Trump to Hold Rally at Site of July Assassination Attempt: Election News and Live Updates

The remark was the last in a series of promises the former president made as he answered preselected questions from voters in Fayetteville, N.C., an area with a large military population. It's a dynamic that happens often at Mr. Trump's events, in which he makes direct commitments on small and large issues to appeal to and energize his specific audience.

He promised that his proposed missile defense system, an American clone of Israel's Iron Dome, would be made in North Carolina. He pledged to raise military pay. And before taking a question, he promised to restore the name of nearby Fort Liberty, the largest U.S. military base, back to Fort Bragg, which honored a Confederate general from a slave-owning family. The name was changed in June 2023 as part of the U.S. military's examination of its history with race.

Sitting onstage at the Crown Arena in front of several thousand people, many of whom said they were active-duty military service members or veterans, Mr. Trump took eight questions from audience members. Like the event's moderator, Representative Anna Paulina Luna, Republican of Florida and a veteran, the participants teed him up to offer lines from his stump speech. Many of the questions echoed his exaggerated and false claims about immigration, approved of his vow to conduct massive deportations of undocumented immigrants and acknowledged his fear-inspiring predictions of global war.

All Mr. Trump had to do, largely, was agree. He repeated his false claims that Democrats cheated in the 2020 election and made familiar attacks against the media.

Mr. Trump earlier in the day toured parts of Georgia hit by Hurricane Helene, and he claimed that reporters were doing little to cover the storm and the Biden administration's response.

Ms. Luna, a proud and combative ally of Mr. Trump, took the ball and ran with it, and claimed that the administration's response was intentional. "I do believe that they've intentionally, this is my opinion, not helped out those residents, because it's red communities that are impacted," she said.

Olivia Troye, who was Vice President Mike Pence's homeland security adviser , said that Mr. Trump had initially instructed Brock Long, then the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency , not to send "any money" to California, a state that Mr. Trump lost decisively in the 2016 election.

Mark Harvey, the senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council in the Trump administration, also recalled Mr. Trump delivering that message in a meeting with Mr. Long. (Mr. Long did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did John R. Bolton, who was the national security adviser at the time.)

Ms. Troye said the episode, which was previously reported by E&E News , was not the only time Mr. Trump resisted providing disaster aid to Democratic-leaning regions. She mentioned his response to sending aid to Puerto Rico after it was hit by hurricanes.

"We saw numerous instances — this was just one — where it was politicized," Ms. Troye said in an interview regarding the California episode, adding, "It was red states vs. blue states."

The Trump campaign disputed the former officials' accounts.

"None of this is true and is nothing more than a fabricated story from someone's demented imagination," Steven Cheung, a campaign spokesman, said in a statement. "In and out of office, President Trump has shown up to provide aid and relief to Americans in the wake of natural disasters."

Mr. Trump has twice in recent days visited southeastern states battered by Hurricane Helene, falsely accusing Ms. Harris of spending disaster funding on migrants.

But during his presidency, Ms. Troye said, securing federal financial support for California was a consistent challenge. Hillary Clinton beat Mr. Trump by 30 percentage points in California in the 2016 election .

After the 2018 wildfires, Mr. Harvey said that he had found election data showing significant support for Mr. Trump in 2016 in Orange County in Southern California, which was scarred by the fires , in an effort to sway him. The funds were unlocked soon after, he recalled.

Mr. Harvey emphasized in an interview that he did not know whether Mr. Trump was moved by election data, by pleas of California officials or by other factors.

Stephanie Grisham, who was the White House press secretary under Mr. Trump from 2019 to 2020 but is now supporting Ms. Harris , said she did not recall the California wildfire episode. But, she said, Mr. Trump "did that basically if there ever was a disaster and a state needed disaster aid."

"One of his first questions would be: Are they my people?" Ms. Grisham, who also once served as an aide to Melania Trump, said Friday.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Democrat who has led California since 2019 , described the officials' account as unsurprising, saying in a statement on Friday that Mr. Trump was "petty, vindictive and self-serving."

"Disasters don't discriminate by political beliefs and his words should be a concern for all Californians," Mr. Newsom added.

The accounts of the push and pull over California wildfire funds surfaced after Mr. Trump accused the Biden administration of withholding support for Republican-leaning areas affected by Hurricane Helene, the deadliest storm to strike the U.S. mainland in almost two decades.

The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said at a news conference on Friday that Mr. Trump's allegation was "categorically false."

Out of more than 20 Florida counties that the federal government designated as eligible for individual and public assistance through Thursday, Mr. Trump lost just three in the 2020 election.

"Michigan, let us be clear," said Ms. Harris, who called for phasing out gas cars during her 2019 run for president but has since said she does not support a mandate for electric vehicles. "Contrary to what my opponent is suggesting, I will never tell you what kind of car you have to drive. But here's what I will do. I will invest in communities like Flint."

The politics of the nation's slow march toward more electric vehicles have been tricky in Michigan, a battleground state that is home to the nation's three major automakers. As the climate crisis has worsened , President Biden's administration has required emissions standards that will most likely require about half of the new cars sold in the United States to emit zero emissions by 2032 .

To reach that goal, the Biden administration has offered incentives to manufacturers who produce electric vehicles and tax credits for consumers who buy them.

But the batteries that power electric vehicles require fewer workers to construct them than the gas-powered engines that have long been the heartbeat of Michigan's auto industry. That has led Mr. Trump and other Republicans, whose campaigns are funded in part by oil and gas company executives, to warn of mass job losses for auto workers if the nation transitions to more electric vehicles.

Ms. Harris on Friday emphasized the Biden administration's work to bolster Michigan's auto manufacturing industry. She also attacked Mr. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, over Mr. Vance's refusal on Wednesday to say their administration would maintain a $500 million federal grant Mr. Biden made to a General Motors factory in Lansing, which is about an hour from Flint.

"Michigan, we together fought hard for those jobs, and you deserve a president who won't put them at risk," Ms. Harris said.

Her visit to Michigan was part of her campaign's aggressive pitch to secure the Northern battleground states by pitching herself as the candidate for the working and middle classes.

Earlier on Friday, Ms. Harris stumped at a firehouse in Redford Township, a Detroit suburb, where she highlighted her support for unions and contrasted it with Mr. Trump, whom she called one of the "biggest losers" of manufacturing jobs in American history.

"I will always put the middle class and working families first," she said. "I come from the middle class, and I will never forget where I came from."

The rally was Ms. Harris's fourth trip to Michigan since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee. It was her first to Flint, a predominantly Black city of about 80,000 people that was thrust into the national spotlight a decade ago when its drinking water was found to be contaminated with dangerous levels of lead.

"You know all too well, Flint, that clean water should be a right for everyone, not just for the people who can afford it," Ms. Harris told the audience packed into the city's hockey arena.

Flint has also long been reliant on its General Motors auto factories. The left-wing movie producer Michael Moore's first hit documentary, "Roger and Me," focused on damage done to the city after the company closed several factories in the 1980s.

Among the liberal allies joining Ms. Harris in Flint were Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan; Shawn Fain, the president of the powerful United Auto Workers union; and Magic Johnson, the basketball star-turned-entrepreneur who grew up in Lansing and led Michigan State University to a national championship. Mr. Johnson's father, who died last year , worked at an Oldsmobile factory and had a garbage-hauling business.

Mr. Johnson extolled Ms. Harris's commitment to union workers and also confronted one of her campaign's acute challenges: a struggle to match Mr. Biden's popularity with Black men.

"Our Black men, we've got to get them out to vote," Mr. Johnson said. Mr. Trump, he added, "promised a lot of things last time to the Black community that he didn't deliver on."

With four-and-a-half weeks until Election Day, the ad also lands at a time when more voters are tuning in and paying attention. Ms. Harris's allies have been highlighting the former president's history of erratic behavior and the condemnation of people who worked with him.

Some aspects of the spot seem intended as much to win voters as to aggravate Mr. Trump: for instance, it begins with footage of David Muir, the ABC News anchor who Mr. Trump has complained bitterly about since he moderated Mr. Trump's debate against Ms. Harris, one that Mr. Trump was widely seen as losing.

The spot is set to begin airing this weekend as part of an existing $370 million fall advertising spending plan by the Harris team across battleground states, although it's unclear precisely how frequently it will air.

The spot opens with Mr. Muir noting that 100 Republicans who worked in the national security space under several G.O.P. presidents — Ronald Reagan, both Bushes and Mr. Trump himself — have backed Ms. Harris.

The retired Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who oversaw the joint special operations command in Iraq under President George W. Bush, is quoted saying of Ms. Harris, "She came up as a prosecutor, an attorney general into the Senate. She has the kind of character that's going to be necessary for the presidency."

The spot then quotes Ms. Cheney, a conservative from Wyoming and the daughter of a former Republican vice president. Ms. Cheney led the House select committee that investigated Mr. Trump's efforts to cling to power after his 2020 election loss and the attack on the Capitol by a mob of his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021. Ousted from congress after she turned against Mr. Trump, Ms. Cheney appeared with Ms. Harris in Wisconsin on Thursday.

Ms. Cheney said that Ms. Harris was "standing at the breach in a critical moment in our nation's history. We have a shared commitment as Americans to do what's right for this country. This year, I am proudly casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris."

The narrator closes by listing the military officials, intelligence officials and former Trump aides who "agree — there's only one candidate fit to lead our nation and that is Kamala Harris."

The Harris team believes there is an opening for voters to be receptive to such a message right now, but the Trump team has consistently argued otherwise, saying it thinks any undecided voters already have the information the ad shares. A Trump spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ad.

On Truth Social, at 12:29 a.m. on Friday, Mr. Trump mocked Ms. Cheney, writing, "Liz Cheney lost her Congressional Seat by the largest margin in the history of Congress for a sitting Representative. The people of Wyoming are really smart!"

"I'm confident it will be free and fair," Mr. Biden told reporters. "I don't know whether it will be peaceful."

"Things that Trump has said and the things that he said last time when he didn't like the outcome of the election were very dangerous," Mr. Biden added, noting that during the vice-presidential debate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio "did not say he'd accept the outcome" of the coming election.

"So, I'm concerned about what they're going to do," he added.

Mr. Biden's remarks underscore the concern inside the government about the possibility that there could be a repeat of the kind of violence that broke out at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 after Mr. Trump's defeat in the 2020 election.

The president declined to comment about any preparations that the administration is making to try to counter that kind of violence, saying only that he is briefed about threats to domestic security all the time.

In one sense, Mr. Biden's acknowledgment that he is not certain the transfer of power will be peaceful is striking, given how often he describes himself as an optimistic person. But talking about the possibility of election violence on the part of Mr. Trump's supporters also fits with the Democratic campaign-year strategy of warning about Mr. Trump and those loyal to him.

In her debate with Mr. Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris accused the former president of not supporting a peaceful transfer of power.

"Donald Trump the candidate has said in this election there will be a blood bath, if this — and the outcome of this election — is not to his liking. Let's turn the page on this," she said. "Let's not go back. Let's chart a course for the future and not go backwards to the past."