The Latest: Trump and Harris are campaigning for votes in pivotal Michigan

The Associated Press

With the Nov. 5 election fast approaching, Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump are setting their sites on the key battleground state of Michigan on Friday.

The vice president is scheduled to begin her day in Grand Rapids before holding events in Lansing and Oakland County, northwest of Detroit.

The former president has his own event in Oakland County in the afternoon before an evening rally in Detroit.

Trump laced into Harris and other Democrats in a pointed and at times bitter speech as he headlined the annual Al Smith charity dinner Thursday in New York. Harris appeared virtually for the event.

Follow the AP’s Election 2024 coverage at: https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.

Here’s the latest:

Trump compares convicted Jan. 6 rioters to interned Japanese Americans in World War II

Former President Donald Trump said on Friday that rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, are being treated like Japanese Americans who were incarcerated on U.S. soil during World War II.

“Why are they still being held? Nobody’s ever been treated like this,” he said in an interview with conservative commentator Dan Bongino. “Maybe the Japanese during Second World War, frankly. They were held, too.”

Trump made the comments after claiming the defendants “won in the Supreme Court.” His reference concerns a ruling from this past June that limited a federal obstruction law that had been used to charge hundreds of Capitol riot defendants as well as the former president himself.

The justices, in a 6-3 opinion authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, held that the charge of obstructing an official proceeding must include proof that defendants tried to tamper with or destroy documents.

The overwhelming majority of the approximately 1,000 people who have been convicted of or pleaded guilty to Capitol riot-related federal crimes were not charged with obstruction and will not be affected by the outcome.

Martin Luther King III backs Kamala Harris

Martin Luther King III, the son of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., said on Friday said: “We must never forget our vote is our voice” while endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for the nation's top executive.

Martin Luther King III, his wife Arndrea Waters King and other community leaders are working to rally Black voters ahead of the 2024 election, warning about civil rights should Trump win.

King said Republican Donald Trump is who he has “always been — a man willing to hurt others for his own profit and notoriety.”

Trump will visit a Muslim-majority city's campaign office

Donald Trump is expected to visit a new campaign office in one of the nation’s only Muslim-majority cities.

That’s according to a person familiar with Trump’s schedule who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the event hasn’t been publicly announced.

The visit to Hamtramck, located in metro Detroit, comes after the city’s mayor endorsed him last month.

Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, has tried to cut into Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris’ support with Arab Americans in Michigan. Many Muslim and Arab voters are frustrated with Harris over the U.S. backing of Israel’s offensive in Gaza and its invasion of Lebanon, both following Hamas’ attack on Israel last October.

Trump’s allies have held meetings for months with community leaders in Michigan, which is a critical swing state in the November election and has a sizable population of Arab Americans particularly in and around Detroit.

—From Joey Cappelletti in Lansing, Michigan

A lot of people didn't like Trump's jokes at charity dinner — including Trump

Former President Donald Trump says he wasn’t a fan of many of the jokes he told at last night’s Al Smith charity dinner.

“For the most part, I didn’t like any of them,” he said in a live appearance on “Fox & Friends” Friday morning.

Trump said a number of people had helped him with material, including some from Fox — though he didn’t say whom.

Trump made a similar aside midspeech after a particularly pointed joke targeting Doug Emhoff, the husband of Kamala Harris.

He seemed to acknowledge he’d gone too far, calling the joke “nasty” and saying he’d told the “idiots” who’d written it that it was “too tough.”

He also said during the speech that he’d gone “overboard” in his 2016 appearance at the event when he laced into his then-rival Hillary Clinton.

Trump says Haley ‘helping us already’ on campaign

Trump says he’ll “do what I have to do” to drum up support from one of his former GOP primary rivals, Nikki Haley.

Trump gave that response Friday during a live appearance on “Fox & Friends” when asked if he would seek the former South Carolina governor’s support on the campaigning trail in the election’s closing days.

Trump said Haley “is helping us already” and “is out campaigning” but questioned why political watchers seemed so concerned that she and not other former rivals, like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, stump for him.

Harris has been courting some of Haley’s former supporters in the closing days of the general election campaign.

Haley, who also served as Trump’s United Nations ambassador, was the last foe remaining against Trump in the Republican primary earlier this year, shuttering her campaign after the former president’s romp through the Super Tuesday contests. She didn’t immediately endorse him in the race but said in May she’d vote for him, leaving it up to the former president to work toward winning over support from her backers.

Haley called for GOP unity around Trump in a speech at this summer’s Republican National Convention.

Singer Marc Anthony slams Trump in a new ad

Grammy Award winning singer Marc Anthony in a new TV ad for Harris is lambasting Trump for blocking disaster relief for Puerto Rico after a 2017 hurricane devastated the U.S. territory.

The ad released Friday and aimed at Latino voters includes footage of the ravaged island following Hurricane Maria and Trump tossing rolls of paper towels into a crowd during a visit to an island church following a hurricane, behavior from the then-president that was derided by some as disrespectful.

“Even though some have forgotten, I remember what it was like when Trump was president,” said Anthony, who is of Puerto Rican descent. “I remember what he did and he said about Puerto Rico, our people.”

Trump publicly feuded with the mayor of San Juan over her criticism of his administration’s response to the storm that killed 3,000 and withheld billions in congressionally approved aid to Puerto Rico. He eventually relented and announced less than 50 days before his losing 2020 reelection bid that he was releasing $13 billion in aid. At the time, he declared himself the “best thing that ever happened to Puerto Rico.”

The Harris campaign said that the ad will air on the popular Spanish-language Telemundo and WAPA America TV, during this Sunday’s coverage of the 2024 Billboard Latin Music Awards and in Pennsylvania on Telemundo and Univision.

Latino voters have historically favored Democrats, but Republicans have made inroads with the group in recent years.

Residents of Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory of more than 3 million people, cannot vote in the general election. But there are more people of Puerto Rican descent on the mainland than on the island, and they could play a key role in the Nov. 5 vote.