Election Updates: Kristi Noem’s new book falsely says she met Kim Jong-un. (2024)

The National Rifle Association announced on Friday that former President Donald J. Trump would be the group's keynote speaker during its annual meeting on May 18. It will be the ninth time that Trump, who has pledged to roll back the Biden administration's restrictions on guns, has addressed the N.R.A.

A right-wing foundation chaired by Cleta Mitchell, a legal architect of Donald J. Trump’s plan to overturn the 2020 election, sued the states of Wisconsin and Minnesota in federal court this week for access to their voter rolls. The group, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, has named several states in litigation, trying to sow doubt about election integrity and voters’ eligibility.

Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, in a new book coming out next week that was obtained by The Times, said she had met Kim Jong-un, North Korea's leader. “I’m sure he underestimated me, having no clue about my experience staring down little tyrants (I’d been a children’s pastor, after all),” she wrote. A spokesman for Noem said today that the anecdote was an error; that Noem had not met with him.

President Biden got an endorsem*nt from a galaxy far, far away when the actor Mark Hamill made a surprise appearance at the White House daily briefing. He praised Biden as legislatively the most “successful president in my lifetime.” Hamill said that Biden invited him to use his first name. "He said, 'You can call me Joe,' and I said, 'Can I call you Joe-bi wan Kenobi?' He liked that."

The Pennsylvania House in a party-line vote narrowly advanced a Democratic bill that would allow election officials in the battleground state to begin counting mail-in ballots up to seven days before an election, a process that must now wait until Election Day. But with Republicans controlling the state Senate and seeking the inclusion of a voter ID requirement, the bill’s prospects appear weak.

That ABC News/Ipsos poll found that all age groups have grown more critical of U.S. support for Israel in its war with Hamas since January — notably including voters over 65, who remain most supportive of the U.S. position. Democrats and Independents have both grown significantly more critical, though Republicans’ views have changed little.

An ABC News/Ipsos poll released this morning found Americans divided over the Israel-Hamas war, with a growing share, 38 percent, saying the United States is doing too much to support Israel. But the poll, which was conducted amid widespread campus protests against the Israeli invasion of Gaza, found college-age adults were actually less critical of U.S. support for Israel than some older age cohorts.

Alabama lawmakers passed a bill ensuring President Biden will be on the ballot in the state this November, averting a potential issue for the Biden campaign stemming from the Democratic nominating convention occurring after Alabama’s deadline for certifying candidates. The bill pushes the certification deadline to after the Democratic National Convention in August.

The Biden campaign released an ad on abortion in English and Spanish featuring a Marine Corps veteran slamming former President Donald J. Trump. “If he wants to take any more freedoms away from my three daughters, he’ll have to come through me first,” says Cesar Carreon. Trump has eaten into some of Biden’s support among Latinos, particularly men. Abortion is one of the few issues where Biden polls better than Trump.

Kristi Noem’s new book falsely says she met Kim Jong-un.

Ms. Noem’s new book also includes an error about when a phone call with Nikki Haley took place. That will be corrected in future editions of the book, too, said Ian Fury, the chief of communications for Ms. Noem.

“It was brought to our attention that the upcoming book ‘No Going Back’ has two small errors,” Mr. Fury said. “This has been communicated to the ghostwriter and editor. Kim Jong-un was included in a list of world leaders and shouldn’t have been.”

In the book, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times ahead of its official publication on May 7, Ms. Noem mentions the meeting with Mr. Kim when writing about her eight years in Congress as South Dakota’s sole representative, in a passage about her role as a member of the House Armed Services Committee.

“I had the chance to travel to many countries to meet with world leaders — some who wanted our help, and some who didn’t,” Ms. Noem writes. “I remember when I met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. I’m sure he underestimated me, having no clue about my experience staring down little tyrants (I’d been a children’s pastor, after all). Dealing with foreign leaders takes resolve, preparation, and determination.”

Mr. Fury did not respond to a question about whom Ms. Noem could have been referring to, if not Mr. Kim.

The conversation that Ms. Noem describes having with Ms. Haley, the former South Carolina governor who dropped out of the Republican presidential primary in March, suggests that Ms. Haley had threatened her because they were both prominent Republican women.

Ms. Noem describes the call as starting with Ms. Haley offering to mentor her during her first term as governor of South Dakota, but then saying: “I’ve heard many good things about you. But when I do hear bad things, I will make sure that you know. I’ve enjoyed talking to you. We will visit soon. Goodbye.”

Ms. Noem then recounts the conversation with her secretary, writing that she said: “I’m pretty sure I was just threatened by Nikki Haley. It was clear that she wanted me to know that there was only room for one Republican woman in the spotlight. It was weird.”

Chaney Denton, a spokeswoman for Ms. Haley, said Ms. Noem’s story was inaccurate.

“Nikki has long called and written notes supporting other women when they go through challenging times,” Ms. Denton said in a statement. “She called Governor Noem in 2020 to encourage her when she was criticized for keeping her state open during Covid. How she would twist that into a threat is just plain weird.”

Future editions of the book will correct the timeline, clarifying that Ms. Noem spoke with Nikki Haley in 2020 and met with her in 2021. Mr. Fury did not specify other changes to the anecdote, in which Ms. Noem writes that the implication she got from the call was that “I’m the alpha female here, and you should know your place.” She also wrote of Ms. Haley: “I actually felt a little sad for her.”

The memoir, seemingly intended to boost Ms. Noem’s profile as Mr. Trump gets closer to picking a running mate, seeks to play up her bona fides as a Trump loyalist.

She boasts of defending Mr. Trump in a speech the day after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, “regardless of the fact that what unfolded on January 6 was undeniably ugly.”

But much of the attention has so far centered on her shooting of the dog, Cricket, to her daughter’s distress. Ms. Noem appeared on the Fox News program hosted by Sean Hannity on Wednesday to defend her conduct, saying that she included the story in the book to illustrate the “tough, challenging decisions that I’ve had to make throughout my life.”

Biden and Trump tussle over the economy with the new jobs report.

In a statement from the White House, President Biden said the report was more evidence that “the great American comeback continues” after he had “inherited an economy on the brink, with the worst economic crisis in a century” from Mr. Trump.

The economy is typically one of the most important issues of every presidential campaign. And it is expected to be so again this year, after high inflation marked Mr. Biden’s first years in office and polls show voters continue to be displeased with prices and the overall economy.

The monthly jobs report is likely to be quickly forgotten in the campaign. But the biggest impact could be on the Federal Reserve, which sets interest rates in the country.

Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, made it clear this week that the jobs market is one place where the Fed is looking for signs that previous rate hikes are cooling the economy. The new employment report could provide just that signal.

Interest rates are at the highest level in two decades in an effort to curb inflation.

Democrats have hoped that potential rate cuts — which determine how much it costs to borrow money to buy everything from cars to homes — will spur the economy ahead of the election and improve public perception.

In the most recent poll by The New York Times and Siena College, Mr. Biden registered only 34 percent approval for his handling of the economy, and 63 percent disapproval.

Mr. Trump himself appears to be closely tracking the rate decisions of the Federal Reserve. At the Manhattan courthouse on Thursday, Mr. Trump said, “Interest rates are obviously not going to be reduced prior to the election because inflation is roaring back.”

A ballot-access consultant for R.F.K. Jr. was recently arrested on assault charges.

The arrest was reported earlier by Mediaite.

Stefanie Spear, a spokeswoman for the Kennedy campaign, said Friday: “Trent is a contractor. He tells us that the alleged incident never occurred.”

Mr. Pool did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and a lawyer representing him did not immediately provide one.

Mr. Pool, a Texas-based petition circulator, has played a central role in Mr. Kennedy’s ballot-access efforts, according to court records and three people familiar with the campaign who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss its internal workings. As an independent candidate, Mr. Kennedy faces an uphill battle to get on the ballot in all 50 states, an endeavor that could cost tens of millions of dollars.

The Kennedy campaign has paid one of Mr. Pool’s firms, Accelevate 2020, nearly $390,000 for ballot consulting. (Accelevate has also done work this election cycle for the presidential campaigns of Marianne Williamson, a Democrat, and Nikki Haley, a Republican, records show.)

Mr. Pool has been instrumental in promoting an aggressive legal strategy to challenge state signature-gathering rules, the people familiar with the campaign said. Accelevate and Mr. Pool joined in a federal lawsuit in Utah filed by the Kennedy campaign this year, seeking to extend the state’s ballot deadline and loosen its rules on who can gather signatures. Paul A. Rossi, a lawyer who has represented Mr. Pool in similar lawsuits over the years, is the Kennedy campaign’s main ballot access lawyer.

A super PAC backing Mr. Kennedy, American Values 2024, has also worked with Mr. Pool, according to public records and two of the people familiar with Mr. Kennedy’s campaign.

From December to the end of March — the latest date for which campaign expense reports are available — American Values paid $2.4 million to companies for ballot access work, including $1.2 million to a newly formed firm called Public Appeal LLC, which was set up last year and whose leadership includes Mr. Pool and his brother, public records show.

Tony Lyons, one of the super PAC’s leaders, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Latino advocacy groups call Trump’s deportation plans a danger to democracy.

“There’s no right way to be American, there’s no right way to look American,” said María Teresa Kumar, president of Voto Latino, adding that Mr. Trump and his backers sent Hispanic voters the wrong message.

The event was part of an effort by the groups’ political arms to better coordinate their work to shore up Latino support for President Biden and other Democrats ahead of the November election.

Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., leaders with Voto Latino, UnidosUS Action Fund, Mi Familia Vota, America’s Voice, and Latino Victory Project announced a combined investment of $50 million — the most the groups have spent jointly to sway a voting bloc that is likely to be crucial in swing-state races and congressional elections.

Their focus, they said, was to avoid another Trump presidency, saying Mr. Trump had launched his 2016 campaign with dangerous and dehumanizing statements against Mexicans and immigrants, and had only intensified his rhetoric since then.

“Donald Trump is enemy number one for the Latino community, for the immigrant community, but also enemy number one for all the basic elements of democracy,” Héctor Sánchez Barba, president Mi Familia Vota, said at the news conference.

In a statement, Karoline Leavitt, the national press secretary for the Trump campaign, countered that Mr. Trump has struck a clear difference between immigrants who arrive legally and those who have sought to game Biden’s border policies. She added that the numbers show immigrants themselves strongly support Mr. Trump, “especially when he rejects the invasion” at the southern border.

Although Latino voters still overall lean Democratic, Mr. Trump improved his performance with Hispanic voters in 2020, and made sizable gains in some areas like South Florida and South Texas. Some analyses have found his opposition to Covid pandemic restrictions that shut down workplaces and his administration’s promotion of low Latino unemployment rates and support for Latino businesses helped sway some of those voters to his side, even when they disagreed with his immigration policies.

Latino Republicans and leaders with conservative Hispanic groups have argued that Mr. Trump has been able to make inroads with the Hispanic community because Latinos had lost trust in the Biden administration and Democrats to handle the influx of migrants at the border.

“Hispanics are for immigration — absolutely — but they also want to see law and order,” said Alfonso Aguilar, director for Hispanic engagement at the American Principles Project, a socially conservative think thank. He added conservative groups were working on their own multimillion-dollar campaign aimed at Latino voters.

At their news conference in Washington on Friday, leaders of Voto Latino and the other organizations pushed back against polls showing Mr. Trump in “a dead heat” with President Biden in the presidential race, as well as recent surveys showing that Latino voters are increasingly supportive of more restrictive immigration measures like mass deportations and a border wall.

They said many Latinos had not been following the presidential election and that disinformation was running rampant in Hispanic communities. One focus group of young voters in Arizona found Latinas were highly concerned about the loss of access to abortion but were not aware that it had been Republicans who had led efforts to curb abortion rights, Ms. Kumar said.

Leaders said their mobilization efforts would be geared toward communicating actions the Biden administration has taken that benefit the Hispanic community, like the decision on Friday to let undocumented immigrants get health care through the Affordable Care Act — a move they said came after Voto Latino presented focus-group findings that many Latino voters were considering sitting out the election or voting for a third-party candidate.

Janet Murguía, president of UnidosUS Action Fund, said she believed Latinos’ attitudes toward more hard line immigration policies would change once they realized the impact.

“I predict that this will shift,” she said, adding that the groups’ efforts are aimed at educating Latino voters about who would work on their behalf.

Biden vs. Trump, through the prism of the campus protests.

“No,” Mr. Biden said, at the end of an unscheduled four-minute statement to the news media at the White House.

The president began to walk away from the podium. Another reporter asked, Do you think the National Guard should intervene?

“No,” he said, without breaking his stride as he left the room.

The president’s remarks on the protests stood in sharp contrast to those of his Republican presidential rival, former President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Trump has denigrated the student demonstrators in increasingly hyperbolic terms. Last week, he described the protests as “riots,” filled with “tremendous hate,” adding in courthouse remarks this week that the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 was “a big hoax” compared with the recent campus protests.

When it comes to handling civil unrest, the contrast between the two presidential candidates could not be clearer. Mr. Biden defended the right to dissent but said too many of the demonstrations had gone beyond the bounds of free speech. Mr. Trump, who as president deployed the National Guard against racial justice protesters in the summer of 2020, has celebrated and encouraged the crackdowns by the police and accused the protesters of being paid by liberal forces.

Mr. Biden, whose party is divided over the war in Gaza, dismissed the option of deploying the National Guard against students who he said were engaging in a time-honored American tradition. His remarks suggested that the threat of violence and disorder from the demonstrations had been overstated by some of the protesters’ most strident critics among prominent Republicans — chief among them Mr. Trump.

“We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent,” Mr. Biden said, adding that “in moments like this, there are always those who rush in to score political points. But this isn’t a moment for politics. It’s a moment for clarity.”

Mr. Trump — who has embraced the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — has taken a more confrontational stance. When New York police officers in riot gear stormed an occupied building on the campus of Columbia University late on Tuesday, he called in to a Fox News broadcast and asserted without evidence that the demonstrations were filled with “a lot of paid agitators, professional agitators,” adding, “Somebody atop is paying, or a group is paying.”

The next day, at campaign rallies in Michigan and Wisconsin, Mr. Trump described the protesters as “raging lunatics,” suggested that they had been hired by liberal groups to draw attention away from the border, and called the police crackdown against the protesters at Columbia “a beautiful thing to watch” and urged other universities to follow suit.

“To every college president, I say remove the encampments immediately,” he said. “Vanquish the radicals and take back our campuses for all of the normal students.”