Election Highlights: Harris and Walz Rally in Las Vegas to End Their Introductory Tour (2024)

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Here’s the latest on the presidential race.

The polls were the latest sign of Ms. Harris’s political momentum since she announced that she had chosen Mr. Walz to be her vice-presidential candidate. The new ticket has been drawing large crowds, including at a rally in Glendale, Ariz., on Friday that the Harris campaign claimed had more than 15,000 people in attendance, which would have been its biggest rally yet.

Mr. Trump was scheduled to attend fund-raisers in Jackson Hole, Wyo., and Aspen, Colo., on Saturday. On Friday, he unveiled fresh attacks against Ms. Harris during a campaign event in Bozeman, Mont., twice interrupting his speech to play compilations of some of her past remarks that his campaign hopes will portray her as overly liberal and inept.

Mr. Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, rallied near Las Vegas last week, denouncing the vice president’s role in the Biden administration’s border policies. At her Arizona rally, Ms. Harris said she supported “strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship.”

Here’s what else to know:

• A twist on that helicopter tale: Mr. Trump spent Friday doubling down on his story of nearly crashing during a helicopter ride with Willie Brown, the notable Black politician from California. Another Black politician from California, Nate Holden, said in an interview with The New York Times that he had been on a helicopter ride with Mr. Trump around 1990 when the aircraft experienced mechanical trouble and was forced to make an emergency landing in New Jersey.

• A first-time endorsem*nt: A Latino rights group backed Ms. Harris, breaking with its 95-year history of abstaining from formal presidential endorsem*nts. The League of United Latin American Citizens, known as LULAC, said its members were stirred to action by concerns over the potential negative impact on Latinos if Mr. Trump were elected again.

• Not an endorsem*nt: Joe Rogan, the world’s most popular podcaster, backpedaled on comments he made on Thursday that seemed to throw his support behind the independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. After backlash from Mr. Trump’s supporters, Mr. Rogan, the podcaster with a large, devoted following that leans young and male, posted on X that what he said was not “an endorsem*nt.” Another podcaster, Tim Pool, also expressed his support for Mr. Kennedy before quickly switching his support to Mr. Trump in the face of withering criticism from Trump supporters.

• A tale of two very different bank accounts: Mr. Vance and Mr. Walz both came from modest backgrounds in the Midwest, but their personal fortunes have wildly diverged since then. Mr. Vance is a multimillionaire. Mr. Walz has much less than that, and is already emphasizing that contrast on the campaign trail.

• Generating buzz: A high school class lesson that Mr. Walz gave 31 years ago is getting new attention online. As a geography teacher in Nebraska in 1993, Mr. Walz asked his students to take what they had learned about the Holocaust to predict which nation was most at risk for genocide. “They came up with Rwanda,” Mr. Walz said, talking about the project at a conference last month. “Twelve months later, the world witnessed the horrific genocide in Rwanda.”

The hacking of presidential campaigns begins, with the usual fog of motives.

By Saturday night, former President Donald J. Trump was declaring that Microsoft had informed his campaign “that one of our many websites was hacked by the Iranian Government — Never a nice thing to do!” but that the hackers had obtained only “publicly available information.” He attributed it all to what he called, in his signature selective capitalization, a “Weak and Ineffective” Biden administration.

The facts were murkier, and it is unclear what, if anything, the Iranian group, which Microsoft called Mint Sandstorm, was able to achieve.

Mr. Trump’s campaign was already blaming “foreign sources hostile to the United States” for a leak of internal documents that Politico reported on Saturday that it had received, though it is unclear whether those documents indeed emerged from the Iranian efforts or were part of an unrelated leak from inside the campaign.

The New York Times received what appears to be a similar if not identical trove of data from an anonymous tipster purporting to be the same person who emailed the documents to Politico.

Either way, the events of the past few days may well portend a more intense period of foreign interference in a race whose sudden turns, and changes of candidates, could have thrown the hackers off their plans.

Russia has so far played a relatively minor role, investigators and cybersecurity experts say, focusing instead on seeking to undermine both the Olympics, from which it was barred from fielding its own team, and support for Ukraine. And while American intelligence officials say they have little doubt that Russia wants to see Mr. Trump return to office, Chinese hackers, they say, seem uncertain how to play the election; they have reason to dislike both Mr. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.

There is little doubt, investigators say, that the Iranians want to see Mr. Trump defeated. As president, he withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal, reimposed economic sanctions on Iran and then, in January 2020, ordered the killing in Iraq of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the commander of the Quds Force, a clandestine wing of the Revolutionary Guards responsible for foreign operations.

Four years later, the Revolutionary Guard Corps appears still determined to avenge Suleimani’s death, and just last week the Justice Department announced it had charged a Pakistani man who had recently visited Iran, accusing him of trying to hire a hit man to assassinate political figures in the U.S., most likely including Mr. Trump. (There is no evidence that Iran was involved in the July 13 attempt on Mr. Trump’s life in Butler, Pa.)

Mr. Trump often casts his actions against Iran as evidence of his strength, despite the fact that his exit from the Iran deal gave Tehran an opening to rebuild a nuclear program that had been hobbled by the 2015 agreement. Still, the combination of the hack and the hit men looking for Mr. Trump and his former aides gave the former president an obvious foil, and he was using it over the weekend to make the case that the Iranians would prefer a continuation of the Biden-Harris administration.

Microsoft stopped short of saying that the hacking effort it detected was focused on Mr. Trump’s campaign, though the campaign itself said that was the case. In an interview, Tom Burt, the head of the company’s customer security and trust team, said that in June, “the Iranian team associated with Iranian intelligence” operations of the Revolutionary Guards successfully breached the email account of a former campaign adviser, whom the company did not name. From that account, he said, the Iranians sent a spear phishing email to an official of a presidential campaign.

While it would have appeared to the recipient to have come from the former campaign adviser, Mr. Burt refused to say whether the targeted campaign was also Mr. Trump’s. By long-established practice, Microsoft says, it can reveal such details only with the permission of the victim of an attack.

In many ways, the effort was similar in technique to what Iran attempted when it sought to interfere in the 2020 presidential campaign. This time, however, the Iranian effort looks to have been more sophisticated — namely, through the hacking of a trusted intermediary — suggesting the hackers learned something from what the Russians accomplished in past campaigns, notably in 2016.

But Mr. Burt said the company could not determine if the effort was successful in penetrating the campaign it targeted.

The documents sent to Politico, as it described them, and to The Times included research about and assessments of potential vice-presidential nominees, including Senator JD Vance, whom Mr. Trump ultimately selected. Like many such vetting documents, they contained past statements with the potential to be embarrassing or damaging, such as Mr. Vance’s remarks casting aspersions on Mr. Trump.

In a statement on Saturday, Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, preemptively chastised outlets that reported on any information that was improperly obtained.

“Any media or news outlet reprinting documents or internal communications are doing the bidding of America’s enemies and doing exactly what they want,” he wrote.

The 2016 election that Mr. Trump won was marked by similar “hack and leak” efforts after Russian hackers broke into the email accounts of top Democratic officials. Leaked emails showed the internal workings of the party and of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and also revealed criticisms of Mrs. Clinton by aides, and a trove of them was published by WikiLeaks in the final weeks of the presidential race.

Seeking an edge then, Mr. Trump’s campaign seized on the emails — many of them from Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta. “We love WikiLeaks,” Mr. Trump declared at the time.

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Rallying in Las Vegas, Harris pledges to end federal taxes on tips.

“When I am president,” Ms. Harris told the Las Vegas crowd, “we will continue our fight for working families of America, including to raise the minimum wage and eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers.”

The “no tax on tips” pitch has garnered bipartisan support since Mr. Trump first floated it in June, including from Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, and both of Nevada’s Democratic senators, Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen. Mr. Trump also announced his support for the policy in Las Vegas.

The former president responded immediately to Ms. Harris’s proposal on Saturday night, posting on his social media website, Truth Social, that she had “copied” his own. “This was a TRUMP idea,” he wrote. “She has no ideas, she can only steal them from me.”

The Las Vegas stop was the last public event of a five-city introduction of the Harris-Walz ticket. As with the other rallies, Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz drew a crowd many times larger than any that had shown up for President Biden while he was seeking re-election.

By Saturday, there were signs that some of the Democrats’ good vibes may have an expiration date. The Harris campaign said Mr. Walz “misspoke” when he said he had carried weapons of war “in war” in a video articulating his views on gun control. And Ms. Harris, before her event in Las Vegas, answered several questions from reporters for the first time since becoming the Democratic nominee — a development that took place after pressure from Mr. Trump and his campaign.

But overall, the week’s rollout was widely viewed as a success. Ms. Harris has engendered more enthusiasm than any Democratic nominee since Barack Obama in 2008. The appointment of Mr. Walz as her running mate took place without any significant grumbling from the party — a bit of a surprise after a two-week vice-presidential audition that surfaced ideological divisions in the party, particularly over the war in Gaza.

On Saturday, Mr. Walz urged the crowd at the arena on the campus of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas — which the campaign said included more than 12,000 people — not only to vote for the Democratic ticket but also to work to ensure their friends and neighbors did, too.

“I know very clearly that I am preaching to the choir,” Mr. Walz said. “But here’s my words for you: The choir needs to sing. The choir needs to sing.”

During stops in Philadelphia, Wisconsin, Detroit and Arizona, Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz spoke to capacity crowds. By the end of the week, the high points in their stump speeches had become familiar enough to audiences that people in the crowd shouted them along with the candidates. All told, the new running mates drew more than 64,000 attendees to their rallies, according to estimates from the campaign.

“Aren’t they a breath of fresh air?” Representative Susie Lee, Democrat of Nevada, asked attendees in Las Vegas.

Mr. Biden had trailed Mr. Trump badly in Nevada, where inflation is a top concern for many voters. But Ms. Harris has tightened that gap significantly since Mr. Biden dropped out.

On Friday, the vice president secured the backing of the Culinary Workers Union, an endorsem*nt that will likely add to her campaign’s organizing operation and eventual voter turnout.

The culinary union is a 60,000-member organization that represents casino and hotel workers and has been a key part of the coalition that has helped Democrats win in Nevada.

Mariana Swanson, a culinary union member who worked as a restroom attendant at a Las Vegas nightclub where she depended on tips, said Ms. Harris’s announcement came as a “shock,” though a welcome one.

“It’s more money for taking care of your family,” said Ms. Swanson, 43, a Democrat and one of many attendees wearing a red culinary union T-shirt. “It’s more money for paying your bills.”

With her promises to raise the minimum wage and eliminate taxes on tips, Ms. Harris seemed to preview the planned release of her policy platform next week. She had told reporters earlier on Saturday that the platform would focus on the economy and lowering costs for working families.

In addition to rank-and-file Democrats, wealthy donors are also responding to the new ticket. On Sunday, Ms. Harris was scheduled to attend a fund-raiser in San Francisco that drew more than $12 million in contributions, her campaign said.

Ms. Harris’s crowd in Las Vegas would have been larger than it was, but law enforcement officials closed the doors as people fell ill while waiting outside the arena in temperatures that reached 109 degrees. Roughly 4,000 people were in line at that point and had to be turned away, the Harris campaign said.

“Don’t worry,” a hoarse-voiced Mr. Walz promised those who had made it inside. “We’re going to be back a lot.”

Before the rally began, thousands of attendees stood and danced in their seats waving Harris-Walz signs, as disco remixes, hip-hop and Latin pop blared over the speakers and the arena’s lights flashed in multicolored rhythm.

“We’ve got a party up in here,” D-Nice, a D.J. and the event’s M.C., shouted to roars of approval. “Let’s light this place up.”

Harris also expressed support for raising the federal minimum wage. She told reporters earlier today that she would release her policy platform next week, with a focus on the economy and on lowering costs for working families.

Donald Trump accused Harris of copying his “no taxes on tips” policy. In a post on his social media site, Truth Social, he wrote that Harris “has no ideas, she can only steal from me” and insisted that she would not follow through on the pledge. “This was a TRUMP idea,” he wrote.

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Torres also has kind words for Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Harris’s running mate, saying that if he can “handle a high school lunch room,” then the vice presidency will be a piece of cake.

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Fun fact — that $12 million is precisely the amount that former President Donald J. Trump raised in San Francisco at an event this summer. But Trump raised it from only about 100 people.

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Harris hopes a new playbook will neutralize G.O.P. attacks on immigration.

This week, she has hit back by promising to heighten border security if elected and slamming her Republican opponent, former President Donald J. Trump, for helping kill a bipartisan border deal in Congress. And her campaign has walked back some of the more progressive positions she took during her bid for the Democratic nomination in 2019, including her stance that migrants crossing the U.S. border without authorization should not face criminal penalties.

“I was attorney general of a border state,” Ms. Harris, who was once California’s top prosecutor, said on Friday at a rally in Arizona, a swing state where immigration is a top concern for voters. “I went after the transnational gangs, the drug cartels and human traffickers. I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won.”

A day earlier, the Harris campaign released a television advertisem*nt highlighting her pivot. The ad, targeted to voters in the battleground states, promised that Ms. Harris would “hire thousands more border agents and crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking.” It made no mention of undocumented immigrants already in the United States — a top priority for many progressives and immigration activists — although in her Arizona speech Ms. Harris stressed the importance of “comprehensive reform” that includes “an earned pathway to citizenship.”

No other Democratic nominee has taken a position this tough on border security since Bill Clinton. Her stance reflects a change in public opinion since Mr. Trump left the White House in 2021. More Americans, including many Democrats and Latino voters, have expressed support for hard-line immigration measures.

The shift in public opinion comes as Republicans have escalated their rhetoric against migrants. Border crossings skyrocketed during the Biden administration, though more recently they have sharply declined since a Biden executive order designed to clamp down on the border. The question for Ms. Harris is whether her new message as the party’s standard-bearer will come too late for voters who have already formed opinions of her record.

Senior Trump campaign officials have ranked immigration as among Ms. Harris’s deepest vulnerabilities and sought to pin responsibility for the Biden administration’s policies on her, calling her the “border czar.” The title far exceeds the actual policy portfolio given to her by Mr. Biden, who asked her to address the root causes of migration from Latin America.

Democratic polling has raised similar concerns about Ms. Harris’s immigration record. Blueprint, a Democratic group, recently tested six potential Republican lines of attack on Ms. Harris — including labeling her the “border czar” — and found that those involving immigration were the most effective, even more so than attacks related to the economy and inflation.

Other polls have shown that voters place more trust in Mr. Trump’s ability to handle border issues than in Ms. Harris’s. But if Ms. Harris can at least counter Republican arguments on immigration, she may be able to sway voters on issues more friendly to Democrats, such as abortion, her allies say.

The decision for the Harris campaign to frame her record as California attorney general as a “border-state prosecutor” stands in contrast to how she ran in the 2020 Democratic primary.

Then, during a debate, she raised her hand in response to a question about whether people who are here illegally should be eligible for public health care.

For his part, Mr. Trump has attacked Ms. Harris over the border in dark terms, engaging in fear-mongering about migrants and using dehumanizing language to falsely paint them as a threat to Americans.

“Every day, Kamala is letting migrant criminals roam free to assault, rape, mutilate and kill our citizens,” the former president said at a rally in Montana on Friday.

Chris DeRose, a Republican who served as a clerk of courts in Arizona’s Maricopa County, said many swing voters would be dubious of Ms. Harris’s rhetoric.

“She’s part of the Biden-Harris administration,” Mr. DeRose said. “There’s going to be some skepticism.”

But Ms. Harris and her allies have tried to make Mr. Trump’s immigration record into its own campaign issue. This year, Mr. Trump successfully convinced Senate Republicans to kill a bill supported by Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris that would have effectively mandated that the border be shut down to migrants when numbers reached certain levels and that vastly expanded detentions and deportations.

“Donald Trump tanked the deal,” Ms. Harris said in Arizona as a crowd of more than 15,000 supporters booed. “Because he thought by doing that it would help him win an election.”

Jen Cox, a senior adviser for the Harris campaign in Arizona, said Democrats in that state, including Senator Mark Kelly, had won elections with tougher messages on immigration.

“Voters want to see folks be serious about actually fixing the broken immigration system and securing the border,” Ms. Cox said in an interview. “They don’t want to see folks play politics with it.”

In a closely watched special election in New York this year, Tom Suozzi, a Democrat, won a competitive House race after slamming Mr. Trump over the scuttled border deal and taking unusually hard-line stances for a member of his party, including calls to temporarily shut down the border and deport migrants who assault the police.

“The most effective politician is the one that says what the people are thinking already,” Mr. Suozzi said. “And people are talking about this issue. They are very much concerned about it. And the vice president can continue to emphasize that, yes, we recognize this is a problem and we are willing to compromise to solve the problem, unlike the other side.”

Harris campaign aides say her move to the center since the 2020 primary had been shaped by her time as vice president.

Mike Madrid, a longtime G.O.P. consultant focused on Latino voters, said Ms. Harris’s pledge to sign the border security bill, which did not include protections for undocumented immigrants already in the United States, and the security-focused message of her new television ad reflected wider changes among Democrats.

Since the Obama years, Democrats had sought to fuse efforts to increase border security with calls to establish permanent paths to legal residency and citizenship for the roughly 10 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, many of whom have lived in the country for years, holding jobs, paying taxes and starting families.

But the Latino electorate, the fastest-growing slice of the voter bloc, now tends to be third- and fourth-generation voters more removed from the immigration experience, Mr. Madrid said.

“This doesn’t mean you have to go all Donald Trump on immigration,” he said. “It means you have to lead with border security and then weave in the elements of immigration reform later.”

Michael Gold contributed reporting from Bozeman, Mont., and Reid J. Epstein contributed reporting from Washington.

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Inside, it’s a full celebration, with thousands of people standing and dancing in their seats to disco remixes. “We’ve got a party up in here,” the D.J. D-Nice, the event’s M.C., says over the speakers. It cannot be said enough how different the energy at Harris’s rallies has been from that at President Biden’s.

Harris has faced criticism — including from former President Donald J. Trump — for not holding a news conference or sitting for interviews with journalists.

The Harris campaign says Walz “misspoke” in a comment about his military service.

“We can make sure that those weapons of war that I carried in war is the only place where those weapons are at,” Mr. Walz said in the clip, which the campaign had shared Tuesday on social media, just hours after Ms. Harris named him as her running mate.

Mr. Walz deployed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as part of Operation Enduring Freedom, but not in a combat zone.

Lauren Hitt, a spokeswoman for the Harris-Walz campaign, said in a statement on Saturday that Mr. Walz’s remarks had been a misstatement and that he had not tried to mislead anyone about his military service.

“In making the case for why weapons of war should never be on our streets or in our classrooms, the governor misspoke,” Ms. Hitt said.

Mr. Walz, who is in his second term as Minnesota’s governor, has come under intense scrutiny from Republicans over his military record. They have accused him of exaggerating his record and also of quitting the Army National Guard two decades ago to avoid being deployed to Iraq, rekindling claims made by two retired command sergeant majors during Mr. Walz’s first campaign for governor in 2018.

Leading that criticism is Senator JD Vance of Ohio, former President Donald J. Trump’s running mate, who has accused Mr. Walz of “stolen valor.”

Mr. Vance served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 2003 to 2007 during the Iraq war. He was deployed to Iraq in 2005 and 2006 with the aircraft wing but was not a frontline combatant. His official military occupation, known as a combat correspondent, meant he was tasked with basic communication roles such as writing articles about the happenings in his unit.

The Republican broadsides against Mr. Walz resembled the “Swift Boat” attacks in the 2004 presidential election that created a cloud of uncertainty over the military record of Senator John F. Kerry, then the Democratic presidential nominee. Chris LaCivita, who is a senior strategist for the Trump campaign, was an architect of those attacks, which were highly effective.

The conservative-leaning editorial board of The Wall Street Journal spurned comparisons this week between Mr. Kerry’s situation and Mr. Walz’s military service, which it wrote was “far different.” It said that there were plenty of reasons to criticize Mr. Walz, but that his military record was not one of them. It quoted a New York Sun editorial that described the attacks as “thin gruel.”

On a number of occasions, Mr. Walz has emphasized that he did not serve in combat. During a CNN interview last month, when the anchor Jake Tapper said that Mr. Walz had deployed to Afghanistan, Mr. Walz corrected him and said that he had served in Europe in support of that war.

In an interview with Minnesota Public Radio in 2018, when he was running for governor, Mr. Walz said of his military career: “I know that there are certainly folks that did far more than I did.”

And when Mr. Walz was running for re-election as governor in 2022, The Minneapolis Star Tribune wrote that he had shied away from dramatic accounts of his time in the National Guard, framing himself instead as a former high school teacher and football coach.

The 2018 clip of Mr. Walz saying that “those weapons of war that I carried in war is the only place where those weapons are at,” was not the only one that Mr. Trump’s allies seized on this week.

They also pounced on a 2007 C-SPAN clip from a Capitol Hill news conference when Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker at the time, thanked Mr. Walz for his service “on the battlefield.” Mr. Walz was identified by C-SPAN as an “Afghanistan war veteran” at the time.

Reid J. Epstein, Michael C. Bender, Thomas Gibbons-Neff and John Ismay contributed reporting.

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Former President Donald J. Trump has tried to extricate himself from the negative attention surrounding Project 2025, the right-wing policy playbook prepared for the next Republican president that Democrats have used as a political cudgel.

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Fine-tuning his attacks on Harris, Trump tries using her words against her.

The first video drew on statements that Ms. Harris made during the 2020 presidential campaign, when she tacked to the left and backed progressive ideas on criminal justice reform. The second was a montage of interviews and speeches that Mr. Trump’s campaign used to mock her speaking style and insult her intelligence.

The videos did little to alter the message that the Trump campaign has deployed against Ms. Harris for weeks and that Mr. Trump summed up during his speech on Friday.

“America cannot survive for four more years of this bumbling communist lunatic,” Mr. Trump told thousands gathered in the Brick Breeden Fieldhouse at Montana State University. “We cannot let her win this election.”

Mr. Trump and his allies have repeatedly tried to portray Ms. Harris as more liberal than President Biden in the three weeks since he ended his campaign and cleared the way for her to be the Democratic presidential nominee.

The video compiling her past positions accused her of supporting a ban on fracking, mandatory gun buybacks and a single-payer health insurance system like “Medicare for all.”

Ms. Harris has backed away from those policy positions, which largely stem from her time in the 2020 presidential race. But Mr. Trump — who has been known to flip-flop or equivocate on hot-button issues like abortion — argued that her early statements were the only ones that mattered.

Mr. Trump’s rally on Friday was his first since Ms. Harris chose Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota as her running mate, and he used the selection to bolster his portrait of the Democratic ticket as overly liberal. Effectively likening Mr. Walz to a socialist, he accused the governor of being too lax in his response to protests that turned to riots in Minneapolis after the police murder of George Floyd and for signing a law giving access to menstrual products to transgender children.

Referring to Mr. Walz as “Comrade Walz,” Mr. Trump argued that Ms. Harris tapped him for his progressive bona fides. “This is her ideology,” he said.

Mr. Trump also acknowledged that he has frequently mispronounced Ms. Harris’s given name in recent speeches, though he added that he “couldn’t care less” how it should be pronounced. He admitted that he has in the past “done a lot of bad name-calling” in which he has purposefully mispronounced a person’s name. “They say, ‘Sir, you made a mistake,’” Mr. Trump recounted. “I said, ‘No, I didn’t.’”

Still, Mr. Trump’s speech offered continued evidence of the growing pains he has faced as he tries to shift years of attacks against Mr. Biden toward Ms. Harris.

Even as he argued that Ms. Harris was more extreme than Mr. Biden, he tied her to the president’s policies on immigration and the economy.

At one point, he said she was the one running the country the past four years, even as he repeatedly argued that she was too unintelligent or incompetent to do so effectively. Mr. Trump has long made the same argument about Mr. Biden.

Mr. Trump's rally is part of a western swing that includes fund-raisers in mountain resort towns favored by the wealthy. Before he took the stage in Bozeman, he attended an event in Big Sky, Mont., and on Saturday he will travel to fund-raisers in Jackson Hole, Wyo., and Aspen, Colo.

Montana is not an obvious site for a presidential campaign rally. Mr. Trump won the state handily in both 2016 and 2020, and he is expected to do so again in November. But with Republicans keen on flipping Democrats’ narrow edge in the Senate, Mr. Trump traveled to Montana to support his party’s Senate candidate there, Tim Sheehy, who is looking to unseat the Democratic incumbent, Senator Jon Tester.

At one point, Mr. Trump, whose flight to Bozeman was diverted to another city after his plane suffered a mechanical issue, reflected on how long it takes to travel to Montana.

“I’ve got to like Tim Sheehy a lot to be here,” he said.

Yes, Trump was in a scary helicopter ride, but not with that politician.

“It was Willie Brown,” Mr. Trump, who spent much of the last year hoping to make gains with Black voters, posted. “But now Willie doesn’t remember?”

Mr. Brown, 90, who was mayor of San Francisco and speaker of the California Assembly, gave several interviews on Thursday and Friday saying such a trip never occurred.

Turns out, however, that there was a Black politician from California who once made an emergency landing in a helicopter with Mr. Trump. It just wasn’t Mr. Brown.

Nate Holden, 95, a former Los Angeles city councilman and state senator, said in an interview with The Times that he had been on a helicopter ride with Mr. Trump around 1990 when the aircraft experienced mechanical trouble and was forced to make an emergency landing in New Jersey.

Recounting an episode that he had described earlier on Friday to Politico, Mr. Holden said Mr. Trump had been seeking to develop the site of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when it was part of Mr. Holden’s district. Mr. Trump wanted him to see his Taj Mahal casino, Mr. Holden said, so on a visit to Manhattan, he rode with Mr. Trump from his Midtown skyscraper to a helipad, where the two took off for Atlantic City, accompanied by Mr. Trump’s brother Robert and by his executive vice president of construction and development, Barbara Res.

“He was trying to impress me,” Mr. Holden said. “We start flying to New Jersey. He said, ‘Look at the skyline! Look at how beautiful it is! And I’m part of it!’”

Mr. Holden said he wasn’t impressed. “I grew up in New Jersey,” he said. “It ain’t nothing new to me.”

“Anyway,” he continued, “we start flying to Atlantic City. He’s talking about how great things are. And about 15, 20 minutes in, the pilot yells, ‘Shut up! Shut up!’”

The hydraulic system had failed, he said. “Donald turned white as snow,” Mr. Holden recalled. “He was shaking.”

Mr. Holden said that as the helicopter’s crew worked frantically to set the aircraft down safely, his own thoughts ran to a helicopter crash in 1989 that had killed three senior executives of Mr. Trump’s casinos over Forked River, N.J.

“I just thought, how the hell do you let your staff not maintain your aircraft after you just had a crash that killed some of your staff? How could you let this happen again? I thought, if we go down, this is your fault.”

The helicopter ultimately landed safely in Linden, N.J., Mr. Holden said.

Ms. Res wrote about the episode in a memoir and corroborated Mr. Holden’s account in a brief interview late Friday. Ms. Res, who also spoke to Politico, recalled that Mr. Trump liked to say that Mr. Holden had “turned white” from fear, but that it was actually Mr. Trump whose face was ashen.

A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

Mr. Holden said he was in his living room watching Mr. Trump’s news conference on TV on Thursday when the former president told of experiencing a brush with death on a helicopter ride with Mr. Brown.

“I said, ‘What the hell is this?’” Mr. Holden said. “‘Was he in two near-fatal helicopter crashes? He didn’t fix those damn helicopters yet?’”

Mr. Holden said that he called Mr. Brown to compare notes. Mr. Brown told him he had never been in a helicopter with Mr. Trump.

“I said, ‘Willie, you know what? That’s me!’” Mr. Holden said. “And I told him, ‘You’re a short Black guy and I’m a tall Black guy — but we all look alike, right?’”

Mr. Holden gave his own height as 6-foot-1. “Willie has to be about 5-foot-6. Maybe 5-foot-5. He comes up to about my shoulders. And he’s bald. And I’m not bald.”

Mr. Brown, he said, “just laughed and laughed.”

Mr. Holden, summing up his assessment of Mr. Trump’s recollection, said: “I just think he makes things up. That’s what I think. He never thought anybody’s going to check.”

Mr. Trump told the story about nearly dying in a helicopter crash with Mr. Brown after a reporter at Thursday’s news conference asked him a leading question about Vice President Kamala Harris’s long-ago relationship with Mr. Brown and whether it helped her career trajectory.

The two dated in 1994 and 1995 when she was a prosecutor in Alameda County, which includes Oakland, and Mr. Brown was the Assembly speaker. Mr. Brown appointed Ms. Harris to two state boards before she ended their relationship.

“Well, I know Willie Brown very well,” Mr. Trump responded. “In fact, I went down in a helicopter with him.”

He recounted how the two had a close brush with death — “We thought maybe this was the end” — and that Mr. Brown used the frightening ride to tell him “terrible things” about Ms. Harris. “He was not fan of hers very much, at that point,” Mr. Trump said.

Mr. Trump had previously told the story, saying it was Mr. Brown on a helicopter with him, in his book, “Letters to Trump,” which was published in 2023.

Reached again Friday night, Mr. Brown reiterated that he had never flown in a helicopter with Mr. Trump and that he had not denigrated Ms. Harris to the former president because he admires and respects her.

“Those are the two things I am certain of,” he said. “All the rest of this is amusing.”

Asked if Mr. Trump might have confused the two California politicians because they are both Black, Mr. Brown said, “I wouldn’t want to conclude that he can’t tell Black people apart, because I’d hate for him to think that I’m Beyoncé.”

And then he burst out laughing.

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Harris rides momentum to Arizona, for what her campaign says is largest rally yet.

The rally was her fourth in four days with an arena-filling crowd that demonstrated the degree to which her candidacy replacing President Biden’s had remade the 2024 race.

Mr. Walz relished the crowd that filed into the Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, Ariz., in 100-degree heat as he poked fun at Mr. Trump’s obsession with rally crowds.

“It’s not as if anybody cares about crowd sizes or anything,” Mr. Walz said to knowing cheers.

Despite her momentum, Ms. Harris faces an uphill battle in Arizona, a longtime Republican stronghold that flipped to Mr. Biden in 2020 but, according to polling, had been drifting back to former President Donald J. Trump this year.

To win, she will need to reunite the diverse coalition of voters who delivered the state four years ago, and she made an explicit appeal to one part of that group on Friday: Native American voters.

“As president, I will tell you, I will always honor tribal sovereignty and respect tribal self-determination,” she said. The first speaker at the rally, notably, was Stephen Roe Lewis, the governor of the Gila River Indian Community, south of Phoenix.

In her speech, Ms. Harris zeroed in on two issues that are especially pertinent to Arizonans: immigration and abortion.

Crossings from Mexico into Arizona have remained high this year even as they have dropped elsewhere, and Ms. Harris positioned herself as supporting both an “earned pathway to citizenship” and tougher border restrictions, pointing to her record as California’s attorney general.

“I went after the transnational gangs, the drug cartels and the human traffickers,” Ms. Harris said. “I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won. So I know what I’m talking about.”

By contrast, Ms. Harris said, Mr. Trump was playing politics with the issue. She highlighted his opposition to a bipartisan bill this year that would have beefed up border security.

“He talks a big game about border security,” she said, “but he does not walk the walk.”

The comments come as her campaign began to air a tough-on-immigration ad that labeled her a “border-state prosecutor.” Senior Trump campaign officials see the border and immigration as one of Ms. Harris’s deepest areas of vulnerability, and his campaign has repeatedly labeled her, inaccurately, as Mr. Biden’s failed “border czar.”

Ms. Harris did add a new riff to her speech, responding to Mr. Trump’s muddled comments on Thursday at a news conference in Florida, in which he did not rule out directing the Food and Drug Administration to revoke access to abortion pills.

Ms. Harris said Mr. Trump’s agenda “would ban medication abortion in every state,” adding, “But we are not going to let that happen — because we trust women.”

Mr. Trump has previously supported the Supreme Court’s ruling on the abortion drug mifepristone. Karoline Leavitt, a Trump spokeswoman, said in a statement the former president’s position on mifepristone “remains the same — the Supreme Court unanimously decided on the issue and the matter is settled.”

The abortion rhetoric could prove especially potent in Arizona, where the State Supreme Court reinstated a near-total ban on the procedure this year. The State Legislature eventually repealed it, but abortion is still banned after 15 weeks, and voters will have a chance to enshrine the right to an abortion until fetal viability in the state’s Constitution through a ballot measure in November.

The speakers who preceded Ms. Harris on Friday made a number of appeals to independents and moderate Republicans, another segment she will need to win over.

“I do not recognize my party,” said John Giles, the mayor of Mesa, Ariz., who is a prominent Republican backing Ms. Harris. “We need to elect a ticket who will be the adults in the room.”

Senator Mark Kelly, the Arizona Democrat who is also a Navy veteran and former astronaut, introduced Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz. It was the second time this week that a finalist in Ms. Harris’s running-mate sweepstakes introduced her at a rally. Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania did the same in Philadelphia on Tuesday.

Mr. Kelly said Mr. Trump had “zero respect for any of us who have worn the uniform.” Mr. Trump’s allies have raised questions about Mr. Walz’s decision to leave the National Guard in 2005 to run for Congress.

Attendees and speakers said the enormous crowd braving scorching desert temperatures on Friday was a sign that, after months of dreariness among Democrats, momentum in Arizona was finally on their side.

“It may be a little warm outside,” Kate Gallego, the mayor of Phoenix, said, “but based on the energy in this arena, I know it’s Donald Trump who’s feeling the heat.”

Trump claims he has helicopter trip records and threatens to sue.

Mr. Trump was expected to keep his rally schedule on Friday as planned, boarding a smaller plane to complete the journey.

Mr. Brown denied on Thursday that he had ever flown in a helicopter with Mr. Trump.

It appeared Mr. Trump may have confused Willie Brown with Jerry Brown, the former governor of California, with whom Mr. Trump traveled by helicopter in 2018 while surveying wildfire damage in the state. But Jerry Brown, who left office in January 2019, said through a spokesman, “There was no emergency landing and no discussion of Kamala Harris.”

Willie Brown, who was a boyfriend of Vice President Kamala Harris during the 1990s, knew Mr. Trump as a potential business associate during those years, when Mr. Trump, then a New York developer, was working on new projects. A biography of Ms. Harris, “Kamala’s Way: An American Life,” reported that Mr. Trump had sent his private plane for Mr. Brown and Ms. Harris in 1994 to fly them from Boston to New York City.

“We have the flight records of the helicopter,” Mr. Trump insisted Friday, saying the helicopter had landed “in a field,” and indicating that he intended to release the flight records, before shouting that he was “probably going to sue” over the Times article.

When asked to produce the flight records, Mr. Trump responded mockingly, repeating the request in a sing-song voice. As of early Friday evening, he had not provided them.

Mr. Trump has a history of claiming he will provide evidence to back up his claims but ultimately not doing so.

He has also told the helicopter story before, in his 2023 book, “Letters to Trump,” in which he published letters to him from a number of people, including Mr. Brown. In the book, Mr. Trump wrote, “We actually had an emergency landing in a helicopter together. It was a little scary for both of us, but thankfully we made it.”

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Two rivals in Michigan’s crucial Senate contest say they were both swatted.

Politicians on both sides of the political aisle have increasingly been the target of swatting in recent years. The hoaxes — when false threats are deliberately made to law enforcement to draw a heavily armed response to a person’s home — have added to a climate of intimidation and the harassment of public officials.

Ms. Slotkin was not home at the time of the incident, according to a spokeswoman for her office, Lynsey Mukomel, who said in a statement that Michigan State Police troopers went to the residence after a false threat was emailed to a local official. She did not elaborate on the nature of the false threat. Michigan State Police confirmed they responded.

“Michigan State Police checked the property and confirmed no one was in danger,” Ms. Mukomel said, adding that U.S. Capitol Police would investigate the incident.

Mr. Rogers, a former longtime House member who was endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump, experienced a similar incident around 12:30 p.m. Eastern time on Friday, said Chris Gustafson, a spokesman for his campaign.

A person reported that a man was holding a woman at gunpoint at the property in Livingston County connected with Mr. Rogers, according to Mr. Gustafson, who said that Mr. Rogers currently does not live there but that other members of his family do. (Mr. Rogers now lives in Oakland County, Mich., according to his campaign.)

Shanon Banner, a Michigan State Police spokeswoman, said that a sergeant had responded to a report about a domestic situation at a residence in Livingston County on Friday and determined that it was false. She was not immediately able to confirm whether it was the same property.

Mr. Gustafson, in a statement, said that it was the second time that Mr. Rogers had been targeted in a swatting incident. The first was in 2013, when he was a member of Congress.

“This kind of violence cannot be tolerated, and it is our hope that those responsible will be quickly prosecuted and held accountable,” Mr. Gustafson said.

The rivals are running for a seat that is being vacated by Senator Debbie Stabenow, Michigan’s senior senator and a Democrat, who announced last year that she would not seek a fifth term. Democrats control the Senate by a thin 51-49 seat majority.

Joe Rogan would like to clarify: He did not endorse Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Mr. Rogan’s devoted following, one that leans young, male and numbers in the tens of millions, is highly coveted. His remarks about Mr. Kennedy, uttered on a show with a far smaller reach than his own, nonetheless set off a frenzied response.

Supporters of former President Donald J. Trump, worried that Mr. Rogan’s stance could carve off voters and hurt his electoral chances come November, quickly turned on the podcaster, standup comic and U.F.C. announcer. They questioned his intelligence and even mocked his height, a spectacle that was greeted with something akin to joy — or, at least, schadenfreude — among Democrats who have long written off Mr. Rogan as helpful to their cause.

By Friday morning, Mr. Rogan was backpedaling. “This isn’t an endorsem*nt,” he posted on the social media platform X, and advised that he is “not the guy to get political information from.”

Mr. Trump himself weighed in on Friday afternoon, pondering “how loudly Joe Rogan gets BOOED the next time he enters the UFC ring” in a post on his social network that seemingly reflected his concerns that the influential podcaster could tip the scales against him.

“This takes straight from the Trump base,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant. A New York Times/Siena poll in battleground states in May found that 54 percent of respondents who said they planned to vote for the former president had a favorable opinion of Mr. Rogan.

Mr. Kennedy, long before Mr. Rogan’s unwinding act, had already taken credit for the perceived nod, posting on social media: “From one ‘legitimate’ guy to another, thank you.”

Even if it’s not a true endorsem*nt, Mr. Rogan’s praise could come as a huge shot in the arm for Mr. Kennedy, who has seen his polling average drop from as much as 15 percent in early June to somewhere around 6 percent as of late last month.

While Mr. Kennedy drew national attention this week after acknowledging that he dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park a decade ago, such headlines have not helped ease his struggles raising money. He’s also fighting to get his name on the ballots in critical states, or, in the case of New York, keep it there.

“He doesn’t attack people. He attacks actions and ideas, but he’s much more reasonable and intelligent,” Mr. Rogan said of Mr. Kennedy on the “Lex Fridman Podcast,” which has 4.1 million subscribers on YouTube.

Mr. Rogan’s fan base is much bigger. In March, Spotify said that “The Joe Rogan Experience” had 14.5 million followers, almost triple the platform’s second most popular program. He also has 19 million followers on Instagram and 17 million followers on YouTube.

A poll by YouGov last year found that 81 percent of his listeners are male and 56 percent are under 35 years old, feeding the perception that he has a direct line to a cohort that polling suggests tends to support Mr. Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris.

“This is a group Trump needs strong performance with,” Mr. Madrid said.

During his interview with Mr. Fridman, he said that he was “not a Trump supporter in any way, shape or form” and adding that he turned down multiple offers to have him on his show. “I’ve said no every time,” Mr. Rogan said. “I’m not interested in helping him,”

Mr. Kennedy sat for an interview on the “Joe Rogan Experience” in June 2023.

Ruth Igielnik contributed reporting.