Donald Trump will appear next to JD Vance for a campaign rally on Friday, the pair’s first joint appearance since the Ohio senator was announced as Trump’s running mate at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The campaign event will take place at 5 p.m. local time in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a key swing state that Trump won in 2016 and Biden lost in the 2020 presidential election.
More than just a campaign event, the rally was the latest public outing for Trump after surviving an assassination attempt.
The rally followed Trump’s high-profile appearance Thursday at the RNC, where he delivered a 93-minute keynote speech.
Ahead of the event, JD Vance, in a post at X, asking Biden to resign from the White House.
JD Vance calls for Biden to resign as president
Many high-profile Democrats have called on Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 presidential campaign and give the stage to someone else, but Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance took it a step further on Saturday.
The senator from Ohio argued in a post on X that if Biden is not eligible to run again, he should also leave the White House immediately.
“Everyone who calls on Joe Biden to *stop running* without asking him to resign from the presidency is engaging in an absurd level of cynicism,” Vance wrote. “If you can’t run, you can’t serve. He needs to back off now.
Josh MarcusJuly 20, 2024 6:21 p.m
Trump is gaining post-assassination efforts in the polls
Donald Trump may have been wounded, but his campaign appears to have been spared as he survived an assassination attempt last week.
According to a survey of eligible voters in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania from The Telegraph53 percent think Trump will win in November, up nearly three points since the same poll on July 10, before the shooting.
Josh MarcusJuly 20, 2024 5:47 p.m
ICYMI: White nationalist bodybuilders and liberal elites: This is what JD Vance is after X
Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance followed several accounts on X that espouse far-right and white nationalist views, according to an analysis by The Independent.
The 39-year-old Ohio senator is best known for his best-selling memoir Elegy Hillbilly and was named Donald Trump’s running mate this week, following 1,132 people on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Among them are two of the most popular figures Right Wing Bodybuilders scene — an online community that shares a worldview that combines white nationalist ideas with anti-globalism, weight-lifting and nutrition.
Read more from Richard Hall and Isaac Lozano.
Josh MarcusJuly 20, 2024 5:10 p.m
A former Secret Service official said agents shouldn’t have let Trump punch him on stage
However, according to a former Secret Service agent, the former president’s security detail should not have allowed him to remain on stage after the shots were fired.
According to former Secret Service Director John Magaw, standard protocol was to surround the president completely and stay down while he was being moved to safety.
“It’s really terrible coverage trying to get people out,” he said USA Today.
“It should be faster,” AT Smith, deputy director of the Secret Service from 2012 to 2015, told the paper.
Josh MarcusJuly 20, 2024 4:50 p.m
Far-right attack JD Vance for his wife Usha who is of Indian-American heritage
Now, the same right-wing views have come to the fore against Usha Vance, Trump’s VP pick for the wife of Senator JD Vance, who is Indian-American.
As Washington Post note, right-wing commentators quickly began attacking Vances after the Ohio official joined the Trump ticket.
“What exactly are we here for?” white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who once dined with Donald Trump, asked in a new podcast, saying that he does not trust “people with Indian wives” to “support White identity.”
Josh MarcusJuly 20, 2024 4:30 p.m
Why Trump and Vance have their eyes on Michigan
It is no coincidence that Donald Trump and JD Vance made their first joint campaign in Michigan.
Michigan is seen as an important battleground state in the 2024 election.
In 2016, Trump won the state by a slim margin, just over 10,000 votes.
Four years later, Biden was able to turn the tide dramatically, winning Michigan by about 154,000 votes en route to the White House.
Josh MarcusJuly 20, 2024 4:14 p.m
Trump shooter flies drone over rally before assassination attempt: report
Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old who tried to assassinate Donald Trump at an event last week, was able to fly a drone and capture aerial footage of the Pennsylvania fair on the same day the former president took the stage there. The Wall Street Journal report.
The apparent breach will certainly raise questions about Trump’s security at the event.
Police encountered Crooks several times but did not stop him from climbing onto a roof near the rally and shooting at the former president, wounding Trump, killing one attendee, and injuring two other rally attendees.
The Secret Service also recommends facing “limited resources” before shooting.
Josh MarcusJuly 20, 2024 3:57 p.m
Pete Buttigieg slams JD Vance for changing Trump song
Joe Biden may be at a dangerous time during the campaign, but that hasn’t stopped Biden administration officials from attacking Trump.
Last night, in an interview that quickly went viral on social media, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg continued Real Time with Bill Maher and chose Trump VP JD Vance as a thin-skinned political climber, someone who “says whatever it takes to get ahead.”
“Five years ago it seemed to be the anti-Trump Republicans, so that’s what it is,” Buttigieg said.
Biden officials also expressed surprise that JD Vance ever compared Trump to “opioids,” given Vance’s roots in Appalachia, which has struggled with a bitter opioid crisis.
“That’s really the darkest thing you can say about Donald Trump, at least in public, but behind the scenes he’s called Hitler,” Buttigieg said.
The secretary then compared Vance to Mike Pence, Trump’s former vice president, who he denied made many moral compromises for power to join the Trump White House, only to be nearly killed during the January 6 uprising at the US Capitol.
For more on JD Vance’s past comments about Trump, here’s a story from Justin Rohrlich.
Josh Marcus20 July 2024 15:29
Republicans have built their election message around Kamala Harris
Oliver O’ConnellJuly 20, 2024 2:00 p.m
The ultimate pursuit of Trump’s wannabe assassin is porn
A law enforcement official told the outlet that the only other recent activity on the gunman’s phone was a text from his parents, asking about where he was. The texts from Crooks’ parents began at 1 p.m. and continued throughout the evening, according to the report.
Oliver O’ConnellJuly 20, 2024 1:30 p.m