Campaign Updates: Trump rallies, J.D. Vance auditions for V.P. and news from the Sunday shows. – The New York Times
In the days since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. acknowledged serious past health problems — including memory loss and mental fogginess — after a parasitic worm ate part of his brain, the candidate and his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, have tried to make light of the issue. On Sunday Shanahan said on social media that she had “purchased the domains for brainworm.ai and brainworm.com.”
George Clooney and Julia Roberts will headline a fund-raiser for President Biden in June in Los Angeles — joined by Barack Obama — according to a Biden campaign official. The star-studded event, reported earlier by NBC News, is another attempt by the president’s campaign to widen its cash advantage over Donald J. Trump, who has used one of his fund-raising committees to pay his legal bills.
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, repeatedly invoked the U.S. nuclear bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, which killed hundreds of thousands of people, to defend Israel’s brutal campaign in Gaza and criticize the push by some on the left to restrict offensive weapons transfers to the Jewish state in light of the soaring civilian death toll and dire humanitarian crisis.
“When we were faced with destruction as a nation after Pearl Harbor, fighting the Germans and the Japanese, we decided to end the war by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons. "That was the right decision,” Mr. Graham said. “Give Israel the bombs they need to end the war they can’t afford to lose and work with them to minimize casualties.”
Senator Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, said on Fox News Sunday that Israel “has no choice but to destroy Rafah” and criticized President Biden for withholding bomb shipments to the Jewish state. Replying to the news anchor’s question on a New York Times article that discussed how President Reagan pressed Israel to stop the Israeli attack on Lebanon in 1982, Mr. Scott avoided giving a clear-cut answer. “We have to live in reality,” Mr. Scott said.
Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware and one of President Biden’s closest allies in the Senate, defended the president’s move to pause certain weapon transfers to Israel and warned that without allowing civilians to evacuate Rafah before an invasion of the Hamas stronghold. He said of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that his “His legacy could instead be achieving regional security and peace for Israel.”
Senator J.D. Vance, the Ohio Republican who is a contender to be former President Donald J. Trump’s running mate, hedged on Sunday when he was asked whether he would accept the results of the November election.
“If we have a free and fair election, I will accept the results,” Mr. Vance told CNN’s Dana Bash during an appearance on the show “State of the Union.”
Mr. Vance, 39, whom the Trump campaign has enlisted as a surrogate, signaled that Republicans were preparing for the prospect of election disputes.
“We have to be willing, as Democrats did in 2000, as Democrats have done in the past, and certainly as Republicans did in 2020, is if you think they were problems, you have to be willing to pursue those problems and try to prosecute your case,” he said.
Mr. Vance is expected to join Mr. Trump on Wednesday in Cincinnati at a fund-raiser, a possible audition to be Mr. Trump’s running mate. He also attended a recent event at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s club in Florida, with several other vice-presidential contenders and Republican donors.
Mr. Vance has appeared eager to demonstrate his loyalty to Mr. Trump, telling ABC News in February that if he had been vice president on Jan. 6, 2021, he would have allowed Congress to consider fraudulent slates of pro-Trump electors before certifying the election.
Mike Pence, who was vice president at the time, rebuffed Mr. Trump’s calls to disrupt the transfer of power after Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the presidency.
During Mr. Vance’s interview with CNN on Sunday, he also defended Mr. Trump’s recent comments that “any Jewish person” who had voted for Mr. Biden “should be ashamed of themselves.”
“We have to remember, Donald Trump is very direct here,” Mr. Vance said. “And he hasn’t singled out Jewish Americans. He singled out a lot of people for voting for Joe Biden.”
Mr. Vance has not always been an unflagging acolyte of the former president.
Before the 2016 election, Mr. Vance, a venture capitalist and the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” his best-selling memoir, called Mr. Trump a “cultural heroin” and a demagogue who was “leading the white working class to a very dark place.”
But his candidacy for the Senate in 2022 garnered the backing of one of the most influential figures in the “Make America Great Again” world: the former president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., who vouched for Mr. Vance on social media during a crowded Republican primary. It would open a door to an endorsement from the former president himself.
In an extended riff at his rally on Saturday in New Jersey, former President Donald J. Trump returned to a reference that has become a staple of his stump speech, comparing migrants to Hannibal Lecter, the fictional serial killer and cannibal from “The Silence of the Lambs,” as he aims to stoke anger and fear over migration in advance of the election.
“Has anyone ever seen ‘The Silence of the Lambs’? The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’s a wonderful man,” Mr. Trump said in Wildwood, N.J. “He often times would have a friend for dinner. Remember the last scene? ‘Excuse me, I’m about to have a friend for dinner,’ as this poor doctor walked by. ‘I’m about to have a friend for dinner.’ But Hannibal Lecter. Congratulations. The late, great Hannibal Lecter.”
He continued: “We have people that have been released into our country that we don’t want in our country, and they’re coming in totally unchecked, totally unvetted. And we can’t let this happen. They’re destroying our country, and we’re sitting back and we better damn well win this election, because if we don’t, our country is going to be doomed. It’s going to be doomed.”
Mr. Trump, beginning with his announcement for the presidency in 2015, has frequently claimed that those crossing the border are violent criminals or mentally ill people who have been sent to the United States by other countries. There is no evidence to back his assertion, and border authorities have said that most migrants who cross the border are vulnerable families fleeing poverty and violence.
But that has not kept Mr. Trump from saying that migrants come from “mental institutions” or “insane asylums,” and comparing them to the fictional psychopath.
Mr. Trump, who often veers into asides during his stump speech, then returned immediately to decrying the migrant crisis and criticizing the Biden administration’s handling of it.
Throughout his campaign this year, Mr. Trump has frequently brought up Hannibal Lecter, once calling him “legendary” and another time referring to him as a nice fellow. In Wildwood, he spoke on the 1991 movie longer than he generally does.
Hannibal Lecter, a fictional psychopath who paired human organs with fava beans and an Italian red, was played memorably by Anthony Hopkins, winning an Oscar for his performance.
It is not clear what Mr. Trump meant by “late, great,” given that neither the character — nor the actor who played the role — have died, in person, film or the books the character originated from.
“The Silence of the Lambs” is one of several references that Mr. Trump frequently invokes during his rallies.
Another favorite is the gangster Al Capone, to whom Mr. Trump often compares himself.
“I’ve been indicted more than the great Alphonse Capone. Scarface,” Mr. Trump said incredulously on Saturday. “Al Capone was so mean that if you went to dinner with him and he didn’t like you, you’d be dead the next morning. And I got indicted more than him.”
Reporting from Wildwood, N.J.
After a long and often tense week in his criminal trial in Manhattan, former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday took part in a time-honored ritual enjoyed by countless New Yorkers in need of a break: He went to the shore.
Sandwiched between the boardwalk and the Atlantic Ocean, Mr. Trump stood in front of tens of thousands of people at a rally on the beach in Wildwood, N.J., where he largely repeated the same criticisms of President Biden that have characterized his stump speech in recent months.
Fresh from court, Mr. Trump insisted that his case in Manhattan, on charges that he falsified business records related to a hush-money payment, was a “Biden show trial,” even though there is no evidence to suggest that Mr. Biden has been involved in the case.
Mr. Trump railed against pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, vowed to crack down on immigration and repeated his false claims that Democrats stole the 2020 election from him.
But if Mr. Trump’s speech largely consisted of what has become his standard fare, the setting stood out. Though New Jersey has voted for Democratic presidential candidates in every election since 1992, and Mr. Trump lost the state by double-digit margins in both 2016 and 2020, he insisted that he could win there in November.
“We’re expanding the electoral map, because we are going to officially play in the state of New Jersey,” Mr. Trump said to a packed crowd on the beach. “We’re going to win the state of New Jersey.”
Mr. Trump, who once owned casinos in Atlantic City, N.J., and who often spends summers at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., has been publicly bullish on his chances in New Jersey for months. Political experts, and even some of his advisers, are skeptical.
Still, parts of the state are deeply conservative, including the area around Wildwood, a boardwalk town on the southern end of the Jersey Shore and a beach destination popular with working-class families. Many visitors come from Pennsylvania, a battleground state that backed Mr. Trump in 2016 but swung to Mr. Biden in 2020.
Mr. Trump’s rally, held shortly before the start of the summer season, brought hordes of people to the boardwalk, where many of the vendors who usually hawk an array of novelty items filled the front of their stores with Trump-related T-shirts and hats. Supporters stretched out on blankets and dabbed on sunscreen hours ahead of Mr. Trump’s arrival.
Against the backdrop of classic Americana, Mr. Trump repeated his typical criticism that Mr. Biden’s economic policies were hurting the middle class. With an amusement park operating rides in the background, he insisted that only he could preserve the summer shore tradition.
“The choice for New Jersey and Pennsylvania is simple,” Mr. Trump said, telling supporters to vote for him if they wanted “lower costs, higher income and more weekends down at the shore.” (The area’s locals usually say “down the shore,” but judging by the cheers of the crowd, the point was well received.)
The rally was a stark contrast to the scene at the Manhattan courthouse, where proceedings are more sober and Mr. Trump’s comments are limited to remarks to reporters before he enters and leaves the courtroom.
At his rally, Mr. Trump largely built on statements he has made in those limited appearances. He once again criticized Mr. Biden for warning Israel that he would not supply the country with weapons if it launched a major ground offensive, and he made his most explicit approval yet of Israel’s military strategy.
“I support Israel’s right to win its war on terror,” he told the crowd. “Is that OK? I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s good or bad politically. I don’t care.”
The rally in New Jersey was only Mr. Trump’s third since his trial began last month. Last week, he held back-to-back events in Wisconsin and Michigan, two battleground states expected to be more critical than New Jersey in the November election.
Mr. Trump, who is bound by a gag order in the case that keeps him from commenting on witnesses and jurors, limited his criticism of the case on Saturday. The judge in the case has found him in contempt, fining him $10,000 for violating the order and warning of possible jail time.
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