Biden and Trump Kick Off General Election in Georgia: Live Updates – The New York Times
President Biden expressed regret for using the term “illegal” during an off-script moment in his State of the Union address to describe an undocumented immigrant charged with killing a 22-year-old student. Progressives have complained that it was dehumanizing. “I shouldn’t have used ‘illegal,’” Biden told Jonathan Capehart on MSNBC. “It’s ‘undocumented.’” Asked if he regretted it, Biden replied, “Yes.”
On the same day that President Biden began airing a campaign ad that leans into his age, Donald Trump sought to seize upon the issue of Biden’s acuity in a spliced-up version of the spot on social media. Trump’s video opens with the clip of Biden saying, “Look, I’m not a young guy. That’s no secret.” It then proceeds to show a mashup of Biden’s stumbles and foibles.
The Trump campaign passed out signs at his rally today in Rome, Ga., with a photo of Laken Riley, the nursing student from Georgia who the authorities say was killed by a migrant who had crossed into the United States illegally and had been released on parole. Riley’s death has become a flashpoint in the debate over immigration, and her family is in attendance today.
Donald Trump is standing by his decision to put out the welcome mat on Friday at Mar-a-Lago for Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, who has been widely condemned for his attacks on democratic norms. Amid criticism from President Biden, Trump on Saturday called Orban a “Great Leader, respected all over the World” in a Truth Social post.
Donald Trump and President Biden are holding head-to-head campaign events today in Georgia, a crucial battleground state, after a week in which their increasingly likely general-election matchup has come into full view. Trump’s lone remaining rival in the Republican primary dropped out, and Biden gave a State of the Union speech loaded with attacks against Trump.
President Biden visited a middle school in Pennsylvania on Friday for what amounted to his first campaign rally of the general election. Most of his speech there was taken directly from the State of the Union address he delivered on Thursday. But he did reveal that he was so pumped after that event that he stayed up until 2 a.m. — when he tuned into Fox News, whose coverage, unsurprisingly, he disagreed with.
In her rebuttal to President Biden’s State of the Union speech Thursday night, Senator Katie Britt, Republican of Alabama, told a story about a Mexican woman who was a victim of sex trafficking at the age of 12, laying blame at the feet of the current administration.
“President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace,” she said.
The story, while wrenching, was highly misleading.
Although Ms. Britt did not name the victim in her speech, she has previously shared the story of a woman who appears to be the same individual based on congressional testimony, news releases and news reports.
That woman, Karla Jacinto Romero, is a Mexican citizen who does not live in the United States and who has spoken frequently about her experiences of being forced into sexual slavery for four years. In 2023, Ms. Jacinto participated in an event near the Texas border with Mexico that was also attended by three senators, including Ms. Britt. In a video released shortly after that trip, Ms. Britt discussed Ms. Jacinto’s experiences.
In her speech Thursday, Ms. Britt talked about the harrowing story as part of a critique of President Biden’s border policies, saying that “we wouldn’t be OK with this happening in a third-world country.” She added that “this is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it.”
In fact, as first reported by the independent journalist Jonathan Katz on TikTok on Friday, Ms. Jacinto’s experiences did not happen in the United States. She has testified that she was kidnapped in Mexico City and that her shocking experience of being raped thousands of times took place entirely in Mexico. Moreover, she has said the kidnapping occurred in 2002 and she was rescued in 2006. Ms. Jacinto continues to live in Mexico and does not appear to have ever lived in the United States or to have sought asylum here.
In other words: None of this happened during President Biden’s administration, nor does it appear to have anything to do with his policies regarding the U.S. border with Mexico. But that didn’t stop the first-term senator from strongly implying that the president could have somehow prevented it from happening, using rhetoric that seemed calibrated to inflame public fears about immigration.
“We know that President Biden didn’t just create this border crisis,” she said. “He invited it.”
Ms. Jacinto did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for Ms. Britt, Sean Ross, stood behind her speech.
“The story Senator Britt told was 100 percent correct,” he said in a statement. “And there are more innocent victims of that kind of disgusting, brutal trafficking by the cartels than ever before right now. The Biden administration’s policies — the policies in this country that the president falsely claims are humane — have empowered the cartels and acted as a magnet to a historic level of migrants making the dangerous journey to our border.”
He did not immediately respond to a follow-up question about what direct responsibility Mr. Biden had for what Ms. Jacinto experienced or what an anecdote about sex trafficking entirely within another country has to do with U.S. border policies.
In a new advertisement for his re-election campaign, President Biden tries to take one of his greatest perceived liabilities as a candidate, his age, and turn it into an advantage.
“Look, I’m not a young guy. That’s no secret,” says a smiling Mr. Biden, talking directly to the camera. “But here’s the deal: I understand how to get things done for the American people.”
The president, 81, goes on to list the accomplishments of his first term, including his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, capping insulin prices for older consumers and passing infrastructure legislation — while contrasting his record with that of former President Donald J. Trump, the likely Republican nominee, whom he accuses of taking away “the freedom of women to choose” in reproductive matters.
With a fiery State of the Union address under his belt, Mr. Biden is entering full campaign mode. The new ad is the first in a $30 million blitz that will target key battleground states over the next six weeks. Mr. Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and their spouses are crisscrossing the country to host political events. And on Saturday, three Democratic groups representing people of color — the AAPI Victory Fund, the Collective PAC and the Latino Victory Fund — are endorsing Mr. Biden and pledging to spend another $30 million to turn their voters out.
Mr. Biden often jokes about his age in small settings. But Americans are more likely to be familiar with his angry remarks over a recent special counsel’s report, which referred to him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
The new ad, titled “For You,” represents a shift in tone. Its joking familiarity may appeal to younger voters, whose support Mr. Biden needs to shore up, and it will play on channels popular with a youthful demographic, including ESPN, Adult Swim and Comedy Central.
The spot even includes an outtake. After the standard announcement that Mr. Biden has approved the message, a voice off-camera asks him to do one more take.
“Look, I’m very young, energetic and handsome. What the hell am I doing this for?” Mr. Biden replies, flashing a mischievous grin before the screen goes black.
President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump will both campaign in Georgia today, kicking off their likely general-election battle for a state that Mr. Biden won by a tiny margin in 2020.
Mr. Trump will hold a rally in Rome, a city of about 38,000 people in the state’s deeply conservative northwest. Mr. Biden will hold a campaign event in Atlanta, just a few miles from the Fulton County Jail, where Mr. Trump was booked last August on racketeering charges in the state’s election interference case against him and his allies.
Vice President Kamala Harris will also campaign on Saturday in Nevada, a battleground state that she and Mr. Biden won in 2020.
Mr. Biden beat Mr. Trump in Georgia in 2020 by just 11,779 votes. In Mr. Trump’s vast effort to deny Mr. Biden his electoral victory, he devoted particular attention to the state. In January 2021, he pressured Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” the 11,780 votes that would allow him to overcome Mr. Biden’s margin of victory.
Now Mr. Trump will rally in the state while under indictment. It has been more than six months since the former president was booked in Fulton County, where he was fingerprinted and had his mug shot taken in a whirlwind media spectacle.
Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, who is prosecuting the case against Mr. Trump in Georgia, has said that a trial will probably “not conclude until the winter or the very early part of 2025,” which means that the case could very likely hang over the campaign in Georgia through Election Day in November.
The president and his predecessor are each likely to highlight the case in their campaign events on Saturday. Mr. Biden may seek to continue to sharpen the contrasts between himself and Mr. Trump, casting his opponent as a threat to American democracy and pointing to the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election as just one of many things that make Mr. Trump unfit for office.
Mr. Trump, for his part, has made the 91 felony counts he is facing across four different cases, including the one in Georgia, a central part of his campaign message, portraying — without evidence — his many legal troubles as a plot by the Biden administration to interfere with the 2024 election.
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