At Ohio Campaign Rally, Trump Threatens to Withhold Aid If Democrats Get Elected

Por Chris Walker — Truthout

“I’m not going to help” if an Ohio Democratic candidate for governor wins, Trump said.

Did you know that Truthout is a nonprofit and independently funded by readers like you? If you value what we do, please support our work with a donation .

In a campaign speech in Vandalia, Ohio, on Saturday, President Donald Trump suggested he would withhold federal funds from the state if voters elect Democratic politicians in this year’s midterm races.

Trump appeared to conflate two different political races, discussing U.S. Sen. Jon Husted’s (R-Ohio) Senate reelection campaign and Democratic candidate Amy Acton’s campaign for governor in the same statement. (Husted is running against former U.S. Senator and Democrat Sherrod Brown, while Acton is facing off against Republican candidate for governor and Trump ally Vivek Ramaswamy.)

“Jon Husted…calls me all the time. He always wants money,” Trump said during his speech. “If Amy Acton got in, I don’t know anything about her.”

“I’m not going to help her, probably, she hates me, I guess,” Trump added.

Trump’s speech also featured vulgar attacks against Democrats in general. At one point, he encouraged those in attendance to “just get out and vote” for Republicans.

“If you do that, we’re going to win, and we’re going to win big, and we’re going to shove it up their ass,” Trump said.

The president made a number of bizarre claims during his Saturday night speech. He claimed that he has one of the highest IQs “anywhere in the world,” telling the audience it was around 1,775. Such an IQ would indeed be the highest, as no IQ test has ever measured above 300. He also said that polls are “fake,” complaining that they didn’t take into account his plans to campaign in the final weeks of the race — a statement that is technically true but misleading, as polls question respondents about their current attitudes. And he reiterated an unlikely (and legally dubious) promise to deliver $5,000 checks to every American adult if Republicans win the midterms.

Trump has already withheld disaster aid from states for seemingly political reasons. In a series of Truth Social posts in late June, Trump announced hundreds of millions of dollars in disaster aid funds going to states that backed him in 2024, while ignoring some requests from states that backed his opponent, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

An analysis from the Urban Institute around that time showed that, since Trump reentered the White House, over 84 percent of requests from states that voted for him won approval, as opposed to only 41 percent of requests from states that didn’t back him. Approvals, when they did occur, happened twice as fast for red states as for blue ones.

We now have three full months of data since Google changed its search to feature AI results. The numbers are worse than we anticipated. Overall readership that comes to Truthout through Google is down 54 percent against last year. The number of new readers who discover Truthout via Google searches is down 49 percent, and returning users from Google are down 51 percent.

We lost 15 percent of our readership overnight. This was a readership we painstakingly built over decades, and it vanished because Google chose corporate greed over a healthy democracy.

We anticipate a loss of roughly $500,000 in online revenue as a result of this massive traffic plunge in the next year alone.

The only way we can keep publishing is with strong reader support. We are asking you to start a monthly donation to Truthout today — anything you can do, whether $5 or $25, makes a difference.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the following terms:

Chris Walker is a news writer at Truthout, based in Madison, Wisconsin. Focusing on both national and local topics since the early 2000s, he has produced thousands of articles analyzing the issues of the day and their impact on people. He can be found on most social media platforms under the handle @thatchriswalker.

Get the news you want, delivered to your inbox every day.

Truthout produces 100 percent independent, nonprofit journalism thanks to readers like you. While you’re here, please consider a donation of a few dollars to support our work.

Fonte: Truthout