground states. The Star-Telegram described Cornyn’s caution, saying he “noted that his friend, former [senator] Bob Corker [of Tennessee], who initially was on cordial terms with Trump’s White House, opted not to run for re-election in 2018 after clashing with Trump on issues such as a border wall.”Corker was once considered as a running mate or secretary of state. Exasperated to the point of saying the White House was being run like an “adult daycare centre”, he retired in 2018.Blasting back at Sasse, Trump showed he never forgets a slight. The Nebraska senator, the president tweeted, “seems to be heading down the same inglorious path as former senator Liddle’ Bob Corker”, who became “totally unelectable” because of his criticism “and decided to drop out of politics and gracefully ‘RETIRE’”.Cornyn, 68, is hoping to defeat his 44-year-old opponent and secure a fourth six-year-term. More