Superstar Beyonce provided the latest shot of stardust to US Vice President and the Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ White House campaign on Friday, as the vice president and her rival, former US president and the Republican Party’s candidate Donald Trump, courted voters with just 11 days to go in a neck-and-neck election.
Taking the stage with her Destiny’s Child costar Kelly Rowland, the Grammy-winning diva introduced Harris to more than 20,000 roaring supporters in the Texas metropolis of Houston, Beyonce’s hometown.
“It’s time for America to sing a new song,” Beyonce said, urging voters to show up.
Photo: AFP
While the superstar did not perform any hits, her presence brought even more attention to Harris’ rally, which focused on abortion restrictions in Republican-led states.
Beyonce said she was not there as a celebrity but as “a mother who cares deeply about the world... A world where we have the freedom to control our bodies.”
Texas is not one of the handful of battlegrounds that are expected to decide the presidential election, or where the Democrat and her rival would normally be campaigning in the home stretch.
Photo: Reuters
However, Harris is banking on her star-studded show — which also featured 91-year-old country legend Willie Nelson — to bring abortion to the forefront of voters’ minds in the final days of campaigning.
“We are 11 days out from an election that will decide the future of America, including the freedom of every woman to make decisions about her own body,” Harris said.
While Harris was in Houston, Trump was in Austin, taping a three-hour interview with The Joe Rogan Experience, the US’ most popular podcast.
The friendly discussion veered around various topics, including UFOs and secret files on the assassination of former US president John F. Kennedy, but rarely got into policy details and wholly avoided the issue of abortion, a video of the chat released Friday evening showed.
Rogan did not say he was backing Trump, and even expressed hope that Harris would also visit.
However, the former US president prodded the comedian to follow in billionaire Elon Musk’s steps and publicly endorse him.
“You cannot be voting for Kamala. Kamala. You’re not a Kamala person,” Trump said.
Harris and Trump locked horns earlier on Friday over accusations that the Republican ex-president has been running as a “fascist.”
The two camps traded barbs over claims by Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, echoed by Harris, that Trump is a “fascist” who cannot be trusted with power again.
Republican leaders in the US Congress attacked her over that characterization, in a statement revealing they had been briefed on “ongoing and persistent” threats to Trump and accused Harris of encouraging “another would-be assassin” after he survived an attempt on his life in July.
Half the country agrees with Harris that Trump is a fascist, according to a new ABC News/Ipsos poll of registered voters, and she hit back at an impromptu news conference.
“The truth is that some of the people closest to Donald Trump, when he was president ... have been very clear about the danger and the threat that [he] poses to America, and the fact that he is unfit to serve,” Harris said.
Meanwhile, the influential Washington Post newspaper, owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, on Friday announced that it would endorse neither Harris nor Trump in the US presidential election.
CEO William Lewis said this was a return “to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.”
However, the Post editorial board has endorsed candidates for much of the last four decades — all of them Democrats — before deciding to stay on the sidelines in one of the most polarizing elections in US history.
Newspaper editorials have little of their once-powerful political heft. However, the Post — whose slogan is “Democracy dies in darkness” — is one traditional media outlet that retains influence among Washington’s elite.
US media reported that a senior Post figure, editor at large Robert Kagan, had resigned in protest.
According to a report by the Washington Post on its Web site, Bezos likewise intervened to block the board from publishing its editorial in favor of Harris. However, a source close to the Post’s leadership said that this “is inaccurate.”
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