Welcome to October Surprise, the Daily Beast’s daily countdown to the biggest election of our lifetime. It’s only 25 days until Election Day and here’s what’s happening in the race to the White House between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
THE DOWNLOAD
Tim Walz ripped Donald Trump as a heathen and a hypocrite on Friday for outsourcing his “God Bless the USA” Bibles to China.
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“We just found out his Trump-branded Bibles—yeah, they’re printed in China,” Walz said at a Michigan rally. “This dude even outsourced God to China!”
The Minnesota governor then feigned pity on Trump and offered to be “generous.” He said, “I don’t blame him. He didn’t notice the ‘made in China’ sticker, ’cause they put it inside, a place he’s never looked: in the Bible.”
Trump’s campaign has reportedly requested that the GOP candidate be flown in military aircraft and driven in an array of military vehicles during the final weeks before the election.
He also wants expanded flight restrictions over his residences and rallies, as well as bulletproof glass to be installed at his events in battleground states, according to the Washington Post.
The requests for such extraordinary and unprecedented measures, first reported by the New York Times, come after the campaign was briefed on Iranian plots to kill the former president. His advisers are concerned about drones and missiles, not just lone gunmen, who targeted him twice already over the summer.
POLLS OBSESSED
Trump leads Harris in Pennsylvania by 1 percentage point, according to a new Wall Street Journal poll. The survey found Harris with a slight edge in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia, which the Journal noted are states that include independent and third-party candidates as options on their ballots. Trump also has a slim lead in North Carolina, and although he leads by 5 points in Nevada, his edge is within the poll’s margin of error.
Harris is clinging to a 2.5 percentage point lead nationally in the FiveThirtyEight average.
ON THE MOVE
Trump took his migrant-bashing crusade to Aurora, Colorado, then to Reno, Nevada, before heading to the Coachella Valley in California to fundraise. Vice President Harris returned to Washington before heading to North Carolina, as her running mate, Tim Walz, stumped votes in Michigan.
FLASHBACK FRIDAY
Steve Bannon, then the CEO of Trump’s campaign, had some embarrassing emails revealed by the Daily Beast on Oct. 11, 2016. It turned out that he had boasted in August 2015 to his former Hollywood writing partner, Julia Jones, “I’m Trump’s campaign manager.” At the time, Bannon was running the far-right news website Breitbart. Jones revealed the emails because she was “disgusted at what Bannon has become.” In 2024 he is, until Oct. 29, inmate number 05635-509 at FCI Danbury in Connecticut.
BEAST OF THE DAY
JD Vance cast an ominous pall over the 2024 election on Friday, saying he would not have certified the 2020 election results while refusing to acknowledge Donald Trump’s loss numerous times in an interview with The New York Times.
The Republican vice presidential candidate told The Interview host Lulu Garcia-Navarro that he was “focused on the future” instead.
When Garcia-Navarro asked him again to acknowledge that Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election, Vance dodged and instead employed GOP talking points alleging big tech companies censored information about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which he said cost Trump “millions of votes.”.
SHAMELESS PLUG
Trump has his Bible (admittedly made in China) but this is not the only sign of the growing influence of religion on the Republican party. Get the latest episode of The New Abnormal to hear Talia Lavin talk about her new book Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America with Danielle Moody and Andy Levy.
