Reuters
Trump unbound as US presidential race nears its end
October 27, 20244:49 PM GMT+6Updated 8 hours ago
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GREENSBORO, North Carolina, Oct 27 (Reuters) – With his third straight U.S. presidential campaign coming down to the wire, Donald Trump mused at a rally about hydrogen-powered cars exploding, lamented how difficult it is to get spray paint off limestone and marveled at how billionaire backer Elon Musk’s rocket had returned to Earth in one piece.
He complained Democratic rival Kamala Harris wasn’t working as hard as he was, praised Chinese President Xi Jinping as “fierce” and called former President Barack Obama “a real jerk.”
His aides had billed the event in battleground North Carolina as economy-focused, but that issue was just the warm-up.
To witness Trump as the Nov. 5 election approaches and his race against Vice President Harris nears its end is to watch a candidate almost fully unbound. At a time when most politicians would be honing their closing arguments to voters, Trump often acts more like an entertainer on a farewell tour than someone who aims to lead the world’s most powerful nation.
His unfocused behavior and dark rhetoric risks alienating some voters in a race that, despite all he says, remains so tight that any swing of a few thousand votes in several competitive states could determine the next president.
He is giving Harris’ campaign ample ammunition to argue that he is more “unstable” and “unhinged” than ever. The Democratic candidate is increasingly embracing those terms and pointing to Trump’s ramblings as evidence of a tired, old man who isn’t fit for the presidency.
“In many, many ways Donald Trump is an unserious man, but the consequences of him being president of the United States are brutally serious,” Harris said last week.
Trump, 78, defends his scattershot approach by saying he does something he calls “the weave” – in which he claims he always returns to his initial point – and supporters say his unscripted style is part of his appeal.
“His patented weave is a brilliant method to convey important stories and explain policies that will help everyday Americans turn the page from the last four years of Kamala Harris’ failures,” said Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump’s campaign.
Trump’s rallies have always featured their share of diversions and odd tangents. But with the clock ticking, the former president seems content to burn precious minutes telling stories about his White House days, musing about long-dead athletes or simply going where his mind takes him.
“They gave Obama the Nobel Prize,” he said on Thursday in Las Vegas. “He didn’t even know why the hell he got it. He still doesn’t. He got elected and they announced he’s getting the Nobel Prize. I got elected in much bigger, better crazier election but they gave him the Nobel Prize.”
Though no rally is ever exactly alike, a consistent theme is Trump’s false assertion that in four short years Democrats have transformed the nation into a dystopian state.
He denounces his political opponents as the “enemy from within” and peppers his remarks with graphic accounts of murders and rapes of young women, false tales of violent gangs taking over small towns and debunked claims about immigrants eating stolen pets.
“We’re like a garbage can for the world,” he bemoaned in Arizona.
Trump aides say he sets the pace and talks as long as he wants. They don’t try to contain him – and they have put him in forums such as podcasts where his rambling ways can find a home and he won’t be subjected to a battery of questions.
During a lengthy interview with podcaster Joe Rogan on Friday, Trump asserted that there may be life on Mars even though, as Rogan noted, probes have found no evidence of it. He also claimed windmills have a negative effect on whales.
“I want to be a whale psychiatrist,” Trump said.
FRENETIC SCHEDULE, INDULGENT FLOURISHES
Trump has adopted a more frenetic campaign schedule with time growing short. Last week, he held events in six of the seven states likely to decide the election.
Talk of border security and crime dominated, but Trump always found time for his more indulgent flourishes.
On Wednesday in Duluth, Georgia, he went on an extended riff about how he averted a trade war with France over champagne. He spoke for so long that many in the arena began to leave.
Trump of late has been making headlines in ways that have nothing to do with how he would run the country.
He turned one rally into an impromptu dance party, swaying on stage to his favorite numbers for nearly 40 minutes. He shared a locker-room tale about the purported size of golfer Arnold Palmer’s penis. He donned an apron and cooked french fries at a McDonald’s.
John Geer, an expert on public opinion at Vanderbilt University, said Trump’s road show is aimed at one audience: his base.
“Trump thinks what he says, even if incoherent, appeals to his base,” Geer said. “If he wanted to expand his coalition, he would not be engaged in random rhetoric.”
The event before a crowd of about 7,500 people in Greensboro last week illustrated best how Trump is approaching his final days on the trail.
After talking about the border and restoring U.S. manufacturing, Trump bashed Harris for not campaigning that day and called her weak. He praised foreign strongmen such as Xi and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and mocked celebrities who had attended Harris’ rallies: “These are not stars to me.”
Trump then launched into a long tale about how he was on the phone earlier this month with a “very important guy” but was distracted watching TV footage of a SpaceX rocket returning to Earth.
“I see this 20-story huge tube pouring down, you know fires pouring out, and it used to be white, but the heat is thousands of degrees coming down. They say thousands and thousands, so it had been beat up on that trip down. And I see this massive tube is coming down and the fires burning and it’s … exploding all over the place,” Trump said, motioning with his hands. “I said ‘Oh, this is terrible. It’s going to crash. What the hell is it?’ I wasn’t sure … maybe it was a movie.”
That led to a tangent where he compared his plan to exempt interest on car loans to the invention of the paper clip.
“It’s very simple,” Trump said. “Somebody came up with it 129 years ago or something. They came up with the paper clip. Then other people looked at it, they said, … ‘Why didn’t I think of this idea?’”
At that point, Trump noticed how far he had veered off script. “I haven’t looked at the teleprompter for 15 minutes,” he boasted.
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Reporting by James Oliphant; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Daniel Wallis
November 5, 20249:16 AM GMT+6Updated 4 hours ago
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WASHINGTON, Nov 4 (Reuters) – Popular podcaster Joe Rogan, who recently interviewed Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump for nearly three hours, said on Monday he has endorsed the former president in the race to the White House.
Trump faces Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in the Nov. 5 U.S. election in what polls show to be a tight race. Harris has got multiple celebrity endorsements.
“For the record, yes, that’s an endorsement of Trump,” Rogan said on X while posting a clip of his interview with billionaire Elon Musk, who has also endorsed Trump. Rogan said in his post that Musk made the “most compelling case for Trump.”
Trump’s recent interview with Rogan lasted about 3 hours and was released on YouTube and Spotify in late October. The two discussed a range of topics and the interview got over 45 million views on YouTube.
The former president criticized Rogan in August on Truth Social, his social media platform, after the podcaster praised then-independent candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. Kennedy has since pulled out of the race and endorsed Trump. Trump later called Rogan a “good guy.”
Trump and Harris have courted voters with appearances on podcasts, in addition to more traditional rallies and media interviews.
Spotify (SPOT.N), opens new tab said in March “The Joe Rogan Experience” had 14.5 million followers, almost triple the platform’s second most popular program. Rogan also has more than 19 million followers on Instagram and 18 million followers on YouTube.
A poll by YouGov last year found that 81% of his listeners are male and 56% are under 35 years old, a demographic that tends to support Trump over Harris.
Harris’ team had been in touch with Rogan’s program about a possible appearance but her campaign said in late October she will not appear on his podcast.
Rogan joins a list of celebrities like Musk and wrestler Hulk Hogan to have endorsed Trump.
Harris has a much bigger list of celebrity endorsements – ranging from basketball superstar Lebron James and actress Meryl Streep to comedian Chris Rock and former talk show host Oprah Winfrey. Superstar singers Beyonce and Taylor Swift have also endorsed her.
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Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Raju Gopalakrishnan
By Kanishka Singh and Sheila Dang
November 5, 20249:52 AM GMT+6Updated 4 hours ago
WASHINGTON, Nov 4 (Reuters) – False or misleading claims by billionaire Elon Musk about the U.S. election have amassed 2 billion views on social media platform X this year, according to a report, opens new tab by non-profit group Center for Countering Digital Hate.
The platform is also playing a central role in enabling the spread of false information about the critical battleground states that will likely determine the outcome of the presidential race, election and misinformation experts said on Monday.
A spokesperson for X said the company’s Community Notes feature, which lets users add additional context to posts, is more effective at helping people identify misleading content than traditional warning flags on posts.
Since taking over the company formerly known as Twitter, Musk has curtailed content moderation and laid off thousands of employees. He has thrown his support behind former President Donald Trump, who is locked in an exceptionally close race against Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.
Musk’s massive reach with nearly 203 million followers helps enable “network effects” in which content on X can jump to other social media and messaging platforms such as Reddit and Telegram, said Kathleen Carley, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and expert on disinformation. “X is a conduit from one platform to another,” she said.
At least 87 of Musk’s posts this year have promoted claims about the U.S. election that fact-checkers have rated as false or misleading, amassing 2 billion views, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s report.
In Pennsylvania, one of the seven key swing states, some X users have seized on instances of local election administrators flagging incomplete voter registration forms that would not be processed, falsely casting the events as examples of election interference, said Philip Hensley-Robin, Pennsylvania executive director at Common Cause, during a press briefing on Monday.
Common Cause is a nonpartisan organization that promotes accountable government and voting rights.
Some X accounts implied “that there was voter fraud, when in fact, we know very clearly that election officials and election administrators in all of our counties were following the rules and … therefore only eligible voters are voting,” Hensley-Robin said.
Cyabra, a firm that uses AI to detect online disinformation, said on Monday that an X account with 117,000 followers played a key role in helping spread a fake video purporting to show Pennsylvania mail-in ballots for Trump being destroyed.
X’s spokesperson said the platform took action against many accounts that shared the video.
Get weekly news and analysis on the U.S. elections and how it matters to the world with the newsletter On the Campaign Trail. Sign up here.
Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington and Sheila Dang in Austin; Additional reporting by Stephanie Burnett; Editing by Lincoln Feast
By Reuters
November 5, 20244:36 AM GMT+6Updated 9 hours ago
- A person picks up a sticker while voters head to a polling station as Georgians turned out a day after the battleground state opened early voting, in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S., October 16, 2024. REUTERS/Megan Varner/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
WASHINGTON, Nov 4 (Reuters) – The top court in the battleground state of Georgia ruled on Monday that Cobb County cannot extend the deadline for counting about 3,000 absentee ballots that were sent out shortly before Election Day, handing a victory to the Republican National Committee and presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Siding with the RNC, the Georgia Supreme Court overturned a judge’s ruling extending the deadline until Friday in Cobb County, located in suburban Atlanta. The court decided that only absentee ballots that arrive by 7 p.m. ET on Tuesday (0000 GMT Wednesday) can be counted.
Civil rights groups had sued last week seeking to extend the deadline, arguing that the county violated state law by failing to promptly send out about 3,000 absentee ballots. County officials said they were overwhelmed by a surge in requests.
The Republican National Committee had argued that extending the deadline would violate state law.
“Election Day is Election Day – not the week after,” RNC Chair Michael Whatley wrote in a post on social media.
Cobb County is a large and racially diverse area in Atlanta’s northern suburbs. The county voted for Democrat Joe Biden over Trump by 14 percentage points in the 2020 election. Biden defeated Trump in Georgia in 2020.
A spokesperson for Cobb County did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The state high court ordered that ballots received after Election Day be separated from other ballots and set aside. Voters who did not receive an absentee ballot or did not have enough time to mail it can vote in person on Tuesday.
Georgia is one of seven closely contested states expected to decide the outcome of the race between Trump and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
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Reporting by Andrew Goudsward; Editing by Scott Malone and Will Dunham
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