Ramaswamy interested in filling Vance's Ohio Senate seat – report
Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate, said he is interested in filling the Ohio Senate seat occupied by JD Vance.
“I would strongly consider it if I were asked to serve,” Ramaswamy said about the Senate seat that would be vacated if Donald Trump is re-elected to the White House with Vance as his vice-president, the Hill reported. He added:
I would also want to have a serious conversation with President Trump about the other ways I could have an impact on the country. My top passion is taking on the regulatory state.
Ramaswamy, who was speaking in an interview with NBC News at the Republican national convention, said he had not discussed the issue yet with the Ohio governor, Mike DeWine, but noted: “I would strongly consider it if asked.”
He added that he has also discussed with Trump the possibility of serving in a future cabinet, saying:
We’ve talked about a lot of different possibilities, President Trump and I. I mean, we talk regularly. I spoke to him, actually most recently, it was after midnight on the night that he suffered that injury, tragedy, assassination attempt on Saturday night. So, we’ve talked about different ideas, potentially, in a cabinet or other ways of driving change.
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Before Donald Trump chose JD Vance as his running mate, there was some speculation that the junior Ohio senator’s presence on the party’s presidential ticket might boost the Republican Bernie Moreno in his effort to unseat the Ohio senator Sherrod Brown, the Democratic incumbent.
Republicans are bullish about winning the Senate, and the Ohio race is seen as one of their best opportunities to flip a seat.
The race was already going to be a challenge for Brown, who will have to attract some of Trump’s supporters to defy the political headwinds in his state. Vance’s nomination is unlikely to change those dynamics, said Kyle Kondik of the Crystal Ball, which has rated the race a “toss up”. Kondik wrote in an email:
Trump was already going to win [Ohio] and Vance has not been around all that long and didn’t perform all that well in his 2022 race relative to other Republicans.
He noted that Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, faced a stronger Democratic opponent in the former Ohio congressman Tim Ryan than other Republicans running in the midterm cycle, but nevertheless was not viewed as an influential political force in the state.
Ohio, once a perennial presidential battleground, is now seen as safely Republican. Brown has managed to defy the trend, winning a tough re-election race in 2018. The Democrat’s team is squarely focused on Moreno and is not adjusting strategy in any way as a result of Vance’s nomination.
Kondik, who authored The Bellwether, an analysis of Ohio’s presidential voting history, said, contrary to popular perception, running mates rarely deliver a home state boost to anymore.
Kondik noted that the last major party vice-presidential candidate to hail from Ohio, John Bricker, may have helped Republican presidential nominee Thomas Dewey clinch the state. But that was in 1944, and he ultimately lost the election to the incumbent, Franklin Roosevelt.
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Adam Schiff, a California Democrat running for Senate, warned donors in a private meeting on Saturday that his party was likely to suffer overwhelming losses if Joe Biden remained at the top of the ticket, according to a report.
“I think if he is our nominee, I think we lose,” Schiff said during the meeting, the New York Times reported.
And we may very, very well lose the Senate and lose our chance to take back the House.
Schiff also said during the fundraiser held on Saturday in East Hampton, New York, that Biden and his campaign staff had been generally unwilling to engage the views of outside pollsters and political experts, the report said.
At least one donor who attended the event said he left dejected, believing that Biden’s chances of winning were now slim and that they should focus on giving their time and money to down-ballot candidates in the hopes of salvaging something for the Democratic party, it said.
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Secret Service director says ‘the buck stops with me’ after Trump rally shooting
The attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on Saturday was “unacceptable”, the director of the US Secret Service said, adding that though “the buck stops with me”, she would not resign.
“It was unacceptable,” Kimberly Cheatle told ABC News on Monday. “And it’s something that shouldn’t happen again.”
Cheatle told ABC in her interview:
It was obviously a situation that as a Secret Service agent, no one ever wants to occur in their career. The buck stops with me. I am the director of the Secret Service, and I need to make sure that we are performing a review and that we are giving resources to our personnel as necessary.
She would not resign, she said.
A former agent, Cheatle was appointed by Joe Biden in 2022 as the 27th director of the Secret Service and the second woman in the role. Some Republicans calling for her to quit have said her appointment was a result of policies meant to increase diversity.
The Republican-run House oversight committee has called Cheatle to testify next Monday, 22 July. The committee chair, James Comer of Kentucky, said:
The United States Secret Service has a no-fail mission, yet it failed on Saturday when a madman attempted to assassinate president Trump, killed an innocent victim, and harmed others. Americans demand answers from Director Kimberly Cheatle.
Cheatle has said she will “work with the appropriate congressional committees on any oversight action” and “participate fully” in an independent review announced by Biden.
Jack Black has put his rock duo Tenacious D on hold following an onstage comment made by his bandmate Kyle Gass, which seemed to support the assassination of Donald Trump.
Gass was celebrating his birthday during a concert in Sydney on Sunday, with a cake presented to him on stage. Black told Gass to make a wish as he blew out the candles, and Gass responded, to audience laughter, “Don’t miss Trump next time” – a reference to the failed assassination attempt by 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks at a Trump rally the previous day.
Black continued with the concert following Gass’s comments, but has now put out a statement:
I was blindsided by what was said at the show on Sunday. I would never condone hate speech or encourage political violence in any form. After much reflection, I no longer feel it is appropriate to continue the Tenacious D tour, and all future creative plans are on hold. I am grateful to the fans for their support and understanding.
Tenacious D had been due to perform four more dates across Australia before travelling to New Zealand.
Senior figures in Britain’s Labour party have rejected comments by Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, that the UK could become the first “truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon” under the party.
Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, told ITV that Vance had said “quite a lot of fruity things in the past” and she looked forward to meeting him and Donald Trump if they won the US election in November.
“I don’t recognise that characterisation. I’m very proud of the election success that Labour had recently,” she said.
We won votes across all different communities, across the whole of the country, and we’re interested in governing on behalf of Britain and also working with our international allies.
The jibe is likely to be embarrassing for the UK’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, who has attempted to build bridges with Vance in recent months, comparing their impoverished childhoods. Lammy described Vance as a friend in a short speech he gave at the Hudson Institute in May when he was in opposition.
Vance was speaking at the National Conservatism conference last week, where he said:
I have to beat up on the UK – just one additional thing. I was talking with a friend recently and we were talking about, you know, one of the big dangers in the world, of course, is nuclear proliferation, though, of course, the Biden administration doesn’t care about it. And I was talking about, you know, what is the first truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon, and we were like, maybe it’s Iran, you know, maybe Pakistan already kind of counts, and then we sort of finally decided maybe it’s actually the UK, since Labour just took over.
Who is JD Vance, Trump’s vice-presidential pick?
The announcement of JD Vance as Donald Trump’s running mate in the presidential race on Monday marked the culmination of Vance’s stunning political evolution over the past several years.
Vance was once an outspoken critic of Trump, mocking him as “America’s Hitler” and “a total fraud”. But Vance came to embrace Trump as he sought a Senate seat in 2022, and he eventually won the former president’s endorsement in a crowded Republican primary.
“He’s the guy that said some bad shit about me,” Trump said at a rally in 2022. “If I went by that standard, I don’t think I would have ever endorsed anybody in the country.” Vance echoed that assessment, telling rally-goers:
The president is right. I wasn’t always nice, but the simple fact is, he’s the best president of my lifetime, and he revealed the corruption in this country like nobody else.
Vance first rose to fame in 2016 following the publication of Hillbilly Elegy, which detailed his upbringing in south-western Ohio and his later ascension to Yale law school. The book was later adapted into a 2020 film starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams.
In the months following Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, Vance’s account of his family’s experiences with poverty and drug addiction came to be viewed by some critics as a revealing portrait into the lives of Americans who helped determine the outcome of the election.
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The Democratic National Committee has released its first media campaign since Donald Trump’s naming of the Ohio senator JD Vance as his running mate, according to the Hill’s Julia Manchester.
The DNC issued a statement on Monday that described Vance as having “championed and enabled Trump’s worst policies for years”, adding that he “embodies Maga – with an out-of-touch extreme agenda and plans to help Trump force his Project 2025 agenda on the American people”.
Let’s be clear: A Trump-Vance ticket would undermine our democracy, our freedoms, and our future.
NEW: @DNC launches its first paid media campaign hitting the Trump-Vance ticket
— Julia Manchester (@JuliaManch) July 16, 2024
16 billboards and a mobile billboard in the Milwaukee area as the RNC takes place this week pic.twitter.com/zAysXALVY7
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Here are some of the defining images from day one of the Republican national convention.
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RFK Jr apologizes to Trump for leaked video of their private call
Robert F Kennedy Jr has apologized to Donald Trump after footage of a private call between the two was leaked online.
In the video, Trump can be heard discussing the assassination attempt on him on Saturday to Kennedy Jr and describing the bullet that grazed his ear as feeling like “the world’s largest mosquito”.
The former president can also be heard criticizing vaccines and telling Kennedy that “we’re going to win”.
A video of Trump’s call with RFK Jr. was leaked - Trump talks about vaccines, tells RFK Jr. doing something with him would be “big,” mentioned his call with Biden and said the bullet was like “the world’s largest mosquito.”
— Meridith McGraw (@meridithmcgraw) July 16, 2024
RFK Jr apologized for the leak. pic.twitter.com/Z6DQ955P6W
Kennedy, in a post to X this morning, said he was “mortified” about the leak and said he wanted to “apologize to the president”, referring to former president Donald Trump.
When President Trump called me I was taping with an in-house videographer. I should have ordered the videographer to stop recording immediately. I am mortified that this was posted. I apologize to the president.
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) July 16, 2024
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Donald Trump met with the independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr on Monday in Milwaukee, just hours before Trump was officially named the Republican party’s presidential nominee.
The Kennedy campaign confirmed the meeting after reports that Kennedy was planning to drop out of the race and possible endorse Trump, the New York Times reported. The report cites Stefanie Spear, a spokesperson for the Kennedy campaign:
Yes, Mr. Kennedy met with President Trump today to discuss national unity, and he hopes to meet with leaders of the Democratic Party as well. And no, he is not dropping out of the race.
She added:
He is the only pro-environment, pro-choice, antiwar candidate who beats Donald Trump in head-to-head polls.
The meeting was brokered by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, according to the report.
As the Republican national convention kicked off in Milwaukee on Monday, about a thousand people led a spirited demonstration against Donald Trump and his party on the streets outside.
The March on the RNC gathered in a park a couple of blocks from the Fiserv Forum, where Trump was formally nominated at the Republican candidate for president.
Armed with pro-Palestinian flags, anti-Trump posters and even a ventriloquist’s puppet of Trump, the coalition of progressive groups marched through downtown Milwaukee, stopping traffic and chanting “Free Palestine” as they walked.
The group had begun proceedings with a rally at Red Arrow park, where Omar Flores, co-chair of the Coalition to March on the RNC, was among the speakers. Flores told the Guardian:
Today is about telling the Republicans that they’re not welcome in our city, they’re not welcome anywhere and anywhere they show up, we’re going to show the opposition to their ideas.
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The Milwaukee mayor, Cavalier Johnson, said demonstrations that took place outside the Republican national convention yesterday proceeded “without any major problem”.
Two arrests were made on Monday, Johnson said, AP reported. One when someone tried to climb a fence into a restricted area and a second arrest when a demonstrator was blocking traffic and did not move when officers repeatedly asked her to do so. Johnson said:
No one was hurt and there was no significant property damage that was reported as a result of these demonstrations.
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Joe Biden was pressed, during his interview with NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt on Monday, on whether he had done any “soul-searching” about whether his language could “incite people who are not balanced”. Biden said:
Look. How do you talk about the threat to democracy, which is real, when the president says things like he says? Do you just not say anything because you might incite somebody?
Look. I have not engaged in that rhetoric. Now, my opponent has engaged in that rhetoric. He talks about there will be a bloodbath if he loses, talking about how he’s going to forgive all the … actually, I guess suspend the sentence of all that were arrested and sentenced to go jail because of what happened at the Capitol. I’m not out there making fun of … like, remember the picture of Donald Trump when Nancy Pelosi’s husband was hit with a hammer, talking about it? Joking about it?
Biden suggested that Donald Trump’s apparent forgiveness of January 6 rioters was also an incitement to violence.
When you say that there’s nothing wrong with going to the Capitol … putting up a noose for the former vice-president, and then you say you’re going to forgive people for that?
Lester Holt, asking Biden about the use of heated political rhetoric: “You said, "It’s time to put Trump in the bullseye.’”
— The Recount (@therecount) July 15, 2024
Biden: “It was a mistake to use the word.” pic.twitter.com/EaFQXbciMd
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Joe Biden has addressed his previous comments about putting Donald Trump “in the bullseye”, saying he thinks there needs to be more focus on the former president’s agenda.
During a high-stakes conversation at the White House with NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt on Monday, Biden was asked about the language he had used to describe Trump – as an “existential threat”, and, on a call with Democratic donors, that “it’s time to put Trump in the bullseye” – and the consequences for the election of the attempted assassination of his opponent two days ago in Pennsylvania. Biden said:
I didn’t say crosshairs. I was talking about ‘focus on’. The truth of the matter was, I guess what I was talking about at the time was, there was very little focus on Trump’s agenda.
“The term was ‘bullseye’,” Holt said. Biden replied:
It was a mistake to use the word. I didn’t mean … I didn’t say crosshairs. I meant bullseye … I meant focus on it. Focus on what he’s doing. Focus on his policies. Focus on the number of lies he told in the debate.
Biden fumbled somewhat during the answer, leaving it unclear whether he was apologizing for telling donors to put Trump in a bullseye or whether he was correcting himself after using the word “crosshairs” instead of “bullseye”.
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Liz Cheney, the former Republican congresswoman and co-chair of the House January 6 committee, has issued a warning about Donald Trump’s running mate, the Ohio senator JD Vance.
Vance has “pledged he would do what Mike Pence wouldn’t – overturn an election and illegally seize power”, Cheney wrote in a post to X this morning. “He says the president can ignore the rulings of our courts.”
He would capitulate to Russia and sacrifice the freedom of our allies in Ukraine. The Trump GOP is no longer the party of Lincoln, Reagan or the Constitution.
JD Vance has pledged he would do what Mike Pence wouldn’t - overturn an election and illegally seize power. He says the president can ignore the rulings of our courts. He would capitulate to Russia and sacrifice the freedom of our allies in Ukraine. The Trump GOP is no longer the… https://t.co/l0O64J3pSj
— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) July 16, 2024
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Key takeaways from day one of the RNC
Just two days after a gunman targeted a Trump campaign rally in Pennsylvania, leaving the candidate grazed by a bullet and one of his supporters dead, the Republican national convention kicked off in Milwaukee in a strikingly normal fashion.
Donald Trump, who made his first public appearance but did not yet address the convention, has now been officially nominated as the Republican presidential candidate. Here are key takeaways from the day:
1. As VP, Trump picks JD Vance, Hillbilly Elegy author who once called him ‘America’s Hitler’: For his vice-president, Trump chose 39-year-old JD Vance, a bestselling author who swiftly transformed himself from a self-described “never Trumper” to a Trump loyalist.
2. Trump makes his first public appearance since surviving a shooting attack in Pennsylvania: Donald Trump looked unusually somber as he emerged from backstage and joined his sons, and his new vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, in a VIP section of the convention hall audience.
3. Post-shooting speeches focus on Trump’s relationship with God, not blaming Biden: Amid multiple media reports that Trump wanted to strike a note of unity after what he saw as his own miraculous escape from death, Axios reported that “Trump ordered aides not to allow the convention’s prime-time speakers to update their remarks to dial up outrage over the shooting.”
4. Teamsters president Sean O’Brien praises Trump’s toughness in defiant pro-labor speech: One of the most prominent labor union leaders in the US brought a fiercely anti-corporate message into the heart of the GOP convention, where he wove together a denunciation of corporate power with praise of Trump’s willingness to hear from alternate voices.
5. Elon Musk is reportedly discussing major donations to a pro-Trump Super Pac: Trump’s choice of former venture capitalist and Peter Thiel protege JD Vance as his vice-presidential nominee already strengthened the link between the 2024 Trump campaign and Silicon Valley.
Read full story: Trump’s arrival and ‘our God saves’: key takeaways from day one of the RNC
RNC enters second day after Trump's first appearance since shooting
Good morning US politics readers. The Republican national convention heads into its second day in Milwaukee, Wisconsin – now with Donald Trump as its official presidential nominee and Ohio senator JD Vance as his running mate.
Republicans will be looking to keep party members’ energy high on Tuesday after an eventful day, during which the former president made a surprise appearance at Fiserv Forum with a bandage over his injured ear, his first since the assassination attempt against him on Saturday. Trump is expected to give his nomination acceptance speech on Thursday, while Vance is expected to take the stage on Wednesday night.
The theme for the convention today is “Make America Safe Once Again”, with speakers expected to focus on immigration and border security. Among those we’re expecting to hear from is Nikki Haley, Trump’s former primary rival.
Here’s what else we’re watching:
The Democratic National Committee are moving quickly to confirm Joe Biden as his party’s presidential nominee by the end of July, weeks before the Democratic national convention next month, according to reports.
Joe Biden wants to curb rent increases by penalizing landlords who hike rents beyond 5% each year, but he needs the help of Congress to put the plan into action.
The House oversight committee will receive a briefing from the Secret Service about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.
