A Latino Republican Asked Trump To Win Back His Vote At A Town Hall. It Did Not Go Well.
Donald Trump participated in a town-hall-style event with undecided Latino voters on Wednesday night, facing a series of tough questions as Americans have begun casting early ballots across the nation.
Ramiro Gonzalez, a Florida Republican, gave Trump a chance to “win back” his vote after he said he was disturbed by the former president’s actions on and after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
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He went on to voice concerns that some in Trump’s orbit, namely his former vice president, Mike Pence, no longer supported him.
Trump rejected that any notable portion of his supporters had broken with him and then launched into a series of falsehoods surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection while claiming there was “nothing done wrong at all” and “nobody was killed.”
Is this the dumbest thread in Kijiji, including the ‘wangapi’ section?
If it seems as if Donald Trump has canceled a surprising number of events, interviews, and appearances lately, it’s not your imagination. Indeed, as Politico reported, the list keeps growing.
Donald Trump was scheduled to appear at a virtual town hall with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) today at 2 p.m. — but it was canceled, with the organizers citing “changes in Trump’s schedule.” … The Make America Healthy Again town hall, which organizers planned to live stream on X, was meant to highlight Kennedy’s health agenda and contributions to the Trump campaign. (The former independent candidate dropped his bid in August and endorsed Trump.)
In fairness, it’d be an overstatement to suggest that the former Republican president is somehow hiding. He hasn’t. The GOP nominee continues to make a variety of public appearances, usually in settings in which he doesn’t have to worry about adversarial questions.
But he’s made a surprising number of cancellations, too:
- Trump agreed to appear on CBS’s “60 Minutes” before canceling.
- He agreed to appear on CNBC before canceling.
- He reportedly planned to sit down for an interview with the NBC affiliate in Philadelphia before canceling.
- He was reportedly in conversations for weeks with The Shade Room about a sit-down interview before withdrawing.
- His campaign said he’d debate Kamala Harris more than once, but he soon after scrapped those plans, too.
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It’s also worth noting that Trump was supposed to participate in an event in Georgia with the National Rifle Association, but it too was canceled. The right-wing group explained that the change was the result of “campaign scheduling changes.”
As for the possible explanations for these many cancelations, Politico reported that Trump’s team told one outlet that the candidate’s schedule has been so busy that it’s led to “exhaustion.”
Making matters a bit worse, the 78-year-old Republican appeared to be falling asleep — more than once — during some recent events.
This has not gone unnoticed by the rival campaign.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) isn’t holding back on how he feels about former President Donald Trump and his supporters in his forthcoming biography.
When Associated Press journalist Michael Tackett interviewed the outgoing Senate Republican leader for his book, “The Price of Power,” McConnell made several jabs at the ex-president and the GOP at large. CNN reported that the Kentucky Republican called the MAGA movement “completely wrong,” and said that two-term Republican President Ronald Reagan “wouldn’t recognize” the modern GOP in the wake of Trump’s ascendancy.
“I think Trump was the biggest factor in changing the Republican Party from what Ronald Reagan viewed and he wouldn’t recognize today,” McConnell said, adding that Trump has “done a lot of damage to our party’s image and our ability to compete.”
“Trump is appealing to people who haven’t been as successful as other people and providing an excuse for that, that these more successful people have somehow been cheated, and you don’t deserve to think of yourself as less successful because things haven’t been fair,” he continued.
Despite McConnell’s attacks on the ex-president, he continues to support him in the November election. Earlier this summer, McConnell urged his fellow Republicans in Congress to unite behind Trump, warning that Vice President Kamala Harris winning the presidency would be Republicans’ “worst nightmare.” The Senate GOP leader has said that Harris’ calls to eliminate the filibuster would signal that “it’s over” for Republicans. He argued that if the obstructionist tool was no longer in place that Democrats could grant statehood to Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., giving them four new Democratic senators “in perpetuity.”
‘Done a lot of damage’: McConnell unleashes on ‘sleazeball’ Trump and his supporters
Stephen A. Smith stopped by Fox News to give the right-wing network’s audience a rare dose of the other side as he tussled with Sean Hannity.
Hannity said Vice President Kamala Harris is “struggling” in interviews because she’s “tied up in a pretzel” since she can’t defend her previous positions on key issues.
“She has to give us word salads because she won’t tell us how she really feels. She’s hiding her true beliefs,” Hannity said. “Donald Trump doesn’t do that.”
Given Trump’s frequent off-topic rambles and digressions, Smith wasn’t having it.
“I know somebody being lucid and cogent and enunciating their thoughts with clarity, and you’re bragging about Donald Trump,” Smith said. “We can’t be watching the same stuff, if that’s what you’re doing.”
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Hannity defended the former president.
“I have sat with him for hour after hour after hour, topic after topic after topic, and he is so dialed in,” Hannity said.
Smith looked skeptical as Hannity spoke.
“Really?” Smith said. “Didn’t he cancel the press conferences?”
Trump has canceled a series of high-profile interviews and appearances, including sit-downs with “60 Minutes,” CNBC and NBC News, with one Trump official saying the former president was “exhausted,” according to Politico.
On Friday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) issued a joint statement weighing on Vice President Kamala Harris’ characterization of former President Donald Trump as a “fascist.” CNN host Jake Tapper was having none of it on his Friday broadcast.
As the Hill reported, both Johnson and McConnell suggested that Harris calling her opponent a fascist could potentially invite more political violence ahead of the November election. The two Congressional Republican leaders said it’s important to not “allow this violence to be normalized,” referencing the July incident in which a would-be assassin barely missed Trump at a Pennsylvania rally and a September incident in which a man with a rifle was spotted at Trump’s Florida golf course.
“In the weeks since that second sobering reminder, the Democratic nominee for President of the United States has only fanned the flames beneath a boiling cauldron of political animus,” Johnson and McConnell wrote “Her most recent and most reckless invocations of the darkest evil of the 20th century seem to dare it to boil over.”
“The vice president’s words more closely resemble those of President Trump’s second would-be assassin than her own earlier appeal to civility,” they continued. “Labeling a political opponent a ‘fascist’ risks inviting yet another would-be assassin to try robbing voters of their choice before Election Day.”
When Tapper began his Friday evening show, he appeared to agree with Johnson and McConnell, pointing out that Harris had indeed called the former president a “fascist” during her Wednesday night town hall on CNN. He then asked his control room to play the clip of Harris, though the clip that actually played was of Trump calling Harris a “Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist” at a September rally.
Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris held massive rallies as part of their respective campaigns over the weekend. With a week to go until the election, the candidates are making a final push to energize voters.
Trump, the Republican nominee, held what was reported to be a sold-out event in Madison Square Garden in New York City on Sunday. The venue has a capacity of 19,500.
The rally was the largest the former president has held this year, which is notable considering it took place in the Democratic stronghold of New York City.
One New York City police officer told the New York Post that thousands more were turned away from the event after it reached capacity.
Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung told Newsweek in an emailed statement: “Madison Square Garden was at capacity and, according to media reports, the number of people outside could have filled up a second Madison Square Garden easily.”
Meanwhile, the vice president held a rally in Houston, Texas, on Friday which was also her largest since she became the Democratic nominee. Her campaign estimated that the rally drew a crowd of around 30,000 people.
Trump has averaged crowd sizes of about 5,600 across the 28 rallies (with capacity information) he has appeared at this year until mid-August, according to analysis from the Crowd Counting Consortium, a joint project of Harvard Kennedy School and the University of Connecticut.
Between July and mid-August, Harris appeared at six rallies, with an average crowd size of about 13,400, the analysis found.
Both of this weekend’s major rallies were held in areas dominated by the opposing party, in places neither candidate expects to win.
Trump’s New York City rally was a break from his recent tour of battleground states and featured appearances from his wife and two eldest sons, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and billionaire supporter Elon Musk.
The event included several controversial moments, including one speaker describing Puerto Rico as an “island of garbage” and conservative commentator Tucker Carlson incorrectly describing Harris’s heritage as “Samoan-Malaysian.”
Meanwhile, Harris’s Houston rally featured appearances from native Texans Beyoncè Knowles-Carter and Willie Nelson.
The Democratic nominee focused much of the rally’s messaging on reproductive rights, issuing a warning that the rest of the country could end up like Texas—which has some of the nation’s strictest abortion laws.
Newsweek reached out to the Trump and Harris campaigns via email outside of regular working hours.
With the election drawing ever closer, both candidates are neck-and-neck in the polls.
The latest analysis of recent polls by aggregator FiveThirtyEight gives Harris a 1.4-point lead over Trump in the popular vote with 48 percent of the vote against 46.6 percent. However, the polling website has Trump as the favorite to win the electoral college, with a 53 percent chance of victory.
