Trump Rally Filled With Racism, Harris Prepares For Jan. 6 Site Speech: Latest Updates

Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris both made high-profile campaign appearances over the weekend as the days until the election got down to single digits.
Trump echoed fascist talking points during a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday that also featured a wildly racist rant from comedian Tony Hinchcliffe. Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned with a slew of celebrities over the weekend, including Beyoncé.
Harris on Tuesday will deliver the closing message of her campaign at the site where Trump instigated the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol after losing the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.
Abortion rights, inflation, extremism, immigration and more — the stakes have never been higher. Catch up on critical 2024 election updates here.
The two and their running mates, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have been swarming battleground states in the final weeks of the race.
See previous election coverage here, and read the latest updates on the 2024 race below.
Hundreds of ballots appeared to have been destroyed by a fire inside a ballot drop box in Vancouver, Washington, according to local media.ABC affiliate KATU reported heavy smoke was seen coming from inside the box early this morning, with first responders eventually putting out the flames.Citing local election officials, KATU said just a handful of hundreds of ballots could be saved.Elsewhere, police said that incendiary devices were placed inside a ballot drop box in Portland, Oregon, according to police.“Officers determined an incendiary device was placed inside the ballot box and used to ignite the fire,” Portland Police Bureau said in a statement.
Harris and Trump remain locked in an extremely tight race with just over a week from Election Day.
What happens in the coming days could impact the outcome of the race, Steve Peoples of The Associated Press writes.
Molly Roberts, a member of The Washington Post’s editorial board, has resigned, according to Katie Robertson of The New York Times. This is the third columnist to quit after the newspaper announced Friday that it wouldn’t be endorsing a presidential candidate for the first time in decades.
Roberts’ resignation follows those of Michele Norris and Robert Kagan.
Longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon is due to be released from prison tomorrow after serving out a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress over defying a subpoena from the now-defunct House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
“I would not be surprised to see him immediately hitting the campaign trail, as well as hosting his ‘War Room’ show for four hours each day,” Raheem Kassam, the former London editor-in-chief of Breitbart News, told NOTUS. “Every second will count. Every word will matter.”
The Trump campaign announced it will host an election night watch party in West Palm Beach, Florida at the Palm Beach Convention Center. No word on if Trump or Vance will be there.
A second Washington Post columnist has resigned following the newspaper’s decision not to endorse a candidate in this year’s presidential election.
Michele Norris, former longtime co-host of NPR’s flagship news program “All Things Considered,” said the lack of endorsement was a “terrible mistake” and “an insult to the paper’s own longstanding standard of regularly endorsing candidates since 1976.”
“We all know that this is the newspaper that boldly adopted the phrase ‘Democracy dies in darkness’ as its official logo,” she wrote on X. “Actually — democracy dies in silence.”
It follows Robert Kagan’s resignation as the Post’s editor at large, and a series of condemnations – including from journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whose reporting on the Watergate scandal for the Post led to former President Richard Nixon’s resignation.
If elected, Trump would devote his second presidency to “retribution and revenge,” Harris warned Sunday while encouraging voters to watch his rallies where she said “he’ll spend full time talking about his grievances, about what everyone has done to him.”
“Donald Trump is full time focused on himself,” she said on Shannon Sharpe’s “Club Shay Shay” podcast, which aired in full Monday. “He’ll talk about himself, but he does not talk about the American people.”
“Do you want to look at the Oval Office and see a Donald Trump who’s going to be sitting there filling out his enemy’s list, spending full time figuring out retribution and revenge,” she said. “Or looking at the Oval Office and knowing you have a president in there who is creating a to-do list that’s about what to do to help the American people?”
Harris went on to say that she thinks people are “exhausted with the anger, with the hate, with the division,” that she think Trump has sown.
“It’s not healthy for the productivity of our country,” she said. “Do we want to strive? Do we want to thrive, or do we want to spend full time with vengeance?”
Harris will travel to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she will headline a rally alongside her running mate, Tim Walz. The event in the battleground state is part of the “When We Vote, We Win” concert series, and will feature a performance by Maggie Rogers.
Former President Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen will appear at a concert and rally in Philadelphia on behalf of the Harris campaign.
Trump will spend the day in another swing state, Georgia. The GOP candidate is attending the National Faith Summit in Atlanta, and will hold a rally at Georgia Tech.
The vice presidential nominees, Walz and JD Vance, are scheduled to hold events in Wisconsin.
As a mark of Wisconsin’s importance, Harris and Trump will head to the Badger State later in the week.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) took issue with comedian Tony Hinchcliffe lashing out at her and Tim Walz over their criticism of his description of Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean.”
Hinchcliffe claimed Walz took his joke out of context “to make it seem racist.”
In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Ocasio-Cortez struck back at Hinchcliffe, suggesting he became defensive after realizing that “opening for a Trump rally and feeding red-meat racism alongside a throng of other bigots to a frothing crowd does, unironically, make you one of them.”
“You don’t ‘love Puerto Rico.’ You like drinking piña coladas. There’s a difference,” she added.
A new ABC News/Ipsos poll has put Kamala Harris ahead of Donald Trump by 4 percentage points — a slight improvement on the same survey earlier in the month.
Among likely voters, Harris is on 51% to Trump’s 47%, according to the poll conducted October 18 to 22. The headline figure stood at 50-48% two weeks before.
It suggests the election remains too close to call, and will be decided by the vagaries of the Electoral College.
But Harris supporters may take some comfort from her slight lead, given the final New York Times/Siena poll had the pair deadlocked at 48-48% among likely voters.
Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe responded to Tim Walz’s criticism of racist jokes the podcaster told about Puerto Rico during Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday.
“I love Puerto Rico and vacation there,” Hinchcliffe posted on X, formerly Twitter. “I made fun of everyone…watch the whole set. I’m a comedian Tim…might be time to change your tampon.”
Walz reacted to Hinchcliffe’s jokes almost in real time, praising the people of Puerto Rico during a livestream with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and recalling Trump’s much-criticized response to Hurricane Maria, which caused mass destruction and death in Puerto Rico during his administration.
Sen. John Fetterman (D-Penn.) told The New York Times he finds the intensity of Trump’s support in the key battleground of Pennsylvania “astonishing.”
“That doesn’t mean that I admire it. It’s just — it’s real,” he said.
Fetterman added that Elon Musk’s endorsement of the former president and his move to campaign for him, including in the Keystone State, could have an impact on the election.
“In some sense, he’s a bigger star than Trump,” Fetterman said. “Endorsements, they’re really not meaningful often, but this one is, I think. That has me concerned.”
The Trump campaign is reportedly distancing itself from at least one racist joke made by a comedian speaking at a Trump rally in New York City over the weekend following backlash.
Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe opened Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden event on Sunday with a series of crude jokes about Latinos, Jews and Black people.
But it was apparently one joke about Latinos that compared Puerto Rico to a “floating island of garbage” that drew the line for the Trump campaign.
“This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” Trump senior advisor Danielle Alvarez told NBC News.
Latinos are a key demographic in securing the White House.
Hinchcliffe has defended his jokes, saying he loves Puerto Rico and that the joke about Puerto Rico was “taken out of context to make it seem racist.”
Read more about Hinchcliffe’s performance here.
Authoritarianism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat delivered a damning critique of former President Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City on Sunday.
Read more here:
Donald Trump brought his fascist campaign for presidency to the heart of midtown Manhattan on Sunday, taking the stage at Madison Square Garden and looking out over a crowd of his fanatically loyal Red Hats.
With nine days left until the election, the campaign stop seemed like a finale ― one more grand provocation meant to show that Trump could win this thing, that he could walk into enemy territory months after a would-be assassin’s bullet pierced his ear, garnering enough supporters in this progressive, diverse city to fill up the “the world’s most famous arena.”
Read more here:
To read our earlier coverage of the 2024 election, go here.