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ST. CLOUD, Minn. (AP) — As the presidential campaign enters a critical final 100 day stretch, Republican nominee Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, rallied supporters on Saturday in a state that hasn’t backed a GOP candidate for the White House since 1972.
The rally in St. Cloud, Minnesota, was designed as a sign of the campaign’s bullishness about its prospects across the Midwest, particularly when President Joe Biden was showing signs of weakness ahead of his decision to exit the campaign. Trump, who won Michigan and Wisconsin in 2016 only to lose them four years later, has increasingly focused on Minnesota as a state where he’d like to put Democrats on defense.
The rally is something of a gamble, potentially forcing the likely Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Democrats to devote resources in a state they would likely otherwise ignore. But it could also be a risk for Trump if he spends time in places that might prove to be a reach with Harris leading the ticket when he could otherwise focus on maintaining his support in more traditional battlegrounds.
Trump spoke for more than an hour and a half to cheering crowds holding signs supporting police and calling for the deportation of migrants in the country illegally. He continued a pattern of escalating attacks against Harris on immigration and crime.
He called her a “crazy liberal” and accused her of wanting to “defund the police," while he said by contrast, he wants to “overfund the police.”
“She has no clue, she's evil,” Trump said, suggesting Harris had failed at her tasks related to the border as vice president. “Kamala Harris’ deadly destruction of America’s borders is completely and totally disqualifying for her to be president.”
Trump called out Harris for a 2020 post she made after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis at the hands of police. The post had encouraged people to help protesters by donating to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which had been working on reforming the bail system and posted criminal bail for people as part of a campaign to address inequities in the system.
Though Harris did not contribute to the fund herself, her tweet was among those from celebrities and high-profile people that helped donations flow into the cash-strapped nonprofit, helping it quickly raise $34 million. In the immediate aftermath of the protests and unrest, the group actually spent little bailing out protesters.
Ammar Moussa, a spokesperson for the Harris campaign, called Trump's attack line “a desperate lie from a desperate campaign" that can't change the fact that its candidate has been convicted of multiple felonies.
Trump also knocked Harris as an “absolute radical” on abortion, seemingly sensing an opening to attack her on the issue after she has become the Biden administration's most vocal proponent of abortion rights. He wrongly suggested Harris wants abortion “right up until birth and after birth.” Infanticide is criminalized in every state, and no state has passed a law that allows killing a baby after birth.
Yet the former president also recycled much of his past material targeting Biden, showing how his campaign has sought to keep Biden's pitfalls fresh in voters' minds even after the president has ended his candidacy and endorsed Harris.
Trump's remarks followed a spirited speech from Vance, in which he leaned heavily into issues that animate the GOP base, particularly security at the U.S.-Mexico border and crime. He also took a broadside against the news media, arguing that journalists were comparing the first Black woman and person of south Asian descent to lead a major party ticket to Martin Luther King, Jr.
In May, Trump headlined a GOP fundraiser in St. Paul, where he boasted he could win the state and made explicit appeals to the iron-mining range in northeast Minnesota, where he hopes a heavy population of blue-collar and union workers will shift to Republicans after years of being solidly Democratic.
Appealing to that population has also helped Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz land on the list of about a dozen Democrats who are being vetted to potentially be Harris' running mate.
Walz posted on the social platform X on Friday poking fun at Trump's visit to his state.
“Donald Trump is coming back to the State of Hockey tomorrow for the hat trick,” Walz wrote. “He lost Minnesota in ’16, ’20, and he’ll lose it again in ’24.”
Saturday's rally took place at the Herb Brooks National Hockey Center, a 5,159-seat hockey arena. After surviving the July 13 assassination attempt on him at an outdoor rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump has only had events at indoor venues. But he said in a post on his social media network Saturday that he will schedule outdoor stops and the “SECRET SERVICE HAS AGREED TO SUBSTANTIALLY STEP UP THEIR OPERATION."
Secret Service officials would not say whether the agency had agreed to expand operations at Trump’s campaign events or had any concerns about him potentially resuming outdoor gatherings. “Ensuring the safety and security of our protectees is our highest priority,” Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said in a statement Saturday. “In the interest of maintaining operational integrity, we are not able to comment on specifics of our protective means or methods."
Earlier Saturday, Trump spoke at a bitcoin conference in Nashville, Tennessee, laying out a plan to embrace cryptocurrency if elected and promising to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the planet” and a “bitcoin superpower.”
Trump didn’t always support cryptocurrency but has changed his attitude toward the digital tokens in recent years and in May, his campaign started accepting donations in cryptocurrency.
Also Saturday, Harris ramped up her campaign for president with her first fundraiser since becoming the Democrats’ likely White House nominee.
The event in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on Saturday was expected to raise more than $1.4 million, her campaign announced, from an audience of hundreds at the Colonial Theatre. That would be $1 million-plus more than the original goal set for the event before Biden dropped out of the race.
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Swenson reported from New York. Associated Press writers Aamer Madhani and Brian Slodysko in Washington and Kimberlee Kruesi in Nashville, Tennessee, contributed to this report.
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