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Trump and Obama trade barbs in closing week of US midterm election
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.
President Trump and the former president Barack Obama have continued to trade barbs on the campaign trail, with less than a week to go before congressional races that could shift the balance of power in Washington.
While Donald Trump has been on a weeks-long campaign blitz that has exposed Republican concerns about losing control of Congress for the final two years of his presidency, Obama had kept a relatively low public profile until the past week.
However, the former Democratic president has taken a more prominent role in recent days, delivering speeches criticizing Trump, which appear to have got under the skin of the current occupant of the White House.
“These are not serious people,” he said of Donald Trump and the Republican party, speaking at a Wednesday campaign rally in suburban Atlanta. “And we’re all paying the price for their lack of seriousness.”
Obama has offered pointed criticism of Republican candidates and Donald Trump in a style that has been unusual for the former president.
He continued to do so on Wednesday, again invoking the image of Trump’s gilded renovations of the White House and noting Trump’s strident reaction to his crack last week likening it to Saddam Hussein decorating a Cheesecake Factory.
“The Saddam Hussein thing didn’t bother him. But he was very upset about the Cheesecake Factory,” Obama said. “I mean, it’s all crazy, but this is the crazy part: they mobilized a whole government response to that joke.
“The White House even called the secretary of the treasury,” the former president continued. “The guy who is trying to figure out how to lower inflation … they told him he should hold a press conference in front of the Cheesecake Factory.”
Trump, meanwhile, defended his White House decor and said Obama left the property deteriorated.
“The White House, I think, is the number one symbol of our country, and we can’t have a White House with broken windows, with broken stone that hasn’t been painted in 30 years,” he said at a rally in Ohio.
Thirty-five of the 100 Senate seats and all 435 seats in the House of Representatives are being contested next Tuesday. Nonpartisan analysts generally favor Democrats’ chances of capturing a majority in the House, with the contest for the Senate seen as very close.
Read the full story here:
In other developments:
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A federal judge declined to order California election officials to segregate ballots from people the Trump administration claimed were non-citizens, rebuffing a legally thin request from the justice department that appeared designed to cast doubt over the results of the midterms.
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Jason Turkish, who is engaged to Democratic congresswoman Haley Stevens, appeared at a campaign event for Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers in Michigan and told reporters he was voting for the Republican, not Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, who narrowly defeated Stevens in the Democratic primary.
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A heckler disrupted Trump’s speech in Ohio by shouting “Trump went on the Jeffrey Epstein plane!” The president then congratulated himself for banning his friend of at least 17 years from his beach club. “I threw Jeffrey Epstein out of a club like 20 years ago, because I thought he was a whack job,” Trump said.
Key events
Judge rebuffs Trump DoJ’s bid to force California to set aside 20,000 ballots
Sam Levine
A federal judge declined to order California election officials to segregate and not count ballots from people the Trump administration claimed were non-citizens, rebuffing a legally thin request from the justice department that appeared designed to cast doubt over the results of the midterms.
The ruling from US district judge David Carter, nominated to the federal bench by Bill Clinton, comes about two weeks after the justice department delivered a USB drive to election officials in Los Angeles and Sacramento that it said contained the names of 20,000 non-citizens on the state’s voter rolls. There are more than 23 million registered voters in California and non-citizen voting is extremely rare.
“This case is about the right of every American citizen to vote in a free and fair election,” Carter wrote in his Wednesday evening ruling. “Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch.”
“In bringing this lawsuit, the Executive would have this Court believe that it reigns as a sole sovereign,” Carter continued. “But California and its people are sovereign, too.”
The justice department gave officials just 48 hours to review the list and said it would sue the state if officials did not sequester ballots from those whose citizenship it could not confirm. The department refused to provide more details about its methodology and Los Angeles officials found preliminary indicators the list was inaccurate. The justice department then sued California on 15 October to try and force the state to sequester the ballots and verify citizenship.
How did the Cheesecake Factory end up in a Maga fight over ‘elitism’?
Matthew Cantor
Around lunchtime on Tuesday, a Rolls-Royce stopped at the intersection of Beverly Drive and Dayton Way in Beverly Hills, California. Local people in athleisure walked past Balenciaga, Dior and Prada boutiques, as visitors on Hollywood bus tours ogled nearby Rodeo Drive, where Burberry and Louis Vuitton shops meet at a celebrated street corner.
Up the street, across from the upmarket Erewhon grocery store – home to $21 smoothies – a few diners sat outside an American landmark: the Cheesecake Factory.
The beloved restaurant chain began here in Beverly Hills in 1978; now it has hundreds of locations across the US and Canada. And this week, it’s become the US’s latest surreal culture-war touchstone.
It started when Barack Obama, campaigning for Democrats in Ohio, made a joke that hit Donald Trump right in the real estate. Referring to his successor’s remodeling obsession, the former president said: “He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory. Just gold everywhere.”
The joke was about maximalism: Saddam had 100 palaces and loved gold plating, and the Cheesecake Factory, while affordable for many, offers swanky surroundings that a curmudgeon might describe as over the top. While the Beverly Hills restaurant has a fairly staid interior, a nearby location at Los Angeles’s Grove mall has a grand staircase, floral paintings on the ceilings and an ornate balcony.
Obama’s comments got a laugh at the rally – which surely contained many Cheesecake Factory customers – and went viral. It’s likely the former president knew he would touch a nerve, given Trump’s twin fixations on remodeling and on Obama himself.
Then the backlash began.
Trump and Obama trade barbs in closing week of US midterm election
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.
President Trump and the former president Barack Obama have continued to trade barbs on the campaign trail, with less than a week to go before congressional races that could shift the balance of power in Washington.
While Donald Trump has been on a weeks-long campaign blitz that has exposed Republican concerns about losing control of Congress for the final two years of his presidency, Obama had kept a relatively low public profile until the past week.
However, the former Democratic president has taken a more prominent role in recent days, delivering speeches criticizing Trump, which appear to have got under the skin of the current occupant of the White House.
“These are not serious people,” he said of Donald Trump and the Republican party, speaking at a Wednesday campaign rally in suburban Atlanta. “And we’re all paying the price for their lack of seriousness.”
Obama has offered pointed criticism of Republican candidates and Donald Trump in a style that has been unusual for the former president.
He continued to do so on Wednesday, again invoking the image of Trump’s gilded renovations of the White House and noting Trump’s strident reaction to his crack last week likening it to Saddam Hussein decorating a Cheesecake Factory.
“The Saddam Hussein thing didn’t bother him. But he was very upset about the Cheesecake Factory,” Obama said. “I mean, it’s all crazy, but this is the crazy part: they mobilized a whole government response to that joke.
“The White House even called the secretary of the treasury,” the former president continued. “The guy who is trying to figure out how to lower inflation … they told him he should hold a press conference in front of the Cheesecake Factory.”
Trump, meanwhile, defended his White House decor and said Obama left the property deteriorated.
“The White House, I think, is the number one symbol of our country, and we can’t have a White House with broken windows, with broken stone that hasn’t been painted in 30 years,” he said at a rally in Ohio.
Thirty-five of the 100 Senate seats and all 435 seats in the House of Representatives are being contested next Tuesday. Nonpartisan analysts generally favor Democrats’ chances of capturing a majority in the House, with the contest for the Senate seen as very close.
Read the full story here:
In other developments:
-
A federal judge declined to order California election officials to segregate ballots from people the Trump administration claimed were non-citizens, rebuffing a legally thin request from the justice department that appeared designed to cast doubt over the results of the midterms.
-
Jason Turkish, who is engaged to Democratic congresswoman Haley Stevens, appeared at a campaign event for Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers in Michigan and told reporters he was voting for the Republican, not Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, who narrowly defeated Stevens in the Democratic primary.
-
A heckler disrupted Trump’s speech in Ohio by shouting “Trump went on the Jeffrey Epstein plane!” The president then congratulated himself for banning his friend of at least 17 years from his beach club. “I threw Jeffrey Epstein out of a club like 20 years ago, because I thought he was a whack job,” Trump said.
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