2024 Election Updates: Latest Trump and Biden News – The New York Times
Moments after Donald Trump took his seat at a jam-packed arena in New Jersey for a U.F.C. fight tonight, the audience started chanting a vulgar chant incorporating Joe Biden’s name. It then turned to chanting, “We love Trump.”
As the White Stripes’ “Seventh Nation Army” started up, the jumbotron at tonight’s U.F.C. match in Newark, N.J., turned back to former President Donald J. Trump. He spun around to face the crowd, and the audience leaped to its feet and began chanting, “USA! USA!” Trump took his seat and the fighters emerged.
Donald J. Trump has just walked into the Prudential Center in Newark, N.J., to sit ringside for an Ultimate Fighting Championship match. The packed arena erupted into rapturous applause as the Kid Rock song “American Badass” blasted out. When klieg lights swiveled onto Mr. Trump, he pumped his fist and smiled wide. He stood with UFC’s chief executive, Dana White.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed ballot access in South Carolina after being nominated by the minor Alliance Party, according to his campaign website. Kennedy has so far achieved ballot access in a handful of states, including the crucial presidential battleground of Michigan. National polls show he is pulling votes from both President Biden and Donald J. Trump.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis pledged to help Donald J. Trump, his onetime G.O.P. rival, keep his voting rights in their home state after Trump’s felony conviction. Technically, Trump won’t be barred from voting unless he is incarcerated, according to the law in New York and one applicable to Florida. “This would be an easy case to qualify for restoration of rights per the Florida Clemency Board, which I chair.”
When former President Donald J. Trump strode into the Prudential Center in Newark, N.J., on Saturday night to watch an Ultimate Fighting Championship cage match, the packed arena erupted into rapturous applause. Kid Rock’s song “American Bad Ass” blasted through the sound system, and klieg lights swiveled to spotlight Mr. Trump. He pumped his fist and smiled wide.
Mr. Trump had arrived early enough so as not to miss the main event: a fight between the league’s lightweight champion, Islam Makhachev, a sensation in Russia and the Gulf States, and Dustin Poirier, a native of Louisiana and a fan favorite.
As the White Stripes’s “Seven Nation Army” started up, the Jumbotron turned back to Mr. Trump. He spun to face the crowd, and the audience leaped to its feet, chanting “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” The audience turned to a vulgar chant incorporating President Biden’s name, and then: “We love Trump!”
Mr. Trump has a long history with the U.F.C. Last year, he attended a U.F.C. event in Las Vegas, and in April 2023, he sat cage-side at a U.F.C. fight in Miami not long after becoming the first former president to face criminal charges, after a grand jury in Manhattan indicted him in a case involving hush-money payments to a porn star. On Thursday, that case ended when a jury found Mr. Trump guilty on all 34 charges of falsifying business records.
Dana White, the chief executive of the U.F.C., has become a key ally of Mr. Trump’s, and the U.F.C. has evolved into something like the unofficial sport of MAGA World. Steven Cheung, Mr. Trump’s campaign spokesman, was once a spokesman for the U.F.C.
On Saturday, Mr. Trump sat ringside with Mr. White.
The conservative media company Salem Media Group has apologized to a Georgia man who was falsely depicted as having committed election fraud in the film “2,000 Mules,” which Salem co-produced and released in 2022.
The documentary, written and directed by the right-wing commentator Dinesh D’Souza, claimed that Democrats had conspired with nonprofit groups to rig the 2020 election in favor of President Biden by using “mules” who stuffed ballot boxes in swing states.
More than a million people watched “2,000 Mules” in just the first two weeks after its release in May 2022, and the film grossed over $10 million. Its unfounded allegations became an article of faith for an untold number of Americans convinced that the election had been stolen. Five months later, Salem released a companion book.
The film features surveillance video of the man from Georgia, Mark Andrews, as he places ballots into a drop box near Atlanta, along with voice-over commentary by Mr. D’Souza calling the action “a crime” and adding, “These are fraudulent votes.”
Although Mr. Andrews’s face is blurred in the images, the film’s producers used unblurred versions of the same video to promote the film on a variety of conservative news outlets, including Tucker Carlson’s former show on Fox News and a show hosted by Charlie Kirk, a founder of Turning Point USA, and produced by Salem.
Mr. Andrews sued Mr. D’Souza, along with Salem and two individuals associated with the right-wing election-monitoring group True the Vote, for defamation in October 2022. State investigators in Georgia have since found that Mr. Andrews committed no crime and that he had legally deposited the ballots for himself and several members of his family.
“It was never our intent that the publication of the ‘2,000 Mules’ film and book would harm Mr. Andrews,” Salem said in a statement on Friday. “We apologize for the hurt the inclusion of Mr. Andrews’s image in the movie, book and promotional materials have caused Mr. Andrews and his family.”
Salem, one of the largest radio broadcasters in the country, with 115 stations, also syndicates radio and podcast content, operates several websites and publishes a number of conservative Christian-themed magazines. It said on Friday that it had taken “2,000 Mules” off its platforms and that it would no longer distribute the film and the book.
As the 2022 midterm elections approached, the film became a touch point for a variety of institutions and individuals alleging that the presidency had been stolen from Donald J. Trump, who for his part called it “the greatest and most impactful documentary of our time.”
Several advocacy groups, inspired by “2,000 Mules,” formed to stake out ballot boxes — at times with individuals carrying firearms — and to warn voters against voting early.
But some of the film’s staunchest promoters, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, who attended a screening at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s residence in Palm Beach, Fla., and Fox News, which aired several segments about the film, later admitted that they had peddled lies about the election. In February, a lawyer for True the Vote told a Georgia court that it had no evidence to support its allegations of election fraud in the state.
Despite such admissions, many Americans continue to believe that the 2020 election was rigged. A poll conducted last August by CNN found that more than two-thirds of Republican voters did not believe that President Biden had won fairly.
Mr. D’Souza did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Catherine Engelbrecht, the founder of True the Vote, did not answer a phone call or reply to an email seeking a response.
“2,000 Mules” relied heavily on cellphone location data provided by True the Vote, which Mr. D’Souza claimed showed ballot mules approaching ballot boxes several times a day, as well as attending Black Lives Matter protests. The film claimed to provide evidence of fraud in battleground states that were critical to the outcome of the 2020 election, including Georgia and Arizona. True the Vote officials claimed that they had turned over proof of fraud to the F.B.I.
But subsequent investigations have debunked the documentary’s claims, and Arizona’s attorney general referred True the Vote to the F.B.I. and the Internal Revenue Service for investigation, noting that the group had provided no evidence to substantiate its fraud claims.
In September, a federal judge in Georgia rejected efforts by defendants to dismiss Mr. Andrews’s defamation case. The case is pending.
The Ohio General Assembly has passed a legislative fix that ensures President Biden will be on the state’s ballot in November, averting a crisis that had been brewing for weeks over what is typically a minor procedural issue.
The secretary of state in Ohio, a Republican, had said that he planned to exclude Mr. Biden from the ballot because the president would not be officially nominated by his party until after a state deadline for certifying presidential nominees. That had threatened the possibility that the president would not be on the ballot in all 50 states.
The General Assembly resolved the issue by passing a bill that pushes back the deadline to accommodate the date of the Democratic nominating convention. Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, is expected to sign the bill over the weekend, pending a legal review, according to a spokesman.
The solution has been used before. Ohio passed temporary extensions to its certification deadline for President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in 2012 and for President Donald J. Trump in 2020. Other states that had similar deadline issues, including Alabama, have also passed legislative fixes with overwhelming bipartisan support, in 2024 and in other election cycles.
But the solution proposed in the Ohio Legislature was entangled in a separate partisan clash over foreign donations. The General Assembly adjourned last week without a fix in place, after the Ohio Senate, which is controlled by Republicans, advanced a bill that would have resolved the issue but included a partisan measure banning foreign money in state ballot initiatives. Democrats opposed that measure, and the speaker of the Ohio House did not take it up before the chamber adjourned.
Mr. DeWine then called a special legislative session to fix the problem, saying that legislators had failed “to take action on this urgent matter.” The General Assembly ultimately adopted two bills, one that fixed the ballot issue and another that banned donations in support of state ballot initiatives from foreign nationals, including immigrants with green cards.
With the legislative solution appearing dead in the water last week, the Biden campaign considered suing the state to ensure that the president was on the ballot. Instead, the Democratic National Committee scheduled a virtual roll-call vote to officially nominate Mr. Biden ahead of the party’s convention in August. That vote is still set to go forward, even as the issue appears to be resolved.
Hannah Muldavin, a spokeswoman for the committee, denounced what she called “partisan games” by Republican lawmakers that had delayed a solution.
“Since the beginning of this process, Ohio Republicans have been playing partisan games and trying to chip away at our democracy, while Democrats have been defending Ohioans’ right to vote,” Ms. Muldavin said in a statement.
Matt Huffman, the leader of the Ohio Senate, praised the foreign-influence ban, adding in a statement that Ohio “needed to ensure that President Biden is on the ballot in November, and it needed to be done legislatively.”
Former President Donald J. Trump, who was convicted of 34 felonies this week in a criminal trial in New York, will attend an Ultimate Fighting Championship cage match just across the river in Newark, N.J., on Saturday night.
It is an unconventional campaign stop for an unconventional moment. Dana White, the chief executive of U.F.C., has become a vital ally of Mr. Trump’s, and when the two appeared together at a U.F.C. event in Miami earlier this year, Mr. Trump received raucous applause from a packed arena. The former president is likely eager to appear in front of a friendly audience in lieu of an official campaign rally.
Mr. Trump has seemed at times deflated by the verdict that came down on Thursday, emerging from the courthouse in Manhattan looking exhausted and glum and, on Friday evening, posting wistful and melancholy statements to his social media website. He has realized, he wrote, that “reason, truth, and love of our country is no longer a force of good and change” and that America is a “failing nation.”
But Mr. Trump and his campaign have also tried to project strength in the aftermath of his conviction. On Friday morning, the former president delivered what was in essence a mini-campaign rally inside Trump Tower, ping-ponging between misleading statements about the trial and standard lines from his stump speech vilifying undocumented migrants.
His campaign also announced that it had smashed online fund-raising records for Republicans, bringing in nearly $53 million in campaign donations in the 24 hours after the verdict. The campaign’s donation website briefly went down on Thursday afternoon, a technical issue that the campaign attributed to a vast swell of donors.
President Biden put out his own fund-raising appeal in the immediate aftermath of the verdict, but he and his campaign initially said little about Mr. Trump’s conviction. That changed on Friday afternoon, when the president broke what had been a long silence on his Republican rival’s legal troubles.
“The American principle that no one is above the law was reaffirmed,” Mr. Biden said from the White House.
Both in his address, and in remarks to reporters that the Biden campaign later highlighted, Mr. Biden pushed back against misleading statements by Mr. Trump and his surrogates about the trial, particularly the assertion that Mr. Trump’s indictments were a political witch hunt orchestrated by the president.
“I didn’t know I was that powerful,” Mr. Biden said with a grin.
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