Trump again calls for prosecution of Mary Peltola as turmoil grows over Alaska campaign investigation – as it happened

This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:

• Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for Ohio governor, confirmed on Thursday that his campaign is no longer airing an attack ad that features the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent, Dr Amy Acton.

• Donald Trump called again for Democrat Mary Peltola to be criminally prosecuted and disqualified from the Alaska Senate race for her campaign allegedly recruiting a man named Dan Sullivan to run against Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan.

• Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed will campaign on Sunday in Detroit with Haley Stevens, the congresswoman he narrowly defeated to win the Democratic party’s nomination in August.

• Tom Hoyle, who achieved instant viral fame on Thursday by comparing Trump supporters to a cult in a live interview with Fox News before the president’s rally in South Carolina, was removed from the venue by three Secret Service agents.

• Trump lashed out at a Reuters reporter who asked him why he just canceled a planned appearance at a rally in Kansas on Saturday in support of a embattled Republican senator, Dr Roger Marshall. “You’re sick to ask that question,” the president said.

Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed will campaign on Sunday in Detroit with Haley Stevens, the congresswoman he narrowly defeated to win the Democratic party’s nomination in August, the Associated Press reports.

The joint appearance — their first since a Democratic unity breakfast days after the August primary — comes after Stevens’s fiancé, Jason Turkish, appeared at a campaign event for Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers in Michigan on Wednesday and told reporters that he was voting for the Republican, not El-Sayed.

The two former rivals will reportedly be joined by Jim Clyburn, an influential Black congressman from South Carolina who had endorsed and campaigned for Stevens in the primary, at a get-out-the-vote event at a Detroit church.

Stevens appeared on CNN on Wednesday night and to say that, unlike her fiancé, she would be voting for El-Sayed. But she expressed what she called the reservations of Bl;ack and Jewish voters who had supported her in the primary. She urged El-Sayed to respond to what she said were ads that angered Black and Jewish voters by taking down one tongue-in-cheek ad that features Tucker Carlson saying he would not vote for Rogers, and denouncing another, made by an outside group founded by commentator Cenk Uygur, which blames US aid to Israel for high food prices.

El-Sayed campaign already said that the second ad, posted online last week by Uygur, the uncle of streamer Hasan Piker, was “not affiliated in any way” with him or his candidacy. The was not even made in support of El-Sayed, but repurposed from one originally produced in 2024 for Uygur’s own, short-lived presidential campaign.

While Vivek Ramaswamy suggested that his campaign had not bowed to pressure when it stopped running an attack ad featuring the estranged, troubled mother of his rival for Ohio governor, Dr Amy Acton, some Democrats are not convinced.

On social media, Hakeem Jeffries, the New York congressman in line to be Speaker of the House should Democrats win control in next week’s midterms, posted: “Vivek Ramaswamy just pulled down his sick ad. These MAGA extremists are on the run. Keep. The. Pressure. On.”

Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for Ohio governor, confirmed on Thursday that his campaign is no longer airing an attack ad that features the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent, Dr Amy Acton.

The ad prompted a wave of revulsion since Acton’s mother, Donna Arthur, lost custody of her daughter in 1978, when her second husband, Cledith Arthur, was charged with raping her daughter between the ages of 10 and 12.

Asked by a reporter in Vandalia, Ohio if his campaign had stopped running the ad, Ramaswamy said: “It ran to completion and we put up four other ads.”

“But what I will say is that for all of the discussion around 30-second ads, I would love, even for this final close, for this campaign to really be about policy,” Ramaswamy added, before criticizing his opponent for not debating him.

Ramaswamy’s campaign had announced last week that it would spend $4m to broadcast the ad, despite criticism from Democrats and Republicans after court records showed that Acton’s mother, who called her daughter “a liar”, had fled the state with her husband when her daughter accused him of rape.

In an interview with the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue in 2020, when Acton was leading Ohio’s response to the Covid pandemic, Acton’s mother said that she was aware that Cledith Arthur had previously been accused of raping his own daughter before she married him.

Ramaswamy’s reference to “30-second ads” referred to the length of the ad after his campaign edited down the original 60-second version, to remove the allegation from Acton’s mother that her daughter had lied about the family having lived in a tent with Arthur when she was a child. Court records from the time indicated that Cledith Arthur had, indeed, lived in a tent at the time of his arrest on rape charges.

Donald Trump repeatedly defended the ad, including at a rally with Ramaswamy on Wednesday, while refusing to acknowledge that the serious child rape allegation was relevant to the credibility of Acton’s mother.

Reporting from NBC News and Zeteo suggests that Acton’s mother has suffered from mental health challenges and was found living in her car with dozens of cats, which troubled some people involved in producing the ad for Ramaswamy’s campaign.

Ramaswamy’s ad was also defend by JD Vance, his Yale law school classmate, despite the vice-president’s previously expressed disdain for empowering “childless cat ladies.”

“How far will Vivek Ramaswamy go?” Acton’s campaign asked in a new campaign ad on the controversy released earlier on Thursday. “To become governor, he’ll smear his opponent for being raped by her stepfather when she was just 10 years old – exploiting the sexual abuse of a child and spending millions lying to you about it,” the ad warns Ohio voters.

Acton also addressed the attack ad at an event on Thursday. “You’ve probably all heard by now, if you didn’t know, a little bit about my childhood,” she told supporters. “My brother and I experienced a lot of things, a lot of abuse and a lot of neglect. We were frequent flyers in children’s services, ended up living in a tent in the middle of winter.”

“My opponent has now chosen to exploit my childhood intentionally,” she continued. “He’s doing it in a desperate attempt to save his struggling campaign. But I’ll tell you, Mr Ramaswamy, it’s not going to work.”

Donald Trump is so proud of the $400m luxury jet he received as a gift from the nation of Qatar, to use as Air Force One, that he frequently orders its pilots to show it off, by flying the Boeing 747-8 low over events he attends, including political rallies, Fourth of July celebrations and, on Thursday, the White House Halloween party.

The roar of a huge jet flying very low over the nation’s capital, and heading for the White House, as the president handed out candy to children on the South Lawn, was greeted with whoops of delight from some revelers who were perhaps aware of the planned flyover, but it alarmed many Washington DC residents who were not.

The fact that the jet is painted not in the traditional light blue, but in a dark blue and gold livery that resembles several commercial airlines, including the failed Trump Shuttle, might have added to fears from some residents who posted images and comments on social media indicating that they feared an air disaster or a terrorist attack was underway.

Tom Hoyle, who achieved instant viral fame on Thursday by comparing Donald Trump supporters to a cult in a live interview with Fox News before the president’s rally in South Carolina, told the Guardian that he was quickly removed from the venue by three Secret Service agents.

Hoyle, 57, explained in a phone interview that he was offended to have received an invitation to what he called the president’s “Nazi rally” in a text sent to his screen-printing business’s phone earlier this week.

He accepted the invitation, he said, with the intention of “screaming vulgarities” at Trump during his speech.

As he was waiting inside the relatively small venue in Rock Hill, South Carolina, however, he was approached by the Fox News correspondent Lucas Tomlinson.

Hoyle said he agreed, and then had just a few seconds to “come up with something not vulgar” to say on air and express his point that most Americans do not support Trump. (“It’s all a charade,” he told the Guardian later, calling Maga Republicans a minority of voters, but a very loud one.)

When Tomlinson then asked Hoyle “why are you here this morning?” he responded by comparing the assembled Trump supporters to members of a cult who committed mass suicide in 1978 by following their leader’s order to drink cyanide-laced fruit punch in Jonestown, Guyana (giving rise to the phrase that true believers “drink the Kool-Aid”).

“Well, the late 70s, I was a little too young to get involved and go to South America for the Jonestown massacre, but this is as close as I’ll ever get, so that’s why I’m here,” Hoyle said.

“Wait, the Jonestown massacre?” Tomlinson asked.

“That’s right,” Hoyle replied. “There’s nothing like seeing a cult right up front, man.”

“All right, so maybe this is not a Trump supporter,” Tomlinson told the studio before stepping away to find someone else to interview.

Before the camera moved, Hoyle took the opportunity to point to his cap and plug his business, MadPark Designs in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Hoyle said after he was ejected from the venue by the Secret Service, he spoke with a group of college student protesting against the president outside.

Speaking to the Guardian later, Hoyle pointed out that his business is in the same office park as a Customs and Border Protection office in Charlotte, adding that he has regularly told officers involved in Trump’s immigration crackdown what he thinks of them to their faces.

After his return from South Carolina, Donald Trump lashed out at a Reuters reporter who asked him why he just canceled a planned appearance at a rally in Kansas on Saturday in support of a embattled Republican senator, Dr Roger Marshall.

After the reporter inquired about Trump’s health, and Trump said he was well, the reporter asked: “So you not going to Kansas has nothing to do with you being sick of travel?”

With a look of disgust, Trump responded: “Oh, you’re sick to ask that question.

“You are a sick guy. Reuters is terrible,” the president added.

Then, stepping away to address other reporters, Trump said: “Can you imagine? Look at this dope. Look at this guy, he’s way out of shape.”

“He comes to me, ‘Sir, you’re not going to go to Kansas.’ I’m not going to Kansas because he’s doing very well. I’m going to do a tele-rally,” Trump continued, imitating the reporter and suggesting that Marshall no longer needs his help to win his Senate race.

“He said, ‘what’s the reason’, after doing what, 28? He says ‘what’s the reason for this, sir, that you’re not going to Kansas?’” the president continued, recapping the exchange for journalists who had just witnessed it for themselves.

“You know what the reason is? I don’t feel I have to go to Kansas,” Trump went on. “I’m going to Florida tomorrow, and I’ll do- if something else comes up – but he said, ‘You’re not going to Kansas, sir, are you feeling well?’ You’ve been following me for two weeks. I feel perfect,” the president said, with indignation.

“You are disgusting,” Trump said, turning back to the Reuters reporter. “Put yourself in shape – you look like hell.”

He then ended the discussion and walked away from the press corps.

The New York Times reports that the Trump administration has issued federal grand jury subpoenas to local election officials in California, opening a criminal investigation as part of a White House campaign to pre-emptively cast the results of the midterm elections in the nation’s largest state as fraudulent.

According to copies of the subpoenas obtained by the Times, the investigation is an effort to promote the unsubstantiated claim that thousands of noncitizens are on California’s voter rolls, and that elections in states run by Democrats are rigged against Republicans.

Hopes of averting a major new conflagration between Iran and the US soon after Tuesday’s midterm elections could rest on Iran’s response to a personal letter from the US vice-president, JD Vance, offering to restart diplomacy.

The letter, written after predominantly Qatari mediation, was sent to the secretary of Iran’s supreme national security council, Mohsen Rezaei, on Sunday. It requires Tehran to agree to make commitments on its nuclear programme at the start of a process that would lead to the opening of the strait of Hormuz within seven days in return for US sanctions relief.

A reply is imminent, but Iran is reluctant to give upfront and irreversible commitments on its nuclear programme, such as exporting its stockpile of highly enriched uranium to a third country, if the compensatory US steps, such as lifting sanctions on Iranian oil exports, are reversible.

• Republicans escalated calls to investigate Mary Peltola’s alleged ballot-stacking scheme. Donald Trump, JD Vance and other Republicans echoed the president’s calls to criminally investigate Peltola for recruiting a man with the same name as her opponent to join the Alaska Senate race.

• Alaska’s governor went one step further, ordering an investigation into Peltola. “Deliberately tricking voters into casting their ballots for someone else strikes at the integrity of our elections,” Mike Dunleavy, the governor, said in a post on X. “Anyone or any organization found to have broken the law must be held accountable.”

• A new CNN poll found that Democrats are leading Senate races in Texas and Michigan. The poll found that James Talarico and Abdul El-Sayed led by a significant margin over their Republican opponents. But it turned up no clear leader in Maine, once thought a likely Democratic pickup, or Kansas, a deep red state where the race has turned unexpectedly competitive.

• New reporting indicates Trump aided Flávio Bolsonaro’s flight from Brazil to the US. According to the New York Times, the president ordered Bolsonaro, the defeated right-wing candidate for Brazil’s presidential election, to be allowed into the US on temporary status. A White House official also arranged the flight that brought Bolsonaro to Miami.

• Trump, campaigning today in South Carolina, canceled another planned rally in Kansas. The president opted not to appear in-person at a rally in Kansas on Saturday, instead opting to focus on participating in remote tele-rallies. Other slated campaign appearances in Florida and Iowa are set to continue as planned.

President Trump has canceled one of his last scheduled campaign stops before the midterm elections next week, axing his plans to appear at a rally in Kansas.

The planned stop in Salina, Kansas, would’ve come as Republicans seek to fend off a surprise challenge from Democrat Adam Hamilton, who polls have found could flip the normally deep-red seat currently held by incumbent Roger Marshall.

Instead of appearing in Kansas, Trump will instead partake in a remote tele-rally for Marshall.

Trump’s other slated appearances through the weekend – including one in Florida and another in Iowa – are still expected to go ahead as planned.

With a comfortable lead in the polls, Deb Haaland, a former congresswoman and interior secretary under Joe Biden, is set to become the first Native American woman to serve as governor in US history.

Her campaign has energized New Mexico’s Indigenous communities. But while the historic nature of her potential victory isn’t lost on her, Haaland says the hectic final stretch of her campaign has pushed it to the back of her mind.

“Sometimes I forget about the fact that I would be the first Native woman,” Haaland said in a recent interview. “We’re in the throes of this statewide campaign and it’s so busy and we’re trying to be everywhere all at once.”

My colleague Cecilia Nowell has the story in New Mexico: