TRUMP VS. OBAMA IN THE FINAL WEEKEND OF MIDTERMS

By DARLENE SUPERVILLE and KEN THOMAS

Associated Press

Feuding from a distance, President Donald Trump and former President Barack Obama exchanged tough words Friday as they sought to rally their parties’ base voters in the final days before the midterm elections.

Obama urged Democrats in Miami to turn against “a politics based on division” and expressed hope that “we will cut through the lies, block out the noise and remember who we are called to be.” Trump said in West Virginia he watched Obama’s speech aboard Air Force One, reminding some of his most loyal supporters of what he called Obama’s broken promises on health care, the freedom of the press and global trade.

“Lie after lie, broken promise after broken promise, that’s what he did,” Trump said during an outdoor rally in Huntington, W.Va.

The competing campaign rallies, including Friday evening events in Georgia and Indiana, placed Trump in a virtual split-screen moment with Obama and set the stage for weekend campaign events for both party heavyweights.

Trump held back-to- back campaign rallies Friday as he launched a feverish push to help elect Republicans in next week’s elections – but he also looked ahead to facing off against any of the Democratic “lefties” he expects to challenge his re-election effort in 2020.

In Miami, Obama said democracy can’t work when words stop having meaning, encouraging a crowd of about 3,000 to vote for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum and Sen. Bill Nelson.

Obama said voters shouldn’t be bamboozled by misinformation while Republicans allow polluters to poison the environment, give tax cuts to billionaires and take health care away from millions.

During the former president’s speech, a protester shouted that Obama should “denounce ANTIFA” – the protesters who square off against neo-Nazis. Obama responded by citing anger among Trump supporters despite their candidate’s win and asked, “Why are they so mad?”

That protester and two others were escorted from the venue.

Trump quickly fired back at his White House predecessor, saying the former president didn’t keep his promises to voters.

Trump said that Obama’s assertion that “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” under the Affordable Care Act proved false. Some Americans were forced to change providers or health plans under the law.

Trump also said “nobody was worse to the press than Obama,” after Obama spoke in defense of the First Amendment. “He’s talking about how I should be nice to the fake news,” Trump said. “No, thank you!”

Trump opened a rally at an Indianapolis high school by highlighting the news from earlier in the day that the economy had added another 250,000 jobs in October. He also talked about the low unemployment rate.

“More Americans are working right now today than have ever worked in this country before,” Trump said. “That’s going to be fun on the debate stage when we debate one of the lefties.”

Trump came to Indiana to campaign for Republican Senate candidate Mike Braun, a former state representative and businessman who is putting up a stiff challenge to Democratic incumbent Joe Donnelly. Trump has sought at his rallies to leverage his popularity with his base supporters to help the GOP expand its slim 51-49 majority in the U.S. Senate.

Trump said Donnelly, a first-term senator, was ineffective and referred to him as “Sleepy Joe.” While Donnelly has sought to highlight his cooperation with Trump on issues such as immigration, he voted against last year’s tax cuts and this year voted against Trump’s choice of Brett Kavanaugh to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Braun said, “Let’s retire Joe Donnelly.”

Trump scheduled nine rallies in West Virginia, Indiana, Montana, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Ohio and Missouri before Election Day.

The Indiana event received an added boost from Vice President Mike Pence, who represented Indiana in Congress and as governor, and Bobby Knight, the Hall of Fame former head coach of the Indiana University men’s basketball team.

Knight led the noisy crowd in chants of “Go Get ’Em, Donald.”

At an airport rally earlier Friday in Huntington, Trump opened his final sprint to the midterms by defending his decision to tweet a video warning of people crossing into the U.S. illegally at the border with Mexico. Democrats and Republicans blasted the video as “racist.”

Trump said critics had given him a “hard time” about the video, which featured a Mexican migrant in a courtroom, smiling and boasting about having killed police officers.

But Trump said, “All I’m doing is just telling the truth.”

The video alleges without evidence that Democrats were responsible for allowing Luis Bracamontes into the U.S. The twice-deported immigrant from Mexico was sentenced to death in California for the 2014 killings of two police officers.

The video also includes scenes of a migrant caravan that is moving toward the U.S., but is still hundreds of miles away from the border. It ominously warns, “Who else would Democrats let in?” and suggests more violence will soon penetrate the border.

Trump says if migrants throw rocks at U.S. troops or border patrol officers, they’re not going to be shot, but they’re “going to be arrested for a long period of time.”

Trump had said that he told the U.S. military mobilizing at the southwest border that if U.S. troops face rock-throwing migrants, they should react as though the rocks were “rifles.”

But Trump said at the White House on Friday the U.S. won’t be firing on the migrants. Then he added that he hoped that shots wouldn’t be fired.

He says what rock-throwing migrants did to the Mexican military was a “disgrace.” Trump says the U.S. is “not going to stand for” what they did to the Mexican military and police.

Trump’s aggressive travel schedule over the next several days is aimed at boosting GOP Senate candidates as the party tries to expand its Senate majority, rather than working to defend embattled Republicans in the House, where the party’s control appears in doubt.

In West Virginia, Trump campaigned for Republican Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, who is in a tight race against Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin. Trump told several hundred people cheering him from inside the airport hangar that a vote for Manchin is a vote for Sen. Chuck Schumer, the leader of Senate Democrats and Trump’s fellow New Yorker.

The final push comes as more than 30 million Americans already have cast ballots for Tuesday’s midterm elections. The White House revealed Friday that Trump and first lady Melania Trump already have voted.

Associated Press writers Zeke Miller and Jill Colvin in Washington contributed to this report.