Transcript of President Joe Biden's State of the Union address
WASHINGTON (AP) — Transcript of President Joe Biden’s as-delivered State of the Union address on March 7, 2024, as provided by the White House. It includes interactions with the audience and White House corrections to Biden’s remarks in brackets:
Good evening. Good evening. If I were smart, I’d go home now.
Mr. Speaker, Madam Vice President, members of Congress, my fellow Americans.
In January 1941, Franklin Roosevelt came to this chamber to speak to the nation. And he said, “I address you at a moment unprecedented in the history of the Union”. Hitler was on the march. War was raging in Europe.
President Roosevelt’s purpose was to wake up Congress and alert the American people that this was no ordinary time. Freedom and democracy were under assault in the world.
Tonight, I come to the same chamber to address the nation. Now it’s we who face an unprecedented moment in the history of the Union.
And, yes, my purpose tonight is to wake up the Congress and alert the American people that this is no ordinary moment either. Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault at home as they are today.
What makes our moment rare is that freedom and democracy are under attack at — both at home and overseas at the very same time.
Overseas, Putin of Russia is on the march, invading Ukraine and sowing chaos throughout Europe and beyond.
If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you: He will not.
But Ukraine — Ukraine can stop Putin. Ukraine can stop Putin if we stand with Ukraine and provide the weapons that it needs to defend itself.
That is all — that is all Ukraine is asking. They’re not asking for American soldiers. In fact, there are no American soldiers at war in Ukraine, and I’m determined to keep it that way.
But now assistance to Ukraine is being blocked by those who want to walk away from our world leadership.
It wasn’t long ago when a Republican president named Ronald Reagan thundered, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
Now — now my predecessor, a former Republican president, tells Putin, quote, “Do whatever the hell you want.”
AUDIENCE: Booo —
THE PRESIDENT: That’s a quote.
A former president actually said that — bowing down to a Russian leader. I think it’s outrageous, it’s dangerous, and it’s unacceptable.
America is a founding member of NATO, the military alliance of democratic nations created after World War Two prevent — to prevent war and keep the peace.
And today, we’ve made NATO stronger than ever. We welcomed Finland to the Alliance last year. And just this morning, Sweden officially joined, and their minister is here tonight. Stand up. Welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome. And they know how to fight.
Mr. Prime Minister, welcome to NATO, the strongest military alliance the world has ever seen.
I say this to Congress: We have to stand up to Putin. Send me a bipartisan national security bill. History is literally watching. History is watching.
Midway through the speech, Biden started talking about border security and called on Congress to pass legislation to secure the border and modernize the country’s outdated immigration laws, praising the bipartisan effort that collapsed when his likely Republican presidential rival, Donald Trump, opposed it.
Greene interjected, “Say her name!”
The congresswoman from Georgia yelled, pointing a finger and jabbing it toward Biden.
And then Biden did just that.
He held up the white button and said: “Laken Riley.”
But he mispronounced her first name so it sounded more like “Lincoln” to some, and the GOP critics instantly pounced.
“It’s Laken Riley, Mr. President,” said the conservative Heritage Foundation on social media.
Still, Biden spoke briefly of Riley’s death and he made reference to his own family’s trauma — his first wife and young daughter were killed in 1972 after an automobile crash. His son Beau died of brain cancer in 2015.
And then Biden urged Congress to work together to pass a border security compromise.
“Get this bill done!” Biden said.
He even called on Trump to stop fighting against any border deal.
“We can do it together,” he said.
With immigration becoming a top issue in the presidential election, Republicans are using nearly every tool at their disposal — including impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas — to condemn how the president has handled the border.
Hours earlier, the House voted to pass the “Laken Riley Act,” which would require the Department of Homeland Security to detain migrants who are in the country without authorization and are accused of theft.
Authorities have arrested on murder and assault charges Jose Ibarra, a Venezuelan man who entered the U.S. illegally and was allowed to stay to pursue his immigration case. He has not entered a plea to the charges.
Trump has used Riley’s death to slam Biden’s handling of the border and at an event this month told the crowd that the president would never say her name.
Biden has also adopted some of the language of Trump on the border, and on Thursday night he called the man charged with killing Riley an “illegal.”
That was disappointing to Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “I wish he hadn’t engaged with Marjorie Taylor Greene and used the word ‘illegal,’” she told the AP after the speech.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif, the speaker emeritus, said afterward on CNN, “Now he should have said ‘undocumented,’ but it’s not a big thing.”
Greene had handed out the buttons earlier in the day. Biden also looked up to the gallery, where many guests were seated, but Riley’s parents were not there.
Rep. Mike Collins, a Georgia Republican, said this week that he had invited Riley’s parents to the State of the Union address but they had “chosen to stay home as they grieve the loss of their daughter.”
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Associated Press writers Farnoush Amiri and Jill Colvin contributed to this story.
Seven states and events miles apart: How the Trump and Biden campaigns approach a rematch
ATLANTA (AP) — Joe Biden and Donald Trump each won the White House by razor-thin margins in key states.
Now, with a reprise of their bitter 2020 campaign all but officially set after Super Tuesday, the two campaigns are unveiling their strategies for a matchup between a president and his immediate predecessor.
Both campaigns will fight the hardest in seven battleground states, five of which flipped from Trump in 2016 to Biden four years ago. Biden’s reelection campaign claims a jump on hiring staff and targeting swing-state voters. Trump campaign officials are finalizing a takeover of the Republican National Committee this week and looking to expand their field operation.
Biden and Trump will each hold events in Georgia on Saturday, a week after they did simultaneous U.S.-Mexico border trips in Texas. That’s a reflection of how closely their campaigns will bump up against each other but also how they will work for votes differently. Biden will be in metro Atlanta, home to a fast-growing and diverse population. Trump will visit rural northwest Georgia and the district of Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a firebrand conservative discussed as a possible running mate.
In a statement Tuesday night, Biden blistered Trump, saying the former president is “driven by grievance and grift, focused on his own revenge and retribution” and “determined to destroy democracy, rip away fundamental freedoms like the ability for women to make their own health care decisions and pass another round of billions of dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy.”
Trump has spent months skewering Biden for inflation, an uptick in migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, crime in U.S. cities and the wars in Ukraine and Israel. “This is a magnificent country and it’s so sad to see where it’s gone,” he said Tuesday night. “We’re going to straighten it out.”
Biden: A post-pandemic chance at traditional campaigning
Biden’s campaign has hired leadership teams of three to five people — each with deep, in-state political experience — in eight states: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Of those, only Florida and North Carolina have twice gone for Trump, though North Carolina is seen by both parties as competitive. Both Biden and 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton won Nevada.
The campaign plans to expand those teams to as many as 15 people each, then bring on hundreds of paid organizers across the battleground map in the coming weeks. Those organizers, in turn, will be tasked with coordinating tens of thousands of volunteers.
Biden’s effort will feature “a large brick-and-mortar operation that we couldn’t do in 2020” because of COVID-19 restrictions, said Dan Kanninen, the campaign’s battleground states director. That means returning to door-knocking and phone-banking with the campaign prioritizing the quality of voter contact rather than just the quantity. It will also train volunteers and give them the flexibility to influence their own social networks — promoting Biden’s campaign in non-traditional online spaces that can best sway their relatives, friends and neighbors.
“I see what we’re doing now as the smarter extension of what we learned in ’12 and also the smarter extension of what we learned in ’20,” Kanninen said, referring to both Biden’s victory and the successful reelection of then-President Barack Obama.
Biden’s campaign has lists of existing volunteers who were involved in the 2020 and 2022 elections, meaning they can reactivate existing networks rather than starting from scratch. In Arizona, it has prioritized Spanish-language outreach early, opening its first Arizona field office in Maryvale, an area of Phoenix that is about 75% Hispanic.
“We are making sure that we’re using the next couple of months to build up really quickly to lay that foundation for the general election,” said Sean McEnerney, Biden’s campaign manager in Arizona.
Kanninen said he doubts Trump has enough time to ratchet up the Republican National Committee’s organizing efforts the same way.
The Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee have vastly outraised Republicans so far. The Biden campaign reported $56 million on hand at the end of January, according to federal disclosures, while Trump’s campaign reported a balance of $30.5 million.
“He can’t buy this time back,” Kanninen said. “You just cannot replicate this by writing a big check, even if they had the money.”
Trump: An RNC takeover and lining up behind ‘the boss’
For Trump, the next post-Super Tuesday step is to complete a takeover of the RNC at the party’s spring meeting that begins Thursday.
The former president effectively will absorb GOP headquarters into his campaign, installing his preferred leadership with a priority on catching up to the fundraising and organizing operation that Biden’s reelection team shares with the DNC.
“It’s message and mechanics,” said Trump senior adviser Chris LaCivita. “If we do what we’re supposed to do from the campaign standpoint, we’ll be able to really drive and increase the states where we are competitive.”
LaCivita, who is set to become the RNC’s chief operating officer while retaining his campaign role, listed seven of the same eight states the Biden campaign sees as battlegrounds. He clarified that he expects Trump to win Florida again but promised the campaign would not be caught flat-footed there. He also said Trump could be “competitive” in Virginia, which Democrats have won in every presidential race since 2008.
He plans for the RNC to begin expanding its field operation and adding staff to coordinate voter outreach “immediately” after the leadership transition at this week’s party meeting. LaCivita and Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, will represent the former president at the meeting in Houston. Lara Trump will become RNC co-chair alongside incoming chair Michael Whatley, the current head of the North Carolina party.
“As soon as we get in, everything changes, and there will be more of a focus on battleground states, as opposed to community centers in Jacksonville, Florida,” LaCivita said.
That’s a shot at previous RNC investments in community outreach centers targeting Black and other minority voters that historically back Democrats in large percentages. At its peak in the 2022 cycle, the RNC had 38 such centers. That total has now dwindled to seven, with locations in potential swing-state North Carolina but also New York, California and Texas, a trio that won’t be competitive in the presidential race.
LaCivita’s promised buildout will take a financial turnaround. The DNC began the year with 2.5 times as much in the bank as the RNC after outraising and outspending Republicans in 2023.
But LaCivita said he isn’t worried about the overall dynamics as the general election takes shape. “What advantage they may have in timing, they will soon lose on message,” he said Tuesday night.
The RNC has established a full-time election integrity department with directors in 15 key states to safeguard voting and spearhead post-election litigation. That’s expected given Trump’s demands that the RNC do more to boost his lies about widespread voter fraud. Lawyers backing Trump launched dozens of failed lawsuits after he lost in 2020.
The committee has also hired political staff in 15 battlegrounds, including those with important House and Senate races, like New York, California and Montana, while beginning an early in-person voting and ballot harvesting initiative called “Bank Your Vote” in all 50 states, six territories and six languages.
LaCivita, meanwhile, noted another wild card: Trump, he said, “is very keen on New York,” the heavily Democratic state where the former president was born, raised and anchored his real estate, marketing and reality television success. New York last went for a Republican presidential candidate in 1984.
Asked what he thinks about the prospects of flipping New York to Trump, LaCivita laughed and said, “I do what the boss says. The boss drives.”
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Weissert reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Jill Colvin in Palm Beach, Florida, contributed to this report.
RNC votes to install Donald Trump's handpicked chair as former president tightens control of party
HOUSTON (AP) — The Republican National Committee voted Friday to install Donald Trump’s handpicked leadership team, completing his takeover of the national party as the former president closes in on a third straight presidential nomination.
Michael Whatley, a North Carolina Republican who has echoed Trump’s false theories of voter fraud, was elected the party’s new national chairman in a vote Friday morning in Houston. Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law, was voted in as co-chair.
Trump’s team is promising not to use the RNC to pay his mounting personal legal bills. But Trump and his lieutenants will have firm control of the party’s political and fundraising machinery with limited, if any, internal pushback.
“The RNC is going to be the vanguard of a movement that will work tirelessly every single day to elect our nominee, Donald J. Trump, as the 47th President of the United States,” Whatley told RNC members in a speech after being elected.
Whatley will carry the top title, replacing longtime chair Ronna McDaniel after she fell out of favor with key figures in the former president’s “Make America Great Again” movement. But he will be surrounded by people closer to Trump.
Lara Trump is expected to focus largely on fundraising and media appearances.
She emphasized that shortly after she was voted in, taking time in her inaugural speech as co-chair to hold up a check for a $100,000 that she said had been contributed that day to the party. When asked by a reporter later, she declined to say who wrote the check.
The functional head of the RNC will be Chris LaCivita, who will assume the committee’s chief of staff role while maintaining his job as one of the Trump campaign’s top two advisers.
McDaniel was handpicked by Trump to lead the committee seven years ago but was forced out after Trump’s MAGA movement increasingly blamed her for losses over the last few years. She alluded to that in her goodbye speech Friday, telling the members that she worries most about “internal cohesion” heading into the election.
“We have to stop the attacking other Republicans,” she said. “If we spend our time attacking each other, we guarantee the Democrats are going to win.”
She also told the party that it needs to engage independent and swing voters, warning: “We don’t win if we only talk to each other.”
While McDaniel got a standing ovation after her goodbye, the new leadership eagerly embraced the change, and Lara Trump, accompanied by her husband, Eric Trump, was greeted like a celebrity, with members lining up to take photos with her.
With Trump’s blessing, LaCivita is promising to enact sweeping changes and staffing moves at every level of the RNC to ensure it runs seamlessly as an extension of the Trump campaign.
In an interview Thursday, LaCivita sought to tamp down concerns from some RNC members that the already cash-strapped committee would help pay Trump’s legal bills. Trump faces four criminal indictments and a total of 91 counts as well as a $355 million civil fraud judgment, which he is appealing. His affiliated Save America political action committee has spent $76 million over the last two years on lawyers.
People speculating about the RNC paying for legal bills, LaCivita said, do so “purely on the basis of trying to hurt donors.” Trump’s legal bills are instead being covered largely by Save America, a separate political entity.
“The fact of the matter is not a penny of the RNC’s money or, for that matter, the campaign’s money has gone or will go to pay legal fees,” he said.
The RNC was paying some of Trump’s legal bills for New York cases that started while he was president, T he Washington Post reported, but McDaniel said in November 2022 that the RNC would stop paying once Trump became a candidate again and joined the 2024 presidential race.
When Trump announced his plans to replace the party’s leadership, it raised fresh questions about whether the committee would pay his bills. Those questions intensified after Lara Trump said last month that she wasn’t familiar with the party’s rules about paying her father-in-law’s legal fees, but she thought the idea would get broad support among Republican voters.
Facing such mixed messages, some RNC members remain skeptical.
Republican committeeman Henry Barbour, of Mississippi, proposed a non-binding resolution explicitly stating that RNC funds could not be used for Trump’s legal bills. Yet the resolution died when Barbour failed to earn the support of RNC members from at least 10 states.
“People I’ve talked to on the committee privately all agree that donor money needs to be devoted to winning elections, not legal fees,” said Republican committeeman John Hammond, of Indiana. “I’m sure the committee would be glad to have some more assurance about that and clarification.”
The new leadership team is also expectedly to more fully embrace Trump’s focus on voter fraud and his debunked claims about the election he lost to President Joe Biden. Multiple court cases and Trump’s own Justice Department failed to reveal any evidence of significant voting irregularities.
Whatley, an attorney, has largely avoided using Trump’s characterization of Biden’s victory and said in one 2021 interview that Biden “absolutely” was legitimately elected and won the majority of the electoral college votes. But he said in another interview in the weeks after the 2020 election that there was “massive fraud.” He has also made focusing on “election integrity” a top priority for his state party in the years since.
In a letter announcing her candidacy for co-chair, Lara Trump wrote to members of the committee telling them she intends to focus on battleground states, getting out the vote in close races, to comb through the RNC’s finances, including all of its contracts and agreements and cut spending “that doesn’t directly go to winning elections.”
A key priority, she wrote, is working to ensure that the election is secure, something her father-in-law has made a chief focus.
In her speech Friday, Lara Trump declared: “I’m ready to get to work.”
“The goal on Nov. 5 is to win, as my father-in-law says, ‘bigly,’” she said.
In some ways, Trump’s GOP takeover represents a typical transition for major political parties when they shift from the primary to the general election phase of presidential elections. Candidates are typically given the keys to their national parties once they secure the presidential nomination. Biden, for example, effectively controls the Democratic National Committee.
Yet some privately worry that Trump is creating unnecessary drama and distraction for the party.
McDaniel is being replaced on Friday after Trump pressured her to resign. She was Trump’s hand-picked choice back in 2017. And he supported her reelection every two years as recently as last year.
But McDaniel increasingly drew the ire of MAGA leaders who blamed her for Republican losses in recent years. Other Republicans have blamed Trump, who remains broadly unpopular with Americans and vulnerable in particular with suburban and college-educated voters. Fifty-eight percent of U.S. adults said they would be dissatisfied if Trump were nominated for president, according to an AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs poll published in December.
Trump wins South Carolina, easily beating Haley in her home state and closing in on GOP nomination
CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) — Donald Trump won South Carolina’s Republican primary on Saturday, easily beating former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley in her home state and further consolidating his path to a third straight GOP nomination.
Trump has now swept every contest that counted for Republican delegates, adding to previous wins in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Haley is facing growing pressure to leave the race but says she’s not going anywhere despite losing the state where she was governor from 2011 to 2017.
A 2020 rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden is becoming increasingly inevitable. Haley has vowed to stay in the race through at least the batch of primaries on March 5, known as Super Tuesday, but was unable to dent Trump’s momentum in her home state despite holding far more campaign events and arguing that the indictments against Trump will hamstring him against Biden.
The Associated Press declared Trump the winner as polls closed statewide at 7 p.m. That race call was based on an analysis of AP VoteCast, a comprehensive survey of Republican South Carolina primary voters. The survey confirmed the findings of pre-Election Day polls showing Trump far outpacing Haley statewide.
“I have never seen the Republican Party so unified as it is right now,” Trump declared, taking the stage for his victory speech mere moments after polls closed. He added, “You can celebrate for about 15 minutes, but then we have to get back to work.”
South Carolina’s first-in-the-South primary has historically been a reliable bellwether for Republicans. In all but one primary since 1980, the Republican winner in South Carolina has gone on to be the party’s nominee. The lone exception was Newt Gingrich in 2012.
Trump was dominant across the state, even leading in Lexington County, which Haley represented in the state Legislature. Many Trump-backing South Carolinians, even some who previously supported Haley during her time as governor, weren’t willing to give her a home-state bump.
“She’s done some good things,” Davis Paul, 36, said about Haley as he waited for Trump at a recent rally in Conway. “But I just don’t think she’s ready to tackle a candidate like Trump. I don’t think many people can.”
At Haley headquarters on Saturday night, supporters waved her signs in front of a large projection screen showing Trump’s speech, blocking it from view. That, of course, didn’t make the defeat any less crushing.
About an hour later, Haley took the stage and said: “What I saw today was South Carolina’s frustration with our country’s direction. I’ve seen that same frustration nationwide.”
“I don’t believe Donald Trump can beat Joe Biden,” Haley said, later adding: “I said earlier this week that no matter what happens in South Carolina, I would continue to run. I’m a woman of my word.”
She said she plans to head to Michigan for its primary on Tuesday — the last major contest before Super Tuesday. Still, she faces questions about where she might be able to win a contest or be competitive.
Trump and Biden are already behaving like they expect to face off in November.
Trump and his allies argue Biden has made the U.S. weaker and point to the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and Russia’s decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Trump has also repeatedly attacked Biden over high inflation earlier in the president’s term and his handling of record-high migrant crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Trump has questioned — often in harshly personal terms — whether the 81-year-old Biden is too old to serve a second term. Biden’s team in turn has highlighted the 77-year-old Trump’s own flubs on the campaign trail.
Biden has stepped up his recent fundraising trips around the country and increasingly attacked Trump directly. He’s called Trump and his “Make America Great Again” movement dire threats to the nation’s founding principles, and the president’s reelection campaign has lately focused most of its attention on Trump suggesting he’d use the first day of a second presidency as a dictator and that he’d tell Russia to attack NATO allies who fail to keep up with defense spending obligations mandated by the alliance.
Haley also criticized Trump on his NATO comments and also for questioning why her husband wasn’t on the campaign trail with her — even as former first lady Melania Trump hasn’t appeared with him. Maj. Michael Haley is deployed in the Horn of Africa on a mission with the South Carolina Army National Guard.
But South Carolina’s Republican voters line up with Trump on having lukewarm feelings about NATO and continued U.S. support for Ukraine, according to AP VoteCast data from Saturday’s primary. About 6 in 10 oppose continuing aid to Ukraine in its fight against Russia. Only about a third described America’s participation in NATO as “very good,” with more saying it’s only “somewhat good.”
Haley has raised copious amounts of campaign money and is scheduled to begin a cross-country campaign swing on Sunday in Michigan ahead of Super Tuesday on March 5, when many delegate-rich states hold primaries.
But it’s unclear how she can stop Trump from clinching enough delegates to become the party’s presumptive nominee for the third time.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., complimented Haley while speaking to reporters at Trump’s election night party in Columbia but suggested it was time for her to drop out.
“I think the sooner she does, the better for her, the better for the party,” Graham said. Later, the senator was greeted with boos after Trump called him to the stage to address those gathered.
Trump’s political strength has endured despite facing 91 criminal charges related to his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Biden, the discovery of classified documents in his Florida residence and allegations that he secretly arranged payoffs to a porn actress.
The former president’s first criminal trial is set to begin on March 25 in New York, where he faces 34 counts of falsifying business records related to hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels in the closing weeks of his 2016 presidential campaign.
Biden won South Carolina’s Democratic primary earlier this month and faces only one remaining challenger, Dean Phillips. The Minnesota Democratic congressman has continued to campaign in Michigan ahead of the Democratic primary there, despite having little chance of actually beating Biden.
Though Biden is expected to cruise to his party’s renomination, he faces criticism from some Democrats for providing military backing to Israel in its war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Some in his party support a ceasefire as the death toll in Israel’s war has reached 30,000 people, two-thirds of them women and children. The war could hurt the president’s general election chances in swing states like Michigan, which is home to a large Arab American population.
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Weissert reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Jill Colvin and James Pollard in Columbia, South Carolina, contributed to this report.
Biden warns of a 'nightmare' future for the country if Trump should win again, and lists reasons why
LAS VEGAS (AP) — President Joe Biden on Sunday ticked through a list of reasons he says a second Donald Trump presidency would be a “nightmare” for the country as he urged Nevada Democrats to vote for him in the state’s presidential primary this week and for his party at large in November.
Biden opened a campaign swing with a fundraiser where he focused on Trump’s ample history of provocative statements — his description of Jan. 6 rioters as “hostages,” his musing about a former top military officer deserving execution, his branding of fallen soldiers as “suckers” and “losers,” his wish to be a Day One “dictator,” his vow to supporters that “I am your retribution,” and more.
Then it was on to a community center in a predominantly Black section of Las Vegas, where he told his crowd of several hundred that “you’re the reason we’ll make Donald Trump a loser again.”
Biden said the stakes were huge when he took on Trump in 2020 — “what made America America, I thought, was at risk’ — and they are even larger now as a likely rematch looms.
He told donors at the private home in Henderson, Nevada, that if they came to Washington, he’d show them the White House dining room table where Trump, according to ex-aides, sat transfixed for hours in front of the TV as the rioters he’d fired up with his rhetoric stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“We have to keep the White House,” he said., “We must keep the Senate” and win back the House.
Accomplish that, he said, and “we can say we saved American democracy.”
He was equally blunt in talking up his record at his subsequent rally where he implored voters to “imagine the nightmare of Donald Trump.”
Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung responded in kind, saying Biden “has been a nightmare for this country in just three short years in the White House, and no amount of gaslighting will make Americans forget about all the misery and destruction he has brought.”
In Tuesday’s Nevada Democratic presidential primary, Biden faces only token opposition from author Marianne Williamson and a few relatively unknown challengers. He won Nevada in November 2020 by fewer than 3 percentage points. But he came to Nevada to rouse voters for the fall campaign as well.
The state known largely for its casino and hospitality industries is synonymous with split-ticket, hard-to-predict results. It has a transient, working-class population and large Latino, Filipino and Chinese American and Black communities . Nevada has a stark rural-urban divide, with more than 88% of active registered voters — and much of its political power — in the two most populous counties, which include the Las Vegas and Reno metro areas.
In 2022, Democrats successfully defended their Senate seat and lost the governor’s office. The six constitutional officers elected statewide are split evenly among Democrats and Republicans.
The narrow victory of Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto helped Democrats party keep control of the Senate for the remainder of Biden’s current term.
Working in Biden’s favor this year is the vast Democratic operation built by the late Sen. Harry Reid. The “Reid Machine” has for years trained operatives and retained organizers and is partially why, despite Nevada’s status as a purple state, Democrats have won every presidential election here since 2008.
But early signs show Biden could have more ground to make up than in past races. Voters are largely dissatisfied with the likely Biden-Trump rematch. A New York Times/Siena poll from November put Biden’s approval rating at 36% in Nevada.
“I know from my reelection, the issues that matter to Nevadans are still those kitchen table issues,” Cortez Masto said in an interview.
Biden has built his reelection campaign around the theme that Trump presents a dire threat to U.S. democracy and its founding values. The president also has championed the defense of abortion rights, recently holding his first big campaign rally, in Virginia, where the issue energized Democrats who won control of the state’s House of Delegates.
Biden also promotes his handling of the economy, arguing that his policies have created millions of jobs, combated climate change and improved American competitiveness overseas. But polls suggest many voters aren’t giving his administration credit.
The Democratic National Committee recently announced a six-figure ad buy in Nevada and South Carolina, where Biden won the leadoff primary Saturday. The ads are meant to boost enthusiasm among Black, Asian American and Latino voters statewide, including radio, television and digital ads in Spanish, Chinese and Tagalog, and a billboard in Las Vegas’ Chinatown.
As early voting began a week ago in Nevada, Trump asserted without evidence during a campaign rally in Las Vegas that he was the victim of the Biden administration’s weaponizing law enforcement against him. Trump has been indicted four times and faces 91 felonies.
Dan Lee, an associate professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said that for Biden, “the map says he has to hold on to Nevada.”
The Republican presidential primary is also Tuesday but the state GOP is holding caucuses on Thursday to allocate delegates. Trump is competing in the caucuses; rival Nikki Haley opted to stay on the nonbinding primary ballot.
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Stern reported from Reno, Nevada. Associated Press writer Will Weissert in Washington contributed to this report.
With a single word -- 'lover' -- Trump employs familiar playbook in tweaking his investigators
WASHINGTON (AP) — Each time Donald Trump refers to a Georgia prosecutor ‘s colleague as her “lover,” he’s invoking a strikingly familiar turn of phrase.
After all, Trump as president repeatedly used the same word to mock two FBI officials, including an agent who helped lead the Russia election interference probe, after revelations that the pair had an extramarital relationship and had traded pejorative text messages about him.
Throughout years of scrutiny from prosecutors, culminating in 91 felony counts, Trump has repeatedly sought to deflect attention from himself by making the personal lives of investigators ripe for derision and ridicule. He’s jumped on allegations of affairs and leveled claims of bias against agents, prosecutors and judges. He’s also been quick to exploit the sometimes questionable decision-making, or occasional outright protocol breaches, by officials investigating him as a means to try to discredit entire inquiries.
The strategy underscores the extent to which Trump views his four criminal cases as battles to be won not just in a courtroom but in the court of public opinion, where attacks on officials — both for groundless reasons but also for actual judgment lapses and unforced errors — are capable of shaping perception of investigations and distracting from the underlying allegations of the probes.
“Prosecutors in the law enforcement apparatus generally are not built to respond to those types of attacks. The Department of Justice policy is: we do not try cases in the public domain. We don’t respond to every single thing that a defendant says,” said Reid Schar, a former federal prosecutor who led the corruption case against ex-Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
He added: “The entire conceptual framework that Trump has moved to is not one that DOJ or frankly state-level prosecutors, for the most part, are used to playing in.”
Trump has most recently seized on revelations of a romantic relationship between Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and an outside lawyer, Nathan Wade, she hired to help manage the case.
Willis acknowledged the relationship in a court filing Friday but said there was no basis to dismiss the case or to remove her from the prosecution charging Trump and 18 others with plotting to subvert Georgia’s 2020 election. On Sunday, responding to the filing, Trump posted on Truth Social about Willis and her “lover” and alleged that they had “perpetrated a conspiracy” to enrich themselves and cheat and interfere in the 2024 race.
“This case is a Hoax, just like Russia, Russia, Russia (and all of the rest!), and everybody in America knows it,” he wrote.
Claims of an inappropriate relationship were first raised last month by a lawyer for a Trump co-defendant who said it created a conflict of interest. Even before Friday’s filing, Trump sensed an avenue to attack. “The Lovers knew that I did nothing wrong,” he wrote in a Jan. 19 post, adding that “the Lovebirds should face appropriate consequences.”
As president, Trump similarly exploited news that Peter Strzok, a lead agent in the investigation into whether the 2016 Trump campaign had coordinated with Russia, and FBI lawyer Lisa Page had sent each other negative text messages about Trump during the Russia probe and had an extramarital relationship.
One such text, referring to the prospect of a Trump victory, said: “We’ll stop it.” (Strzok, who was fired over the texts, later said he was referring to the will of the American voters and not to any step the FBI would take to interfere in the election).
The Justice Department inspector general called the texts troubling but also found no evidence that any investigative decisions were motivated by partisan bias. That didn’t stop Trump from accusing Strzok and Page of “treason,” or many of his supporters from agreeing with Trump that the entire investigation had been a “witch hunt.”
“Trump has shown the ability to affect public opinion in a way that may not get him out of the legal trouble he’s facing — it’s still going to be up to judges and juries — but it certainly seems to be enhancing his political viability, as unbelievable as that is,” said Greg Brower, a former assistant FBI director in the congressional affairs office.
Strzok has said he was the subject of more than 100 Trump tweets, telling The Associated Press in 2020 that “being subjected to outrageous attacks up to and including by the president himself, which are full of lies and mischaracterizations and just crude and cruel, is horrible.”
Other figures in the Russia probe provoked Trump’s ire, including Christopher Steele, the ex-British spy who compiled a dossier of salacious and unproven rumors about Trump. He also fumed at the FBI, which among other things was faulted for submitting flawed applications to surveil an ex-Trump aide.
In 2017, days after being fired by Trump as director of the FBI, James Comey sent a friend a memo documenting a private Oval Office conversation he’d had with the president that unnerved him. The goal, Comey later admitted, was to have the content shared with the media so that Trump’s actions could be exposed and because he thought it might prompt the appointment of a special counsel.
The Comey memo revealed that Trump had asked him to end an investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn. The act laid bare Trump’s determination to exert his will on the FBI and became part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s broader investigation into whether he had obstructed justice.
But to Trump and his supporters, the disclosure became an opening to attack Comey as a “leaker.” A Justice Department inspector general report concluded that Comey had violated FBI policy but said that, contrary to Trump’s claims, he had not illegally disclosed classified material.
Mueller himself had his personal life picked over, with Trump seeking his termination over perceived conflicts — Mueller years earlier had sought a membership refund from a Trump golf club in Virginia — that aides told the president were frivolous.
Former Justice Department prosecutor Christopher Mattei, who prosecuted former Connecticut Gov. John Rowland and more recently represented families of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in a lawsuit against Infowars host Alex Jones, said he was concerned Trump “had poisoned a significant part of the population” to believe public officials routinely act out of personal bias.
“To the extent he’s been successful in suggesting to people that our public officials and leadership who have taken an oath to perform their duty really aren’t doing that — yeah, that’s concerning,” he said.
The Biden administration once more bypasses Congress on an emergency weapons sale to Israel
WASHINGTON (AP) — For the second time this month the Biden administration is bypassing Congress to approve an emergency weapons sale to Israel as Israel continues to prosecute its war against Hamas in Gaza under increasing international criticism.
The State Department said Friday that Secretary of State Antony Blinken had told Congress that he had made a second emergency determination covering a $147.5 million sale for equipment, including fuses, charges and primers, that is needed to make the 155 mm shells that Israel has already purchased function.
“Given the urgency of Israel’s defensive needs, the secretary notified Congress that he had exercised his delegated authority to determine an emergency existed necessitating the immediate approval of the transfer,” the department said.
“The United States is committed to the security of Israel, and it is vital to U.S. national interests to ensure Israel is able to defend itself against the threats it faces,” it said.
The emergency determination means the purchase will bypass the congressional review requirement for foreign military sales. Such determinations are rare, but not unprecedented, when administrations see an urgent need for weapons to be delivered without waiting for lawmakers’ approval.
Blinken made a similar decision on Dec. 9, to approve the sale to Israel of nearly 14,000 rounds of tank ammunition worth more than $106 million.
Both moves have come as President Joe Biden’s request for a nearly $106 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel and other national security needs remains stalled in Congress, caught up in a debate over U.S. immigration policy and border security. Some Democratic lawmakers have spoken of making the proposed $14.3 billion in American assistance to its Mideast ally contingent on concrete steps by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to reduce civilian casualties in Gaza during the war with Hamas.
The State Department sought to counter potential criticism of the sale on human rights grounds by saying it was in constant touch with Israel to emphasize the importance of minimizing civilian casualties, which have soared since Israel began its response to the Hamas attacks in Israel on Oct. 7.
“We continue to strongly emphasize to the government of Israel that they must not only comply with international humanitarian law, but also take every feasible step to prevent harm to civilians,” it said.
“Hamas hides behind civilians and has embedded itself among the civilian population, but that does not lessen Israel’s responsibility and strategic imperative to distinguish between civilians and Hamas terrorists as it conducts its military operations,” the department said. “This type of campaign can only be won by protecting civilians.”
Bypassing Congress with emergency determinations for arms sales is an unusual step that has in the past met resistance from lawmakers, who normally have a period of time to weigh in on proposed weapons transfers and, in some cases, block them.
In May 2019, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made an emergency determination for an $8.1 billion sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan after it became clear that the Trump administration would have trouble overcoming lawmakers’ concerns about the Saudi and UAE-led war in Yemen.
Pompeo came under heavy criticism for the move, which some believed may have violated the law because many of the weapons involved had yet to be built and could not be delivered urgently. But he was cleared of any wrongdoing after an internal investigation.
At least four administrations have used the authority since 1979. President George H.W. Bush’s administration used it during the Gulf War to get arms quickly to Saudi Arabia.
DC: Presiden Biden and First Lady Jill Biden about White House arrival
AP VoteCast: How did Biden do it? Wide coalition powered win
WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Vice President Joe Biden’s White House victory was powered by a broad and racially diverse coalition of voters driven to the polls by fierce opposition to President Donald Trump and anxiety over a surging, deadly pandemic.
Both nationwide and in key battleground states across the Midwest and Sun Belt, the Democrat dominated with voters worried about the coronavirus and hungry for the federal government to do more to contain its spread, according to AP VoteCast, an expansive survey of more than 110,000 voters nationwide. After four years of political turbulence under Trump, Biden handily won voters looking for a leader who could unify the country, and those pushing for racial justice. More saw him as empathetic and honest, and willing to stand up to extremism, compared with the Republican incumbent.
“It has to do with decency. This country has got integrity and hopefully we can get decency,” said Kay Nicholas, a 73-year-old retired teacher and school principal from Brighton, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. “I think Joe Biden can do it and bring back kindness.”
The election ultimately emerged as a contest between two conflicting visions of America in a time of crisis. Biden voters saw a nation in chaos and a void in presidential leadership, while Trump’s supporters believed the economy was roaring back to health and that the president was delivering on the dramatic political change he campaign on four years ago.
“We love our president, we love our Constitution, we love everything that he’s promised and followed through on,” said Annastasia Theodoropoulos, a 50-year-old Trump supporter in Milford, Pennsylvania, a borough outside Scranton.
Biden’s coalition included clear majorities of college graduates, women, urban and suburban voters, young people and Black Americans — all groups that have risen up in resistance to the Trump presidency. He made good on his promise to win over moderate voters, including some Republicans who rejected the president.
Trump, meanwhile, held his base of white voters without a college degree, rural voters and religious conservatives. And in some competitive states, like Nevada and Florida, Trump ate away at Biden’s support among Latinos, according to the survey.
The two coalitions reflected a striking racial division. Roughly 40% of Americans identify as racial minorities, but just 14% of Trump supporters do. Biden voters more closely reflected America — 63% of his supporters were white, and 37% were people of color.
“We are a force to be reckoned with,” said Linda Wilson, a Black woman and Biden voter, of the mobilization of Black voters. “Let us pray that this is just the beginning.”
Ultimately, Biden’s coalition was large enough for the former vice president to seal a victory, although not the sort of overwhelming wave that Democrats hoped would secure a commanding majority in the Senate. Biden’s win was locked in Saturday when a narrow victory in Pennsylvania handed him an Electoral College majority after he had cemented leads in battlegrounds Wisconsin and Michigan on Wednesday.
Trump refused to concede and threatened further legal action on ballot counting.
Biden flipped the industrial states by securing core Democratic groups. He won 55% of women nationwide. He was backed by 56% of voters under 45 and 90% of Black voters. Biden also led among moderate voters, with 61%. He outpaced Trump in the suburbs, 54% to 44%, and dominated with roughly two-thirds of voters in urban areas.
And while Trump won white voters overall, Biden ate away at his advantage among white women and young white voters. And in one sign of the growing education gap between the parties, Biden led by a narrow margin among white college graduates, while Trump dominated among white voters without a college degree.
This was a race about turning out decided supporters — about three-quarters said they knew all along which candidate they backed.
Still, both candidates undertook major efforts to turn out new voters, those who sat out in 2016 or cast ballots for minor-party candidates. AP VoteCast shows those voters ultimately favored Biden — about 60% of them nationwide cast ballots for the Democrat — and made up about 20% of all voters.
Nearly three-quarters of U.S. voters were white and 55% of them supported Trump. A solid 81% of white evangelical Christians backed him. Men leaned toward him over Biden, 52% to 46%. Trump won 60% of voters living in small towns and rural areas.
Eight months into a pandemic that has disproportionately hit Black and Latino Americans, Biden voters were more likely than Trump voters to say they’d been affected personally by the coronavirus pandemic. And Biden’s campaign succeeded in making the election about the controversial president, as well as his leadership on the virus.
For Brittany Walker, a 29-year-old nurse in Virginia Beach, Virginia, the tipping point was when Trump himself contracted the virus. She cast her ballot for Biden.
“To see that Trump was saying that he had it … and was wearing no masks; to me that’s a very big deal,” said Walker, who works on a hospital floor that cares for COVID patients. “How can you show us how to live if you’re not really living it yourself?”
Biden’s message on the virus also appears to have resonated in key battleground states, especially those that saw rising virus cases in the weeks leading up to Election Day. In Wisconsin, which saw an October spike in cases, 45% of voters said the pandemic was the top issue facing the country. They were more likely to say the pandemic is not at all under control, compared with voters nationwide.
Half of all voters said the coronavirus was not under control in the U.S., casting their ballots as a third wave of infections was adding to a death toll that has now surpassed 236,000. About 8 in 10 of these voters supported Biden.
Biden prevailed despite Trump being the preferred candidate to handle the economy, an issue that Trump’s campaign tried to make a top selling point for his reelection. He repeatedly pushed back against public health restrictions that could curb economic growth and made inaccurate claims about the state of economy before the pandemic hit. Trump’s voters believed the president. Roughly three-quarters of his voters said they thought economic conditions were good or excellent, although only about 4 in 10 voters overall agreed.
“We’re living on our 401Ks and it’s just been going up, up, up for the last four years,” said Bill Roan, a retiree from Snellville, Georgia. “I’m just scared with Biden’s tax plan and what’s going to happen with it.”
Throughout the campaign, Trump also sought to use racial tensions to shore up his support, particularly among suburban and older voters. He positioned himself as a defender of the police and portrayed the protesters calling for racial justice and police reform as radicals.
While the appeal showed some signs of resonating in small towns, it did little to sway the suburbs. When asked who could better address policing and justice issues, suburban voters — an increasingly racially diverse group — preferred Biden to Trump by a narrow margin.
In Kenosha, the Wisconsin city that saw violence after a police shooting of a Black man, Trump’s rhetoric on policing and race was too divisive for some of his own supporters.
Steelworker Jason Beck voted for Trump four years ago because he “just felt that it was time for something different,” he said. “And it was a big mistake.”
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AP VoteCast is a survey of the American electorate conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago for Fox News, NPR, PBS NewsHour, Univision News, USA Today Network, The Wall Street Journal and The Associated Press. The survey of 110,485 voters was conducted for eight days, concluding as polls closed. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish. The survey combines a random sample of registered voters drawn from state voter files; self-identified registered voters using NORC’s probability based AmeriSpeak panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population; and self-identified registered voters selected from nonprobability online panels. The margin of sampling error for voters is estimated to be plus or minus 0.4 percentage points. Find more details about AP VoteCast’s methodology.