Trump latest news: Former president holds rally with JD Vance as VP pick calls for Biden’s resignation

Many high-profile Democrats are calling on Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 presidential campaign and yield the stage to someone else, but Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance took things one step further on Saturday.

The senator from Ohio argued in a post on X that if Biden is unfit to run again, he should also leave the White House immediately.

“Everyone calling on Joe Biden to *stop running* without also calling on him to resign the presidency is engaged in an absurd level of cynicism,” Vance wrote. “If you can’t run, you can’t serve. He should resign now.”

Donald Trump may have been wounded, but his campaign seems not to have missed a beat since he survived an assassination attempt last week.

According to a survey of eligible voters in swing states Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania from The Telegraph, 53 percent think Trump will win in November, up almost three points since a similar pollon July 10, before the shooting.

Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance follows several accounts on X that espouse far-right and white nationalist views, according to an analysis by The Independent.

The 39-year-old Ohio senator, who rose to fame with his best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy and was named as Donald Trump’s running-mate this week, follows 1,132 people on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Among them are two of the most popular figures in the Right Wing Bodybuilders scene — an online community in which many share a worldview that combines white nationalist ideas with anti-globalism, weight-lifting and nutrition.

Read more from Richard Hall and Isaac Lozano.

However, according to former Secret Service agents, the former president’s security detail should’ve never let him stay so exposed on stage after the shots rang out.

According to former Secret Service Director John Magaw, standard protocol is to fully surround the president and keep their head down as they are moved to safety.

“It was absolutely terrible coverage trying to get him out,” he told USA Today.

“It should have been faster,” A.T. Smith, deputy director of the Secret Service from 2012 to 2015, told the paper.

Now, those same hard-right views are coming to the fore against Usha Vance, Trump VP pick Senator JD Vance’s wife, who is Indian-American.

As The Washington Post notes, right-wing commentators quickly began attacking the Vances after the Ohio official joined the Trump ticket.

“What exactly are we getting here?” white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who once dined with Donald Trump, asked on a recent podcast, saying he doesn’t trust the “the guy who has an Indian wife” to “support White identity.”

It’s no accident that Donald Trump and JD Vance are making their first joint campaign appearance in Michigan.

Michigan is seen as a crucial battleground state in the 2024 election.

In 2016, Trump won the state by a razor-thin margin, just over 10,000 votes.

Four years later, Biden was able to dramatically turn the tide, winning Michigan by roughly 154,000 votes on his way to the White House.

Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump at an event last week, managed to fly a drone and obtain aerial footage of the Pennsylvania fairgrounds the same day the former president took the stage there, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The apparent breach is sure to prompt further questions about Trump’s security at the event.

Police encountered Crooks multiple times but didn’t stop him from climbing onto a roof near the rally and firing on the former president, wounding Trump, killing one attendee, and harming two other rallygoers.

The Secret Service has also suggested it faced “limited resources” ahead of the shooting.

Joe Biden may be at a perilous moment in his campaign, but that hasn’t stopped Biden administration officials from going on the attack against the Trump.

Last night, in an interview that quickly began circulating widely on social media, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg went on Real Time with Bill Maher and savaged Trump VP pick JD Vance as a thin-skinned political climber, someone who would “say whatever they needed to to get ahead.”

“Five years ago that seemed like being the anti-Trump Republican, so that’s what he was,” Buttigieg said.

The Biden official also pointed out just how shocking it was that JD Vance once compared Trump to an “opioid,” given Vance’s roots in Appalachia, which has struggled with a bitter opioid crisis.

“That really is the darkest thinking you could possibly say about Donald Trump, at least in public, but behind the scenes he was apparently calling him Hitler,” Buttigieg went on.

The secretary then compared Vance to Mike Pence, Trump’s former vice-president, who he argued made numerous moral compromises for power to join the Trump White House, only to end up being nearly killed during the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.

For more on JD Vance’s past remarks about Trump, here’s this story from Justin Rohrlich.

A law enforcement official told the outlet that the only other recent activity on the gunman’s phone was texts from his parents, asking about his whereabouts. The texts from Crooks’ parents started at about 1pm and continued during the afternoon, according to the report.