Former President Donald Trump doubled down on his anti-immigrant rhetoric at a rally in State College on Saturday, claiming the U.S. has “become essentially an occupied country,” and “a dumping ground for nations all over the world,” during a speech at Penn State University.

“We’ve become like a garbage can for the rest of the world,” Trump told the audience at Penn State’s Bryce Jordan Center, repeating a phrase he’s used at several rallies recently. “They’re throwing all their garbage into our country.”

He repeated his pledge to “launch the largest deportation program in American history,” if he wins another term, but without providing specifics of how he would go about it. American towns have been “invaded and conquered,” Trump told the audience.

Trump also repeated several debunked claims about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio and Aurora, Colorado, and played several videos mocking his opponent Vice President Kamala Harris with clips of her speaking. He boasted about last weekend’s visit to a Bucks County McDonald’s where he served fries to pre-selected “customers,” and touted his recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast.

Trump invited the championship Penn State men’s wrestling team on stage with him at one point during the rally. “ I don’t know if this platform can hold them, because that’s a lot of muscle. You know, muscle is much heavier than fat,” he said.

As the race heads into the final stretch, Harris and Trump are polling neck-and-neck, with multiple campaign stops in Pennsylvania over the final nine days before Election Day. Harris is in Philadelphia on Sunday after a rally in Michigan Saturday night with former first lady Michelle Obama, who made an impassioned plea in favor of women’s reproductive freedoms.

Trump is in New York City on Sunday for a rally at Madison Square Garden.

The Keystone State’s 19 electoral votes make it a must-win for either candidate.

Pennsylvania Capital-Star is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kim Lyons for questions: info@penncapital-star.com. Follow Pennsylvania Capital-Star on Facebook and X.

A falsified video purporting to show mail-in ballots being destroyed and thrown away in Bucks County was a part of a Russian disinformation campaign, federal officials said Friday.

The video was posted to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter on Thursday, claiming to show a man tearing up mail-in ballots cast for former President Donald Trump, and GOP U.S. Senate candidate Dave McCormick.

The Bucks County Board of Elections issued a statement saying it was aware of the video and that it was fake, noting that the envelope and other materials were clearly not authentic.

This type of behavior is meant to sow division and distrust in our election systems, and makes a mockery of the people working incredibly hard to ensure a free and fair election is carried out,” Board of Elections Commissioners Bob Harvie, Diane Ellis-Marseglia and Gene DiGirolamo said in a joint statement. “The Board of Elections unequivocally condemns this purposeful spreading of dangerous disinformation. We will not be distracted from the job the voters of Bucks County have entrusted to us.

The video is no longer on X.

“It is conspicuously fake, and I saw it last night,” Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt said during a tour of Philadelphia election facilities on Friday. “And anyone who has any experience processing mail ballots or knows a lot about election administration would be able to spot it a mile away.”

“I think that’s what’s so concerning about it is that you have people deceived by videos like that, even something as simple as that can do great harm in undermining confidence in election results or leading people to believe that their vote won’t be counted,” he added.

In a joint statement Friday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said the intelligence community “assesses that Russian actors manufactured and amplified a recent video that falsely depicted an individual ripping up ballots in Pennsylvania, judging from information available to the [intelligence community] and prior activities of other Russian influence actors, including videos and other disinformation activities.”

Pennsylvania was the target of numerous conspiracy theories following the 2020 election, after ballot-counting in Philadelphia took several days, due to the high volume of mail ballots. Despite numerous attempts by Trump and his allies to sow doubt about the election results, no credible evidence of tampering or fraud was ever found.

The federal authorities said Friday the faked Bucks County video was “part of Moscow’s broader effort to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the US election and stoke divisions among Americans.”

In the lead up to election day, they added, the intelligence community “expects Russia to create and release additional media content that seeks to undermine trust in the integrity of the election and divide Americans.”

This story was modified post-publication Oct. 25, 2024 at 9:18 p.m. to update the headline.

Pennsylvania Capital-Star is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kim Lyons for questions: info@penncapital-star.com. Follow Pennsylvania Capital-Star on Facebook and X.

With 10 days to go before the candidates for president face off in the first debate, President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign launched a new $50 million ad campaign on Monday with a spot that focuses on former President Donald Trump’s conviction last month on 34 felony counts.

Titled “Character Matters,” the ad refers to Trump as “a convicted criminal who’s only out for himself,” comparing him to Biden, a “president who is fighting for your family.”

A screen capture from the new Biden campaign ad “Character Matters.”

Biden campaign communications director Michael Tyler said in a statement that Trump “will do absolutely anything for his own personal gain and for his own power,” adding “His entire campaign is an exercise in revenge and retribution.”

After his conviction on 34 felony counts in New York, Trump is scheduled to be sentenced on July 11, days before the Republican National Convention kicks off in Milwaukee. The new Biden campaign ad, which will run on general market television in battleground states and on national cable is the first time the Biden campaign is taking direct aim at Trump’s conviction.

A pro-Trump super PAC ran an ad campaign in Pennsylvania in April critical of the Biden administration’s immigration policies. The ad ran the same week Biden visited Pennsylvania, campaigning in Scranton, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, ahead of the state’s April 23 primary.

The Trump campaign did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Monday.

Trump is scheduled to appear in Philadelphia on Saturday for a rally at the Liacouras Center on Temple University’s campus. “President Trump will highlight how Biden’s weak presidency is devastating American families, which is why only 34 percent of Pennsylvanians approve of the job Joe Biden is doing,” Trump’s campaign said in a statement Friday announcing the rally.

The visit will be Trump’s fourth to Pennsylvania in 2024 and his second to Philadelphia this year. He spoke in February to a National Rifle Association gathering in Harrisburg, and announced a new line of Trump-branded sneakers in Philadelphia at SneakerCon that same month. Trump held a rally in the Lehigh Valley in April, his most recent visit to Pennsylvania.

Biden has made eight appearances in Pennsylvania so far this year, visiting Philadelphia with Vice President Kamala in late May to announce the launch of Black Voters for Biden-Harris at Girard College. The majority of Biden’s visits to Pennsylvania have been in the southeastern part of the state, a heavily Democratic region.

Polls in Pennsylvania have shown Trump has a slight lead over Biden for the state’s 19 electoral votes. A June 12 Marist poll showed Trump leading Biden by 2 points in Pennsylvania.

In the 2020 election, Biden beat Trump in Pennsylvania by just over 80,000 votes.

Pennsylvania Capital-Star is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kim Lyons for questions: info@penncapital-star.com. Follow Pennsylvania Capital-Star on Facebook and X.

Patricia Ford of Philadelphia, 72, remembers a time in the not-too-distant past when politicians would barely discuss Social Security, much less threaten to make cuts, because it didn’t make sense: Senior citizens, many of whom rely on Social Security income, are considered reliable voters, and would respond at the voting booth.

“I think about the possibility of cuts to Social Security, and it’s just so ridiculous,” Ford told the Capital-Star. She said she’s worked since age 16, and doesn’t want her children to have to take care of her, that she should be able to take care of herself. “If this issue was brought up and talked about over and over, I believe a lot of seniors would come out to vote.”

She said she was not entirely surprised, however, to learn that former President Donald Trump had appeared to open the door to making cuts to entitlement programs like Social Security.

“There is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting, and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements,” Trump said in a March 11 interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box program.

Trump and his campaign have since tried to reframe or walk back the comments, saying the former president was focused on “cutting waste.” Trump gave an interview on Thursday to conservative news outlet Breitbart where he said “I will never do anything that will jeopardize or hurt Social Security or Medicare.”

But in the time between, the Biden campaign mobilized voters in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, including Ford, for press conferences where seniors and other recipients of Social Security benefits spoke about what cuts to the program would mean for them. Ford attended a press conference with Rep. Steven Kinsey (D-Philadelphia) in Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood.

“I am a recipient of Medicare and Social Security. I can guarantee you, all of my working life, my husband and I contributed to those two programs with the hope and belief that we would be able to benefit from them when it was our time to retire,” Mary Lou Alsentzer of Lancaster said during a Wednesday press conference in Harrisburg. “We cannot allow Donald Trump to take away one more thing. We the people have to stand up.”

William Byrnes, a senior citizen and Social Security recipient who lives in Wilkes-Barre, said during a Tuesday press conference in Luzerne that he started paying into the Social Security system when he was a teenager in 1966.

“One of the things that my wife and I dread is that one medical quote that can wipe you out,” Byrnes said. “Donald Trump has a history of stiffing the people who work for him, it’s completely in character for him to be stiffing the American people on the benefits that we have contributed to and paid for out of the labor of our lifetime.”

The Biden campaign also pointed to Trump’s previous statements, including during his presidency, when he suggested entitlements like Social Security were on the table. In August 2020, Trump said he would make permanent a temporary pandemic-era pause on the payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare if he were re-elected. And even earlier, in a 2000 book Trump authored called “The America We Deserve,” he referred to Social Security as a “huge Ponzi scheme.”

Even before Trump’s recent comments, Social Security was already on Democrats’ political radar. During his March 7 State of the Union address, President Joe Biden made clear he would seek to prevent any attempts to reduce entitlement programs.

“If anyone here tries to cut Social Security or Medicare, or raise the retirement age, I will stop you,” Biden said.

Biden warns ‘freedom and democracy are under attack’ in fierce State of the Union address

In a swing state like Pennsylvania, where 20% of the population is 65 or older, a suggestion of cutting Social Security would seem to be politically unwise.

“More than 2 million Pennsylvanians rely on Social Security and Medicare, and Donald Trump wants to leave them with fewer benefits and instead give away more tax cuts to his wealthy friends and big corporations,” Pennsylvania state Rep Patty Kim (D-Dauphin) said at the Harrisburg press conference on Wednesday.

Ford said she looked up the history of Social Security and discovered a word she wasn’t familiar with in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1934 message to Congress about the program. “He said it was a social insurance that was a safeguard against the hazards and ‘vicissitudes’ of life,” she said. “That means a hardship and something that happens out of your control. The seniors put in the work, this is something that is theirs, that is owed to them. It’s theirs just as if they’re going to work every day.”

Ford will celebrate her 73rd birthday in November, the day after Election Day. She said she hopes seniors see Trump’s comments on Social Security as a wake up call to show up at the polls. “I hope that enough people turn out that it isn’t a matter of if we get a few votes over here, get a few votes over there,” she said. “It needs to be a total landslide.”

Pennsylvania Capital-Star is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kim Lyons for questions: info@penncapital-star.com. Follow Pennsylvania Capital-Star on Facebook and Twitter.

Seven states, including Pennsylvania, that were the focal points of Republican efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election have more than 200 legislators labeled in a new report as being “election deniers.”

States United Action, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization with a mission to protect elections, issued the report Thursday using data collected with the assistance of Penn State University’s McCourtney Institute for Democracy. It found 202 “election deniers” currently serving as state legislators in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Pennsylvania had more election deniers in its legislature than any other state it analyzed, the report’s authors wrote, making up more than 80% of the Senate Republican caucus and holding a majority of seats “on several of the most important committees that handle election matters, and hold leadership positions within those committees.”

The report identified 87 Pennsylvania state legislators, all Republicans, who fit within its description, noting that together they make up 34% of the 253-person body — nearly half of the state Senate (23) and almost a third of the state House of Representatives (64).

“In our decentralized election system, state legislators have immense power to shape voting procedures and election administration. Election Deniers can — and are trying to — leverage this power to erode our democracy. And they’re doing it outside the spotlight of national politics,” Joanna Lydgate, CEO of States United Action said.

In general terms, the group identified “election deniers” as those who have either introduced or cosponsored bills that would add barriers to voting, enabled investigations of voters, promoted election conspiracy theories, made it harder for nonpartisan election officials to do their jobs, or otherwise interfered with the routine functioning of elections.

While the phrase “election deniers” is one often used in the fallout from the 2020 election, States United Action says adding legislators to its list relied on research of their social media accounts as well as their websites and news media coverage to gather information on election-related statements and actions.

Sixty-four members of the General Assembly signed a letter urging members of the Pennsylvania congressional delegation to object and vote to sustain the objection to Electoral College votes from Pennsylvania for Biden during the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.

In Pennsylvania, 20 people signed a certificate in December 2020 stating they had cast electoral college votes for then-President Donald Trump, when Joe Biden had been declared the winner of the popular vote. The group has emphasized that the certificate indicated the votes for Trump were intended to be used in the event the election results were overturned in court. Josh Shapiro, then attorney general of Pennsylvania, has said that caveat prevented the group from being prosecuted in court.

“We have to keep track of the Election Denier movement, especially those who are outside the spotlight of national politics. In an election year as critical as this one, every level of government matters,” said Lydgate. “What we found is clear: Election Deniers in state legislatures pose a real threat. Among other things, they’re introducing legislation that undermines our free and fair elections, and they’re eroding public trust by pushing conspiracy theories and lies.”

Peter Hall of the Capital-Star staff contributed.

Pennsylvania Capital-Star is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kim Lyons for questions: info@penncapital-star.com. Follow Pennsylvania Capital-Star on Facebook and Twitter.

Ahead of former President Trump’s Friday visit to Harrisburg to speak at the National Rifle Association’s annual gathering, the Democratic National Committee is putting up a billboard at the intersection of S. Second and Mulberry streets that includes some of the former president’s own words.

“Donald Trump to victims of gun violence: ‘get over it’,” the sign reads. It’s a reference to comments Trump made in January after a school shooting in Perry, Iowa, that left a sixth-grade student and the teenage gunman dead, and five others injured.

At a campaign rally in Sioux City, Iowa, on Jan. 5, Trump began by offering “support and deepest sympathies” to the victims and their families. “It’s just horrible, so surprising to see it here,” Trump continued. “But we have to get over it, we have to move forward.”

Trump, the current front-runner for the GOP nomination for president, is scheduled to address the NRA’s Presidential Forum at its Great American Outdoor show, an annual event that drew 200,000 attendees last year, the organization said. It’s Trump’s first scheduled visit to Pennsylvania of 2024, a state he won in 2016 but lost to President Joe Biden in 2020.

A billboard from the Democratic National Committee displayed in Harrisburg chastises Trump for comments he made after an Iowa school shooting in January. (Image via the DNC)

It’s Trump’s eighth time addressing the NRA, according to the organization, which says the former president “never let NRA members down,” including his appointment of three U.S. Supreme Court justices. All three of Trump’s appointees — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — played a role in the court’s 2022 ruling that struck down a New York law requiring people to show a need to carry a gun in public.

“Americans need common sense solutions to make our communities safer, but Donald Trump thinks gun violence victims need to just ‘get over it’,” DNC National Press Secretary Sarafina Chitika said in a statement. “This sickening behavior is what we’ve come to expect from Trump, who is running on a dangerous and unpopular agenda that would put more guns in classrooms and roll back bipartisan gun safety legislation.”

Pennsylvania Capital-Star is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kim Lyons for questions: info@penncapital-star.com. Follow Pennsylvania Capital-Star on Facebook and Twitter.