Trump: People without ID will ‘vote 10 times’
Trump: People without ID will ‘vote 10 times’
WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump is reiterating his concerns that the November election will be “rigged” against him, speculating that people without proper identification “are going to vote 10 times.”
Trump discussed voter ID during an interview Tuesday on Fox News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor.”
The Republican presidential nominee said, “You don’t have to have voter ID to now go in and vote and it’s a little bit scary.”
During the last two weeks, courts have dealt setbacks to voter ID laws in several states. Critics of photo ID requirements say they fall disproportionately on minority voters and the poor.
Trump says without voter ID, “people are going to walk in, they are going to vote 10 times maybe. Who knows?”
With jab at Ryan, Trump ignites new tensions in GOP
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado (AP) — As Republican loyalists continue to flee, Donald Trump ignited new party tensions Tuesday by refusing to endorse House Speaker Paul Ryan or a pair of senators seeking re-election, a remarkable display of party division just three months before Election Day.
The Republican presidential nominee told The Washington Post he’s “just not quite there yet,” when asked about an endorsement of Ryan, who faces a primary election next week. In doing so, he echoed the House speaker’s comments of almost three months earlier, when the Wisconsin congressman was initially reluctant to embrace Trump as his party’s standard bearer.
Ryan says he never sought Trump’s endorsement in the first place.
The Wisconsin Republican’s spokesman, Zack Roday, said neither Ryan nor anyone associated with his re-election ever asked for Trump’s backing. Roday added that the Ryan team was “confident in a victory next week regardless.”
Ryan faces a challenge from longshot candidate Paul Nehlen (KNEE-lin) in the Aug. 9 primary.
Trump’s statement comes amid intense fallout over his criticism of the family of the late Capt. Humayun Khan, a U.S. Army soldier who died in Iraq in 2004. Indeed, just two weeks after a Republican National Convention that tried to focus on party unity, the Trump-driven rifts inside the GOP appear to be intensifying.
On Tuesday, retiring New York Rep. Richard Hanna became the first Republican member of Congress to say he will vote for Democrat Hillary Clinton in November instead of Trump.
“He is unfit to serve our party and cannot lead this country,” Hanna wrote in a column published in The Post-Standard newspaper of Syracuse, New York. “He is unrepentant in all things.”
Also Tuesday, the woman who helped shape New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s national image declared that she’s voting for Clinton.
“As someone who has worked to further the Republican Party’s principles for the last 15 years, I believe that we are at a moment where silence isn’t an option,” former Christie senior aide Maria Comella told CNN.
They join dozens of high-profile GOP leaders who have previously said they would not vote for Trump, including the party’s 2012 nominee, Mitt Romney, and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
Trump is ‘unfit,’ Obama says, challenging GOP to end support
WASHINGTON (AP) — In a searing denouncement, President Barack Obama castigated Donald Trump as “unfit” and “woefully unprepared” to serve in the White House. He challenged Republicans to withdraw their support for their party’s nominee, declaring “There has to come a point at which you say ‘enough.’”
While Obama has long been critical of Trump, his blistering condemnation Tuesday was a notable escalation of his involvement in the presidential race. Obama questioned whether Trump would “observe basic decency” as president, argued he lacks elementary knowledge about domestic and international affairs and condemned his disparagement of an American Muslim couple whose son was killed while serving the U.S. Army in Iraq.
A chorus of Republicans has disavowed Trump’s criticism of Khizr and Ghazala Khan and the Republican nominee’s calls to temporarily ban Muslims from coming to the U.S. But Obama argued that isn’t enough.
“If you are repeatedly having to say, in very strong terms, that what he has said is unacceptable, why are you still endorsing him?” Obama asked during a White House news conference. “What does this say about your party that this is your standard-bearer?”
No prominent Republican lawmaker responded to Obama’s challenge.
Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton sees those GOP concerns about Trump as an opportunity to reach out to party moderates — particularly women — who may be so upset by the nominee that they’re willing to look past policy differences and questions about Clinton’s character.
Trump’s response? On Twitter, he said, “President Obama will go down as perhaps one of the worst president in the history of the United States!”