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Republican governor Mike Dunleavy orders the inquiry into whether Mary Peltola’s campaign recruited candidates to draw votes from the Republican incumbent Sign up for the Breaking News US email Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Defense Secretary, has jettisoned the top planner in the US military, the Associated Press and other outlets have reported. The firing, the latest in a string of shakeups in top staff at the Pentagon…
Key points
- Donald Trump and Barack Obama have traded barbs on the campaign trail less than a week before congressional elections.
- Obama criticized Trump and Republicans at a Wednesday rally in suburban Atlanta, saying 'These are not serious people.'
- Trump defended his White House decor at a rally in Ohio, saying Obama left the property deteriorated.
- Thirty-five Senate seats and all 435 House seats are being contested next Tuesday.
Donald Trump and Barack Obama have continued to trade barbs on the campaign trail with less than a week to go before congressional elections that could shift the balance of power in Washington. Trump has been on a weeks-long campaign blitz that has exposed Republican concerns about losing control of Congress for the final two years of his presidency, while Obama kept a relatively low public profile until the past week.
Obama has taken a more prominent role in recent days, delivering speeches criticizing Trump. At a Wednesday rally in suburban Atlanta, he said of Trump and the Republican party: 'These are not serious people.'
Exchange over White House decor
Obama again invoked Trump's gilded renovations of the White House and noted Trump's strident reaction to his crack last week likening it 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, adding that the White House mobilized a whole government response to the joke and even called the secretary of the treasury.
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.
These are not serious people
— Barack Obama
Other campaign developments
A federal judge declined to order California election officials to segregate ballots from people the Trump administration claimed were non-citizens, rebuffing a legally thin request from the justice department that appeared designed to cast doubt over the results of the midterms.
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!' Trump then congratulated himself for banning his friend of at least 17 years from his beach club, saying 'I threw Jeffrey Epstein out of a club like 20 years ago, because I thought he was a whack job.'
