President Joe Biden abandoned the 2024 race to the White House on Sunday, ending his re-election bid after a disastrous debate with donald trump this raised doubts about his fitness for office just four months before the election.
Meanwhile, Vice President Kamala Harris is being thrust into the most scrutinizing of the spotlightsuddenly the leading candidate to succeed Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president and his party’s main hope to defeat Trump.
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The director of the Secret Service says the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump was the agency’s “most significant operational failure” in decades.
Director Kimberly Cheatle told lawmakers Monday during a congressional hearing: “On July 13, we failed.” Cheatle says she takes full responsibility for the agency’s mistakes related to the attack on Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania earlier this month.
Additional endorsements on Monday, including from Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, left a dwindling list of rivals in potential for Vice President Kamala Harris as she tries to hold Democratic delegates. her campaign for the White House.
Winning the nomination is just the first item on an impressive political to-do list for her following Biden’s decision to drop out of the race, which she learned about in a call with the president on Sunday morning. If she manages to secure the nomination, she must also choose a running mate and launch a massive political operation to boost her candidacy, rather than Biden’s, with just over 100 days until Election Day.
The director of the Secret Service is expected to testify on Monday before a congressional committee, as calls grow for her to resign over security failures at a rally where a 20-year-old gunman tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump.
The House Oversight Committee hearing will be director Kimberly Cheatle’s first appearance before lawmakers since the July 13 shooting in Pennsylvania that left a bystander dead.
Lawmakers have expressed anger over how the shooter managed to get so close to the Republican presidential candidate when he should have been carefully guarded.
As President Joe Biden decided to withdraw from the race on Sunday morning, Vice President Kamala Harris had several phone conversations with him, according to a person familiar who spoke only on background to release details more freely.
Harris was at the vice president’s residence at the Naval Observatory in Washington. She was surrounded by family and staff and wore a Howard University hooded sweatshirt, workout sweatshirt and sneakers, the person said.
She spent more than 10 hours on Sunday making calls to more than 100 party leaders, members of Congress, governors, labor leaders and leaders of advocacy and civil rights organizations. Harris told everyone she was grateful Biden supported her as he left the race, but she planned to win the Democratic presidential nomination on her own merits.
The vice president also called her pastor, Amos Brown III, who, along with his wife, prayed for her.
Harris organized lunch and dinner for the assembled aides. They ate sandwiches in the afternoon and salad and pizza in the evening. Harris’ pizza had anchovies, which the person said was his favorite topping.
-Will Weissert
“The vice president is smart and strong, which will make her a good president,” Beshear said during a Monday morning appearance on MSNBC. “But she is also kind and empathetic, which could make her a great president.”
Beshear praised Harris’ resume as a former prosecutor and says she is ready to assume the presidency. He says he’s willing to do everything he can to support her.
Asked if he’s open to potentially joining the ticket, Beshear said he loves his job as governor. “The only way I would consider anything other than this current job would be to believe that I could help my people further and help this country,” he said.
Beshear defeated Trump-backed Republicans to win the governorship in 2019 and to win re-election last year in his Republican-leaning state.
Speaking Monday on CBS, the West Virginia Democrat-turned-independent said, “I don’t need this in my life.”
Manchin was the last senator to call on Biden to drop out of the 2024 race before Biden’s Sunday announcement that he would do just that.
Manchin had already considered his own run for the White House in 2024, but said in February after a listening tour that he did not want to be a “spoiler.” As a Democrat, he often contradicted his own party’s leadership.
Luxembourg Foreign Minister Xavier Bettel praised President Joe Biden for announcing he will end his re-election bid.
“It takes courage for a politician to say ‘I’m a little old and I’m not capable of doing this anymore,’” Bettel said, describing it as a “courageous and difficult decision” by Biden.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat from New York, supported Harris and called her “an unwavering defender of families, workers and justice.”
Gillibrand, who ran against Harris in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, said in a statement Monday that the vice president is “incredibly well qualified, with experience as a prosecutor, as a lawmaker and as a leader on the world stage.”
“Now is the time to come together,” said the senator. “Vice President Harris has the courage and resilience to defeat Donald Trump and I look forward to joining her in this fight.”
ActBlue, the Democratic fundraising platform, announced that it had raised US$46.7 million from 9 p.m. ET, with small-dollar donations to Vice President Harris’ campaign.
The Biden campaign and affiliated groups previously had about $96 million in cash on hand. The Republican National Convention, by contrast, reported a campaign fund of $102 million in June.
Donald Trump’s campaign has spent the last year and a half viciously attacking Joe Biden, ridiculing his policies, mocking his failures and relishing a revenge they felt they were winning.
But he also spent weeks preparing for the possibility that he would drop out of the race, preparing a series of attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris that he unleashed as soon as Biden made the stunning announcement on Sunday that he would step aside.
Biden soon after endorsed Harris, who quickly won support from Democrats to be the party’s nominee.
The move, less than four months before Election Day, presents new challenges for Trump’s team, which until recently had focused on contrasting the former president’s stamina and mental acuity with Biden’s.
Read more about the Trump campaign’s pivot toward Harris.
Democratic delegations from several states have decided to support Vice President Kamala Harris for the party’s nomination at next month’s national convention.
“Tonight, all 168 delegates of the North Carolina Democratic Party made history,” said North Carolina Party Chairman Anderson Clayton in a post on the X social platform.
In South Carolina, party chair Christale Spain said in an emailed statement Sunday night that that state’s delegation met virtually. The vice president “has been fully vetted and has earned our unwavering support,” Spain said.
Harris received her first delegates earlier in the day from Tennessee, when the state party posted on X that her delegation voted during a meeting to support her.
Another state where the change was made was New Hampshire, where the 25 pledged delegates voted unanimously Sunday night to support Harris.
The nation’s six black state attorneys general have thrown their support behind Vice President Harris. In a statement about X, they laid out her qualifications and said she “strongly defended our right to choose and preserved our most sacred right to vote. There is no one more qualified to lead and continue to defend the values of our great nation.”
The statement listed Letitia James, New York; Kwame Raoul, Illinois; Anthony Brown, Maryland; Andrea Campbell, Massachusetts; Keith Ellison, Minnesota; and Aaron Ford, Nevada.
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