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LAS VEGAS (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris and the White House criticized Donald Trump for his attacks on the federal response to Hurricanes Helene and Milton and suggested he was wrongly trying to turn the deadly storms to his political advantage.
Attending a town hall sponsored by Univision in Las Vegas, Harris was asked about complaints that federal officials have bungled disaster recovery efforts. She responded, “In this crisis — like in so many issues that affect the people of our country — I think it so important that leadership recognizes the dignity” to which people are entitled.
“I have to stress that this is not a time for people to play politics," Harris added.
Those comments came after the former president spoke at the Detroit Economic Club, offering sympathy to people affected by Hurricanes Helene and Milton, the latter of which came ashore in Florida Wednesday night. But Trump also suggested that the Biden administration’s response had been lacking, particularly in North Carolina after Helene.
“They’ve let those people suffer unjustly,” said Trump, who has for several days promoted falsehoods about the federal response.
Harris virtually attended a briefing, held in the White House Situation Room with President Joe Biden, on emergency efforts in Milton’s wake. In subsequent comments to reporters, Biden slammed Trump and his supporters for spreading misinformation about federal assistance available to victims.
“They’re being so damn un-American with the way they’re talking about this stuff,” Biden said, then adding directly to Trump: "Get a life, man. Help these people.”
Despite the storm, Trump and Harris are both visiting key swing states strategically, trying to increase support with key voting blocs who could decide an election expected to be exceedingly close.
In Michigan, where he's looking to appeal primarily to blue-collar voters, Trump took a swipe at the city he happened to be campaigning in, suggesting that Detroit was “a mess.”
“Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president," he said of Harris. “You’re going to have a mess on your hands.”
Harris responded that Trump "yet again has trashed another great American city when he was in Detroit, which is just a further piece of evidence on a very long list of why he is unfit to be president of the United States.”
The former president used his appearance at the Detroit Economic Club to echo core themes from his 2016 campaign, saying some other countries, especially China, are ripping the U.S. off and taking manufacturing business away. Trump said powerful companies have “raped” the United States.
“They’ve been screwing us for so many years that we’re allowed to get some of that back,” Trump said about charging tariffs from countries.
Economists warn Trump’s proposed tariffs would drive up consumer costs. Trump has also claimed, without providing specifics, that he can use tariffs to reduce the U.S. budget deficit and pay for an expansion of childcare funding, even as he proposes other ideas without saying how he would replace the lost funding.
But the former president seemed to not understand the difference between the budget deficit and trade imbalances, conflating the two different economic measures as essentially being the same thing.
He noted that the federal government has nearly $36 trillion in total debt, a byproduct of the annual borrowing needed to cover the gap between tax revenues and government spending. Except Trump then seemed to indicate that the debt was a byproduct of the trade deficit with China — which is a separate issue that reflects the difference between how much a country exports and how much it imports.
“We have $36 trillion in debt,” Trump said. “For years and years and years, we’ve been accumulating. We’d have these deficits that are monstrous. We had 5,6,7 $800 billion deficit with China.”
He also claimed that “we had the highest job numbers in my administration,” but that isn’t true any longer. The unemployment rate fell slightly lower under Biden — to 3.4% early last year, the lowest in a half-century, below 3.5% before the pandemic under Trump.
Harris held a rally near Phoenix after participating in the town hall for the Spanish-language network Univision. She's looking to increase support among Hispanic voters, especially men.
Her campaign began a group this week known as “Hombres con Harris” — Spanish for “Men for Harris” — that is planning to hold events at Latino-owned small businesses, union halls, barbecues and community events until Election Day.
At Univision's “Latinos Ask, Kamala Harris Responds” event, Ivett Castillo, 40 and a Las Vegas resident, told Harris that she’s an American citizen born to two Mexican parents and that her mother died six weeks ago. She cried as she asked the vice president about “plans to support that subgroup of immigrants here their whole lives and who live and die in the shadows.” When the town hall ended, Harris went over and clasped hands with Castillo, whose face was still streaked with tears.
In response to her question, Harris noted that Biden sent a bill to Congress on his first day in office seeking to create pathways to U.S. citizenship for many people in the country illegally that was never considered.
Unauthorized border crossings hit record highs during the Biden administration before declining this year after the president issued an executive order restricting asylum claims.
Another audience member asked Harris to explain how she replaced Biden on the Democratic ticket, prompting her to respond, “President Biden made a decision that I think history will show was probably one of the most courageous a president could make."
She said Biden “put country before personal interest” and “urged me to run.”
Hispanic voters are about evenly split on whether to trust Harris or Trump to do a better job handling the economy, but they give the former president an edge on handling immigration. Hispanic women are more likely to trust Harris to better handle the economy and immigration, and Hispanic men are more likely to trust Trump on both issues, according to polling from The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Later, in Arizona, Harris praised the late Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain for defying his party and voting to preserve the Obama administration's signature health care law. That drew extended cheers while people in the crowd made thumbs-down gestures to signify McCain's opposition to the GOP effort to repeal it.
“It was late, late, late in the night and they were trying to get rid of the Affordable Care Act again,” Harris recalled of the Senate vote. “And the late, great John McCain, the great American war hero ... said: 'No you don't. No you don't. No you don't.'”
Harris also deviated from her usual campaign speech to urge Arizonans to vote in a state referendum to safeguard abortion rights and talked about preserving tribal rights and responsible water policy.
“I promise you as president I will continue to invest in drought resilience," Harris said.
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Volmert reported from Detroit. Weissert reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Christopher Rugaber, Josh Boak and Linley Sanders in Washington, Anna Johnson in Chandler, Arizona, and Adriana Gomez Licon in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, contributed to this report.