Key events
Here are some images from the newswires from the rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where Donald Trump is due to speak shortly in his first public campaign rally since he was injured in an assassination attempt.
Axios’s Sophia Cai reports that supporters of Donald Trump had to go through one of eight metal detectors to enter the venue for today’s rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan:
Edward Helmore
“Welcome to Michigan, Donald Trump and JD Vance,” the Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, said in an Instagram post on Saturday, before outlining “three things you should know about our great state” ahead of today’s joint rally.
Here, we protect reproductive freedom. We’re not interested in your national abortion ban. Two, we find ways to put money back in Michiganders pockets … and three, we’re a proud union state and UAW workers still remember when Donald Trump broke his promises to Michigan workers … and Michigan is going to reject your extreme Project 2025 agenda.
Whitmer’s caustic welcome comes amid polling indicating she would beat Trump by 1% in the key swing state if she were to become the Democratic presidential nominee, but trails the former president by almost 4% nationally in a hypothetical general election matchup.
Donald Trump has arrived in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he is expected to speak in his first public campaign rally since last Saturday’s assassination attempt.
From Fox 17’s Lauren Kummer:
JUST IN: Former President Donald Trump has arrived to Grand Rapids.
His motorcade passed me on I-96 just before 3:30 p.m. as he heads to Van Andel Arena for his first campaign rally since his assassination attempt. @FOX17 pic.twitter.com/5xLa0yaXNK
— Lauren Kummer (@LaurenKummerTV) July 20, 2024
Trump to hold first public campaign event since assassination attempt
Donald Trump is shortly expected to speak at his first public campaign rally since his assassination attempt a week ago by appearing in a crucial rust belt battleground state alongside his new running mate, Ohio senator JD Vance.
The return to the campaign trail by Trump comes after the attempted killing of the former president at a Pennsylvania rally last Saturday when a 20-year-old gunman opened fire, injuring Trump and others and killing one rally-goer.
The shooting roiled American politics, ratcheting up the tension in a race already fueled by fears over rising political violence and the prospect of civil unrest. It also dominated the past week’s Republican national convention in Milwaukee from which Trump emerged at the head of a remarkably unified and energized campaign.
Tonight’s joint rally with Vance is the first for the pair since they officially became the nominees.
Michigan is one of the crucial swing states expected to determine the outcome of the presidential election. Trump narrowly won the state by just more than 10,000 votes in 2016, but Democrat Joe Biden flipped it back in 2020, winning by a margin of 154,000 votes on his way to the presidency.
JD Vance has been speaking at a campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in his first rally appearance since he was announced as Donald Trump’s running mate.
From CNN’s Kate Sullivan:
JD Vance takes the stage at a Trump rally for the first time as his running mate: “I gotta be honest, it’s still a little bit weird to see my name on those signs.” pic.twitter.com/x3pCQtYhQ1
— Kate Sullivan (@KateSullivanDC) July 20, 2024
Trump still experiencing ‘intermittent bleeding’ from ‘2cm wide’ bullet wound, says physician
Donald Trump was struck by a bullet that passed “less than a quarter of an inch” from his head that left a “2 cm wide wound” in his right ear during last week’s assassination attempt, his former physician said.
In a statement shared by the former president, Texas congressman Ronny Jackson, Trump’s former doctor, said he has been evaluating and treating his wound daily.
Trump “is doing well”, Jackson said.
As reported and witnessed by the entire world, he sustained a gunshot wound to the right ear from a high-powered rifle used by the would be assassin. The bullet passed, coming less than a quarter of an inch from entering his head, and struck the top of his right ear. The bullet track produced a 2cm wide wound that extended down to the cartilaginous surface of the ear.
Jackson said there was initially “significant” bleeding, “followed by marked swelling of the entire upper ear” which has since resolved.
“Based on the highly vascular nature of the ear, there is still intermittent bleeding requiring a dressing to be in place,” he wrote, adding:
In summary, former president Trump is doing well, and he is recovering as expected from the gunshot wound sustained last Saturday afternoon. I am extremely thankful his life was spared. It is an absolute miracle he wasn’t killed.
Trump campaign ‘preparing major attack’ on Harris in case Biden steps aside – report
Donald Trump’s campaign is preparing a major attack plan on Kamala Harris if Joe Biden steps aside, including a wave of ads focusing on her record in her current office and in California, according to a report.
The Trump team has already prepared opposition research books on Harris, including a recently concluded poll testing her vulnerabilities in a general election contest, the New York Times reports, citing sources. The report says:
The Trump team’s attention on Ms Harris is based on its assumption that if Democrats were to bypass the first Black woman to serve as vice president, it would drive even deeper divisions in the party and risk alienating their base of Black voters.
Trump allies have also begun examining the records of Democratic governors who are considered potential running mates for Harris, including Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, according to the report.
Members of the House homeland security committee have announced they plan to visit the site of the assassination attempt of Donald Trump on Monday.
The committee chair, Mark Green, will be joined by 10 members of the committee for the visit to Butler, Pennsylvania.
The visit comes as the House oversight committee prepares to hear from the Secret Service director, Kim Cheatle, in a public hearing on Monday morning.
Peter Stone
The multimillionaire and prominent election denier Patrick Byrne has been boosting his funding to the Maga-allied America Project and using it to steer six-figure checks to far-right groups that push voting conspiracies in Arizona, Michigan and elsewhere, according to tax records and voting experts.
Byrne, the former CEO of online retailer Overstock.com, said last fall that only $3m of the $30m the Florida-based project had raised at that point came from “the public”, with the rest coming from him. In 2022, the America Project almost doubled its revenues to $14.3m versus some $7.7m the prior year, according to tax records first disclosed by Issue One, a bipartisan political reform group.
The America Project was launched in April 2021 by Byrne and Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser to Donald Trump when he was president; both Byrne and Flynn have been vocal purveyors of falsehoods that Trump lost the 2020 election due to fraud. They were also both at a meeting with Trump and others in late 2020 to brainstorm ways to overturn his loss.
The America Project and Byrne have sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Arizona-based We the People AZ Alliance, and Michigan-based United States Election Investigation and Lawsuits Inc, triggering alarms by election watchdogs and some GOP veterans due to their incendiary election denialist stances and leaders.
Read the full story: Pro-Trump multimillionaire and election denier boosts funds to far-right voter-conspiracy groups
CNN is reporting that Joe Biden has been briefed on “developments” in the Middle East after an Israeli airstrike in Yemen targeting Houthi rebels.
Airstrikes hit a refinery and electricity infrastructure, igniting a fiery blaze. A spokesperson for the White House national security council told CNN that the the US did not coordinate with Israel on the airstrikes but recognizes Israel’s “right to self-defense”.
Department of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas released a statement defending women in law enforcement after rightwing figures haves started to blame the presence of female agents and Kimberly Cheatle, the director of the Secret Service, for Donald Trump’s assassination attempt.
Matt Walsh, a prominent rightwing figure, said on Twitter that “there should not be any women in the secret service. These are supposed to be the very best, and none of the very best at this job are women.”
Mayorkas hit back on those claims, saying that the Department of Homeland Security “will, with great pride, focus and devotion to mission, continue to recruit, retain and elevate women in our law enforcement ranks”.
“These assertions are baseless and insulting,” Mayorkas said, in a statement released Saturday. “Women are serving in federal, state, local, tribal, territorial and campus law enforcement. They are highly trained and skilled professionals, who risk their lives on the front lines for the safety and security of others.”
Joe Biden is planning potential trips to Georgia and Texas in the coming days even as he recovers from Covid and Democrats continue to call on him to drop out of the race.
Biden is currently recovering from Covid at his Delaware beach house. Senior Democrats have urged Biden to make a decision about his campaign this weekend, according to Axios. One anonymous Biden aide said that the “universal sentiment internally” is “that we have reached the end of the road”.
Meanwhile, Steve Ricchetti, one of Biden’s core advisers, traveled to Delaware on Friday to have face-to-face conversations with the president, presumably about his campaign. Though several seniors aides typically accompany Biden to his Delaware house on the weekends, only three were with him in his motorcade this time.
One anonymous senior Democratic official told Axios that things “feel stuck at the moment”.
“That’s not to say it isn’t going to stay stuck,” the official said.
Biden’s Covid symptoms continue to ‘improve steadily’, says physician
The White House just released an update on Joe Biden’s Covid infection, saying that the president is still experiencing mild symptoms, including a cough and hoarseness, “but his symptoms continue to improve steadily”. Biden took his sixth dose of Paxlovid Saturday morning.
“The president continues to tolerate treatment well and will continue Paxlovid as planned,” White House physician Kevin C O’Connor said in a statement. “He continues to perform all of his presidential duties.”
The vice-president of the Teamsters, John Palmer, has announced he is mounting a challenge to the current president, Sean O’Brien, who has faced a backlash over his speech at the Republican national convention.
In a letter reported by the Hill, Palmer said he was officially announcing his candidacy for Teamsters national office in the 2026 election and invited all Teamsters to join him in forming an opposition slate to “send Sean O’Brien back to the truck”.
Palmer laid out several reasons why O’Brien has shown he is not fit for his leadership position, including fear of retaliation among members and failing to support members in contracts, adding:
This has all culminated in his presence at the anti-union, anti-worker Republican national convention, kissing the ring of a man that scabbed a picket line, failing to pay workers, discriminating against people of color as a landlord, falsely accusing five black men in New York of murder, orchestrating an insurrection against the United States, dodging the draft, and appointing Union busters from the Jones Day law firm to create the most anti-union Labor Board in history.
NEWS: Teamsters VP-at-Large, John Palmer, who has been extremely critical of current President O’Brien’s overtures towards the GOP, has just announced he’s forming an opposition slate and running for president in the 2026 Teamsters leadership election. “We are better than this.” pic.twitter.com/f8wOrojhp7
— Kim Kelly (@GrimKim) July 19, 2024
The chair of the Biden-Harris campaign has urged staff to tune out news coverage that focuses on whether Joe Biden will withdraw his re-election bid, according to a report.
“Don’t watch cable news all the time,” Jen O’Malley Dillon told campaign staff and the Democratic National Committee during an a call on Friday, Axios reported. She was quoted as telling staff:
That is not the real world. The real world is the voters that are standing with us, the delegates that are with us, and we’re going to weather this because of this organization.
O’Malley Dillon reiterated to staff that Biden is “in this race” and “in it to win it”, the outlet said.
Biden “sounds like shit because he’s not feeling that well”, she said, noting his recent Covid-19 diagnosis.
But he is doing the work, and he is focused on what you guys are doing.
The outlet reported that O’Malley Dillon said “the people that the president is hearing from are saying: ‘Stay in this race and keep going and keep fighting, and we need you.’
Those voices will never be as loud as the people on TV, but remember that the people in our country are not watching cable news. They just aren’t.
Clintons supportive of Biden’s decision to stay in race – report
The former president Bill Clinton and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton have privately been supportive of Joe Biden’s decision to stay in the race and have been actively encouraging donors to stay with him, NBC is reporting, citing sources.
The Clintons’ position was described by the sources as “deferential” in relation to Biden’s commitment to continue his re-election campaign, the report says.
Behind the scenes, the Clintons have been in touch with the White House and have offered to help however they can, sources told the outlet.
Lauren Gambino
When Al Sharpton recently hung up the phone with Joe Biden, a man he has known for more than 30 years, first as a senator, then as vice-president and now as president, the message was clear: “He assured me he wasn’t going anywhere.”
In their conversation, Sharpton said, he never asked Biden to exit the 2024 presidential race.
“I said to him that I appreciated what he did and I want to see it continue,” the reverend told the Guardian in an interview. “And he said: ‘That’s why I’m running, Al.’”
That was Monday. By the week’s end, the 81-year-old president, cloistered at his beach house in Delaware with Covid and besieged on all sides by dismal polling, voter concerns and a rebellion against his candidacy from members of his own party, was confronting the most consequential decision of his half-century in public life.
“Let him make up his mind,” said Sharpton, the veteran civil rights leader.
If he decides to walk, let him walk with his dignity, and if he decides to stay in it, he’s earned that right.
Read the full interview: Al Sharpton on Joe Biden’s re-election bid: ‘Let him make up his mind’
Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts, has emphasized that Joe Biden is her party’s nominee but that the president has “a big decision to make”.
Warren, in an interview on MSNBC this morning, added:
What gives me a lot of hope right now is that if President Biden decides to step back, we have vice-president Kamala Harris, who is ready to step up to unite the party.
There’s been discussion of Democrats’ desire to eliminate the entire Biden-Harris ticket. Senator Elizabeth Warren says @POTUS has “a big decision to make” and “Vice President Harris is ready to serve” if needed. pic.twitter.com/ddeZcUgjij
— The Weekend on MSNBC (@TheWeekendMSNBC) July 20, 2024
