WASHINGTON: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said on Sunday he thinks Vice President Kamala Harris will be easier to defeat in November’s election than Democratic President Joe Biden, who earlier in the day stepped aside as his party’s candidate.
“Harris will be easier to beat than Joe Biden would have been,” Trump told CNN.
Trump and his campaign later also attacked Biden and Harris on social media while saying Biden was unfit to continue serving as president.
Biden ended his reelection campaign on Sunday after fellow Democrats lost faith in his mental acuity and ability to beat Trump. Biden endorsed Harris to replace him as the party’s candidate.
Biden had faced growing doubts about his reelection chances after a weak and faltering performance in a televised debate against Trump late last month.
On his Truth Social platform on Sunday, Trump said Biden “was not fit to run for President, and is certainly not fit to serve.”
Other top Republicans, including House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson, also said Biden was not fit to serve as president and finish his term if he was stepping aside as the Democratic presidential candidate. Johnson explicitly called on Biden to resign.
Trump, in a post on his Truth Social platform, said: “We will suffer greatly because of his (Biden’s) presidency, but we will remedy the damage he has done very quickly.”
Trump and Biden had been mostly tied in polls, but after the debate some polls showed Trump narrowly ahead of the president in a match-up for the November elections.
The Trump campaign had already begun discussions about how it would redeploy campaign resources for the possibility of Biden’s dropping out, a source with direct knowledge of the matter said on Sunday.
Given that any alternative Democratic candidate would likely have different strengths and weaknesses than Biden, that person said, the president’s dropping out would require rethinking where to spend ad dollars and where to deploy resources more generally.
Publicly, Trump campaign advisers and allies have been telling reporters they are not worried about facing Harris because they can simply tie her to Biden’s record in office, particularly on immigration and inflation. They say they will try to portray Harris, and any of the other candidates being suggested as alternatives for the Democrats, as being to the left of Biden on various policies.
In a statement after Biden dropped out, the Trump campaign said Harris was Biden’s “enabler in chief.” The campaign said Biden and Harris owned each other’s records and “there is no distance between the two.”
The official Republican National Committee YouTube channel published a two minute video on Sunday afternoon attacking Harris over immigration policies, alleging she neglected that issue.
In recent weeks, Trump’s campaign and some of his allies have launched pre-emptive political attacks on Harris to try to discredit her amid talk she could replace Biden atop the party’s 2024 presidential ticket.
In March 2021 Biden said Harris would lead efforts with Mexico and Central American nations to address illegal immigration.
Republicans have seized on that to accuse her of failing to stem the flow of millions of migrants crossing illegally into the United States, although she was never directly responsible for securing the southern border.
Trump says Kamala Harris will be easier to defeat than Biden
https://arab.news/4z9pe
Trump says Kamala Harris will be easier to defeat than Biden
- President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid on Sunday and endorsed Harris as the Democratic nominee
- Even before that decision was made, Trump was saying Harris was no different from Biden
Treason trial of South Sudan’s suspended VP is further eroding peace deal, UN experts say
- The experts said forces from both sides are continuing to confront each other across much of the country
- “Years of neglect have fragmented government and opposition forces alike,” the experts said
UNITED NATIONS: The treason trial of South Sudan’s suspended vice president is further eroding a 2018 peace agreement he signed with President Salva Kiir, UN experts warned in a new report.
As Riek Machar’s trial is taking place in the capital, Juba, the experts said forces from both sides are continuing to confront each other across much of the country and there is a threat of renewed major conflict.
UN peacekeeping chief Jean-Pierre Lacroix told the UN Security Council last month that the crisis in South Sudan is escalating, “a breaking point” has become visible, and time is running “dangerously short” to bring the peace process back on track.
There were high hopes when oil-rich South Sudan gained independence from Sudan in 2011 after a long conflict, but the country slid into a civil war in December 2013 largely based on ethnic divisions, when forces loyal to Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, battled those loyal to Machar, an ethnic Nuer.
More than 400,000 people were killed in the war, which ended with the 2018 peace agreement that brought Kiir and Machar together in a government of national unity. But implementation has been slow, and a long-delayed presidential election is now scheduled for December 2026.
The panel of UN experts stressed in a report this week that the political and security landscape in South Sudan looks very different today than it did in 2018 and that “the conflict that now threatens looks much different to those that came before.”
“Years of neglect have fragmented government and opposition forces alike,” the experts said, “resulting in a patchwork of uniformed soldiers, defectors and armed community defense groups that are increasingly preoccupied by local struggles and often unenthused by the prospect of a national confrontation. ”
With limited supplies and low morale, South Sudan’s military has relied increasingly on aerial bombings that are “relatively indiscriminate” to disrupt the opposition, the experts said.
In a major escalation of tensions in March, a Nuer militia seized an army garrison. Kiir’s government responded, charging Machar and seven other opposition figures with treason, murder, terrorism and other crimes.
The UN experts said Kiir and his allies insist that, despite having dismissed Machar, implementation of the peace agreement is unaffected, pointing to a faction of the opposition led by Stephen Par Kuol that is still engaged in the peace process.
Those who refused to join Kuol and sided with Machar’s former deputy, Natheniel Oyet, “have largely been removed from their positions, forcing many to flee the country,” the experts said in the report.
The African Union, regional countries and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, or IGAD, have all called for Machar’s release and stressed their strong support for implementation of the 2018 agreement, the panel said.
According to the latest international assessment, 7.7 million people — 57 percent of the population — face “crisis” levels of food insecurity, with pockets of famine in some communities most affected by renewed fighting, the panel said.
