Federal judge declines to order California ballot segregation
President Donald Trump and former President Barack Obama have continued to trade barbs on the campaign trail, less than a week before congressional races that could shift the balance of power in Washington. Obama spoke at a Wednesday campaign rally in suburban Atlanta; Trump addressed a rally in Ohio.
Trump has been on a weeks-long campaign blitz that, The Guardian reported, has exposed Republican concerns about losing control of Congress for the final two years of his presidency. Obama, who kept a relatively low public profile until the past week, has taken a more prominent role in recent days, delivering speeches criticizing Trump. He has offered pointed criticism of Republican candidates and Trump in a style that The Guardian reported has been unusual for the former president, and his speeches, the outlet reported, appear to have got under the skin of the current occupant of the White House.
“These are not serious people,” Obama said of Trump and the Republican Party, speaking at the Wednesday rally. “And we’re all paying the price for their lack of seriousness.”
The former president again invoked the image of Trump’s gilded renovations of the White House, noting Trump’s strident reaction to his crack last week likening the decor 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,” Obama 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 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.
In a separate development, a federal judge declined to order California election officials to segregate ballots from people the Trump administration claimed were non-citizens, rebuffing what The Guardian described as a legally thin Justice Department request that appeared designed to cast doubt over the results of the midterms.
In another development, 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 Guardian reported that Trump 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.