Unlock the US election countdown newsletter for free
Big stories about money and politics in the race for the White House
Donald Trump joined billionaire supporter Elon Musk on stage to participate in a rally in the Pennsylvania town where he survived an assassination attempt, as the tense US election campaign enters its final month.
Musk, the Tesla founder who has donated to the super Pac linked to the Republican campaign, took the stage to urge voters to support Trump, echoing the candidate’s claim that the November’s vote is “the most important election of our lifetime.”
“The true test of someone’s character is how they behave under fire, and we have a president who can’t climb stairs, and another president who raises his fist after being shot: ‘War fight, fight, fight,'” Musk said, in his first appearance with the former president.
Musk declared the Democratic Party a threat to the US constitution, adding that if Trump did not win it would be “the last election”.
He said the Democrats want to “take away your right to free speech, they want to take away your right to bear arms, they want to effectively take away your right to vote.”
In his hour-and-a-half speech, Trump said his return to Butler, where a shot from an assassin nearly killed him, showed the gunman “did not demoralize us.”
“I returned to Butler after tragedy and heartbreak to send a simple message to the people of Pennsylvania and the American people – our movement to make America great again is stronger, prouder, more united, more determined and closer to victory than ever,” Mr. Trump said.
But since his first appearance in Butler, Vice President Kamala Harris has replaced Biden and the polls have narrowed. Harris leads Trump in the popular vote and in the races seven vibrational states practically a deadly heat, according to one FT analysis of FiveThirtyEight polling data. Pennsylvania is the closest of all the races, with Harris leading Trump by an average of just 0.6 percentage points.
“Over the past eight years, those who want to prevent us from achieving this future have slandered me, impeached me, indicted me, tried to keep me off the ballot, and who knows, maybe even tried to kill me,” Trump said. crowd. “But I never stopped fighting for you, and I never will.”
Tens of thousands of supporters, many of whom were at the July event in which one Trump supporter was killed and two others injured, have gathered in Butler since the morning of the rally. They chanted “Fight, fight, fight” – words Trump declared on stage immediately after the shooting.
In front of the firefighter uniform of Corey Comperatore, the supporter who was killed that day, Trump deployed his typical rhetoric, making exaggerated claims about immigration and crime rates, promising would allow fracking, a key industry in Pennsylvania, and repeat false assertions that the 2020 election was stolen. The families of Comperatore, Trump’s running mate JD Vance, and hedge fund billionaire John Paulson also attended the rally.
Trump also deployed his latest line of attack against Harris — that she mishandled the response to Tropical Storm Helene.
Helene was “Katrina to them,” he said, adding that “they said it was the worst job ever done in helping people through the devastation of a hurricane” and declared falsely claimed that the only assistance the government provided to those affected was an emergency payment of $750.
Candidates traveled across the country as the election race reached its climax. On Saturday, Harris visited North Carolina to provide an update on recovery efforts from Tropical Storm Helene, which devastated the southeastern United States, killing at least 223 people according to the latest count. .
