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This is an adapted excerpt from the Oct. 22 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
With less than two weeks until Election Day, both campaigns are shoring up votes in key swing states. On Tuesday, Donald Trump campaigned in North Carolina, while his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, held a rally in Arizona.
Gov. Tim Walz was in Wisconsin with former President Barack Obama, who then traveled to Detroit to hold a rally with Eminem. Also Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris sat down for two taped interviews, one with Telemundo and one with NBC News, where she made a forceful case to voters on the issues of reproductive rights and preserving American democracy.
The Republican ticket is doing its best to avoid a pair of damning new stories.
While we’re a couple of weeks out from Nov. 5, the election is already underway across the country. According to a tally from NBC News, more than 21 million votes have already been cast this election cycle. That includes more than 360,000 mail and in-person ballots in Wisconsin, where early in-person voting began Tuesday morning.
During their time in the state, Walz and Obama urged Democrats to continue to keep up those numbers come Election Day. “This thing’s close,” Walz told the crowd. “We’re still the underdogs in this, and we know we’re going to leave it all on the field. Wisconsin, you got same-day voter registration, and it’s open today to get there and vote.”
“If you haven’t voted yet, I won’t be offended if you just walk out right now,” Obama added. “Because together, we’ve got a chance to choose a new generational leadership in this country and start building a better, stronger, fairer, more hopeful America.”
Meanwhile, the Republican ticket is doing its best to avoid a pair of damning new stories. The Atlantic is out with a new article quoting more of the racist and reprehensible things Trump reportedly says behind closed doors, including alleged comments about a murdered army private.
In 2020, Vanessa Guillén, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, was killed by another soldier at the then-Fort Hood in Texas. At the time, then-President Trump offered to pay for her funeral. But when the bill came, according to the report, Trump was furious, telling his chief of staff Mark Meadows, “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a f---ing Mexican!’”
The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg goes on to report:
[Trump] turned to his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and issued an order: ‘Don’t pay it!’ Later that day, he was still agitated. ‘Can you believe it?’ he said, according to a witness. ‘F---ing people, trying to rip me off.’
According to the Atlantic, Trump didn’t pay the bill. His campaign denies the former president made those comments and Guillén’s sister disputed Goldberg’s reporting. You can make up your own mind as to whether or not that sounds like something Trump would say.
Just hours after that Atlantic report was released, The New York Times published an interview with another former Trump chief of staff, John Kelly, in which he called his former boss a fascist.
“Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that,” Kelly told Michael Schmidt. “So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”
In less than two weeks, it’s up to the American people to decide if that man — a man who reportedly disparaged a murdered soldier and, according to his own former chief of staff, fits the definition of a fascist — deserves another four years in the White House.