How Kamala responded to the Trump attempted assassination

Two months after former president Donald Trump went into the lion’s den to be interviewed at the National Association of Black Journalists, Vice President Kamala Harris made her own appearance at an NABJ event. With her sit-down coming just days after a second attempted assassination against Trump, Harris was asked if she has full confidence in the US Secret Service to protect her.

She responded by flipping the question to accuse Trump, the victim of the attempted assassination, of fomenting hate and violence toward other groups of people and thus making them unsafe.

“You can go back to Ohio,” Harris said. “Not everybody has Secret Service. And there are far too many people in this country who are not feeling safe.”

“Yes, I feel safe. I have Secret Service protection,” she continued. “But that doesn’t change my perspective of the importance of fighting for the safety of everybody in our country.”

Harris’s remarks echo those of major media headlines following the assassination attempt in West Palm Beach that attempted to blame Trump for the heated political rhetoric that supposedly almost got him killed. New York Times reporter Peter Baker wrote that Trump is “both a seeming inspiration and an apparent target of the political violence.” The Cincinnati Enquirer published an opinion piece that said, “There is no place in politics for violence. That said, the former president, Donald Trump, brings a lot of this stuff on himself.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre found herself in a similar quandary on Tuesday when she simultaneously argued that Americans need to “tone down” the political rhetoric while referring to Trump as a threat to democracy from the podium. Fox News’s Peter Doocy got into a scrap with Jean-Pierre as he pushed her on her inconsistency. “How many more assassination attempts on Trump until you choose a different word than a threat?” Doocy asked. “The question that you’re asking is incredibly dangerous in the way that you’re asking it because American people are watching,” KJP argued.

Trump, meanwhile, has openly blamed Democrats for allegedly inspiring the latest assassination attempt, as the shooter repeated their concerns that Trump is a “threat to democracy.” 

-Amber Duke

On our radar

¡SÍ SE PWAD-WAY! First Lady Jill Biden is set to lead the United States’s delegation for the inauguration of new Mexican president-elect Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo in October. Biden was previously criticized by members of the Latino community for describing them as “unique as the breakfast tacos” in San Antonio, Texas. 

RELEASE THE TRANSCRIPTS Republican senator Roger Marshall sent a letter to ABC News and the Kamala Harris campaign demanding their communications prior to the debate between Harris and Donald Trump earlier this month. “On debate night, it became abundantly clear that ABC News and its respective moderators had a biased agenda,” Marshall wrote. 

SPRINGFIELD THREATS ‘HOAXES’ Ohio governor Mike DeWine claimed in a press conference this week that the thirty-three bomb threats that have been called in to various sites in Springfield, Ohio are “hoaxes,” with many of them coming from foreign actors. 

Congress battles over IVF

Not all in-vitro fertilization (IVF) bills are created equal. This week, Senate Democrats and Republicans continued their spat over legislation related to the procedure, with Democrats tanking a bill from Senators Ted Cruz and Katie Britt, and Republicans, led by Senator John Thune, accusing Democrats of putting up another “show vote [that] is not a serious attempt to legislate or make law.”

The dueling bills both aim to ensure access to IVF at the federal level, but the Republican version did not guarantee a “right” to IVF. Cruz and Britt eschewed that language to make sure that religious medical providers who have moral objections to IVF were not compelled to offer those treatments. The Democrats’ latest failed version, Thune said, is “not any different than when we had this same vote three months ago…this is an attempt by Democrats to create a political issue where there isn’t one.”

Across the aisle, Senator Patty Murray claimed that the Republicans’ bill “would still allow states to regulate IVF out of existence.”

Democrats have sought to make IVF the latest health care-related battle following the repeal of Roe v. Wade. In the aftermath of the case’s overturn, an Alabama court ruled that embryos could be considered children for the purposes of a wrongful death suit by parents whose embryos were inadvertently destroyed by a fertility clinic employee. This prompted Republicans in the state and across the country to push for expanded protections for the procedure.

The issue of IVF has popped up in unique places on the campaign trail, in addition to surfacing in the halls of Congress. Governor Tim Walz falsely claimed that he conceived his children through the procedure, before admitting that that was one of many lies in his biography. 

–Matthew Foldi

Trump favorability surges 

As left-wing and left-leaning media outlets continue to report that Vice President Kamala Harris is surging in the presidential polls, a new Gallup poll tells a different story.

With a headline that belies former president Donald Trump’s growing popularity — “Favorable ratings of Harris, Trump remain under 50 percent” — Gallup eventually revealed Trump’s favorability is actually up, while Harris’s is down just forty-seven days ahead of the election. 

The poll, which asked 1,007 random adults their opinions of the presidential candidates, found:

Nearly identical percentages of US adults rate Donald Trump (46 percent) and Kamala Harris (44 percent) favorably in Gallup’s latest September 3-15 poll, during which the candidates debated for the first time…Harris’s bump in favorability after her unexpected nomination as the Democratic presidential nominee has moderated somewhat, while Trump’s favorability is up five points since last month, returning to the level he was at in June.

Though both candidates are viewed more unfavorably than favorably, Trump’s “unfavorable” rating has dropped two points since August (he’s at 53 percent), and Harris’s unfavorability rating increased by five points during the same period, to 54 percent. Among Independents, Trump is also ahead on Harris with a favorability rating of 44 to her 35 percent.

It seems the more the American public sees of Kamala Harris, the less they like her. Still, Axios tells us, “Harris soars to record six-point lead over Trump in post-debate poll,” the Des Moines Registerreports “Trump’s Iowa lead shrinks significantly,” and Reuters insists “Kamala Harris leads Republican Donald Trump 47 percent to 42 percent.”

What’s in a poll? Time will tell. Just remember they’ve “missed their mark” in the not-so-distant past.

–Teresa Mull