In swing states, Harris touts Republican endorsements while Trump leans into incendiary rhetoric

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump launched campaign blitzes Thursday with dramatically different approaches to attracting swing-state voters who will decide the presidential contest.

In North Carolina, Democratic nominee Harris used rallies in Charlotte and Greensboro to tout endorsements from Republicans who have crossed the aisle to back her. She also promised to protect access to health care and abortion, while delighting her partisan crowds with celebrations of her debate performance Tuesday, taking digs at Trump and cheerleading for her campaign and the country.

“We're having a good time, aren't we?” Harris declared, smiling as her boisterous crowd chanted: “USA! USA! USA!”

In the border state of Arizona, the Republican Trump pitched a tax exemption on all overtime wages, adding it to his previous proposals to not tax tips or Social Security income. But the former president squeezed those proposals, along with a nonspecific pledge to lower housing costs, into a stemwinding speech marked by his most incendiary rhetoric on immigration and immigrants themselves, name-calling of Harris and others, and a dark, exaggerated portrait of a nation Trump insisted is in a freefall only he can reverse.

“I was angry at the debate,” Trump said, mocking commentators' description of his performance Tuesday. “And, yes, I am angry,” he said, because “everything is terrible” since Harris and President Joe Biden are “destroying our country.” As he repeated the word “angry,” Trump's crowd in Tucson answered with its own “USA! USA! USA!” chants.

The competing visions and narratives underscored the starkly different choices faced by voters in the battleground states that will decide the outcome. Harris is casting a wide net, depending on Democrats' diverse coalition and hoping to add moderate and even conservative Republicans repelled by the former president. Trump, while seeking a broad working-class coalition with his tax ideas, is digging in on arguments about the country — and his political opponents — that are aimed most squarely at his most strident supporters.

That could become a consistent frame for the closing stretch of the campaign after Trump shut the door on another debate. That potentially could have been another seminal moment during a year that already has boomeranged around milestones like Trump's criminal conviction by a New York jury, Trump surviving an assassination attempt, Biden ending his reelection bid amid questions about his age, and Harris consolidating Democratic support to become the first woman of color to lead a major-party ticket.

“There will be no third debate,” Trump said Thursday, counting his June matchup against Biden in the total, and insisting he had won his lone encounter with Harris on Tuesday in Philadelphia.

The post-debate blitz reflected the narrow path to 270 Electoral College votes for both candidates, with the campaign already having become concentrated on seven swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Harris’ itinerary Thursday put her in a state Trump won twice, but his margin of 1.3 percentage points in 2020 was his closest statewide victory. Arizona, meanwhile, was one of Trump’s narrowest losses four years ago. He won the state in 2016.

In North Carolina, Harris took her own post-debate victory lap, and her campaign already has cut key moments of the debate into ads. But Harris warned against overconfidence, calling herself an underdog and making plain the stakes.

“This is not 2016 or 2020,” she said in Charlotte. “Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails.”

She touted endorsements from Republican former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, former Rep. Liz Cheney, both of whom have deemed Trump a fundamental threat to American values and democracy.

“Democrats, Republicans and independents are supporting our campaign," Harris said in Charlotte, praising the Cheneys and like-minded Republicans as citizens who recognize a need to “put country above party and defend our Constitution.”

Yet she also made a full-throated defense of the Affordable Care Act, the 2010 law commonly called “Obamacare” and passed over near-unanimous Republican opposition. She mocked Trump, who has spent years promising to scrap the ACA but said at their debate that he still has no specific replacement in mind.

“He said, ‘concepts of a plan,’” Harris said. “Concepts. Concepts. No actual plan. Concepts. ... Forty-five million Americans are insured through the Affordable Care Act. And he’s going to end it based on a concept.”

She saddled Trump again with the Supreme Court’s decision to end a woman’s federal right to abortion, paving the way for Republican-led states to severely restrict and in some cases effectively ban the procedure.

“Women are being refused care during miscarriages. Some are only being treated when they develop sepsis,” Harris said of states with the harshest restrictions.

The vice president added her usual broadsides against Project 2025, a 900-page policy agenda written by conservatives for a second Trump administration. Trump has distanced himself from the document, though there is a notable overlap between it and his policies — and, for that matter, some of the policy aims of Republicans like the Cheneys.

Harris’ approach in Charlotte and Greensboro tracked perhaps her widest path to victory: exciting and organizing the diverse Democratic base, especially younger generations, nonwhite voters and women, while convincing moderate Republicans who dislike Trump that they should be comfortable with her in the Oval Office, some policy disagreements notwithstanding. That’s the same formula Biden used in defeating Trump four years ago, flipping traditionally GOP-leaning states like Arizona and Georgia and narrowing the gap in North Carolina.

Trump, meanwhile, appears to bet that his path back to the White House depends mostly on his core supporters, plus enough new support from working- and middle-class voters drawn to his promises of tax breaks.

A raucous crowd cheered his new promise to end taxes on overtime wages. The Harris campaign quickly labeled the proposal a “snake oil sales pitch,” noting the Trump administration abandoned Obama administration plans to vastly expand the number of workers eligible for overtime pay in favor of a less generous expansion. In a state where rising housing prices has been an acute issue since the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump also pledged to reduce housing construction costs by “30 to 50 percent” — a staggering drop that he did not detail beyond pledging to cut regulations and ban mortgages “for illegal aliens."

“We are going to bring back the American dream bigger, better and stronger than ever before,” Trump said, beaming.

But he reserved most of 75 minutes at the podium for, in his words, anger. Mostly about an influx of migrants across the U.S. Southern border, but also about the ABC debate moderators he said were unfair in the debate he insisted he won. He singled out Linsey Davis, calling her “nasty” — the same word he would use to describe his 2016 Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

Trump ticked through many of his usual immigration bromides, arguing that migrants in the U.S. illegally have “taken over” cities and suburbs. He again alluded to the debunked claims — fueled by right-wing actors on social media — that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating domesticated pets and fowl in public parks. Trump invoked the approval of Hungary's authoritarian leader, Viktor Orban, and he elicited roars when he promised “largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”

Throughout his remarks, the former president mispronounced Harris’ first name, and he insisted she is both a Marxist and a fascist — ideologies that rest on opposite ends of the left-right political spectrum.

Barrow reported from Atlanta. Cooper reported from Tucson, Arizona. Associated Press reporter Jill Colvin contributed.

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign event, Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024, in Greensboro, N.C. (AP Photo/Matt Kelley)

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump departs after speaking at a campaign event at the Linda Ronstadt Music Hall, Thursday, Sept.12, 2024, in Tucson, Ariz. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Supporters listen as Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event at the Linda Ronstadt Music Hall, Thursday, Sept.12, 2024, in Tucson, Ariz. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign event, Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024, in Greensboro, N.C. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event at the Linda Ronstadt Music Hall, Thursday, Sept.12, 2024, in Tucson, Ariz. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris departs after speaking at a campaign event, Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024, in Greensboro, N.C. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event at the Linda Ronstadt Music Hall, Thursday, Sept.12, 2024, in Tucson, Ariz. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign event, Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024, in Greensboro, N.C. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump visits the Shanksville Volunteer Fire Company in Shanksville, Pa., Wednesday, Sept. 11, 2024. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris boards Air Force Two at LaGuardia Airport in East Elmhurst, N.Y., Wednesday, Sept. 11, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

AVIGNON, France (AP) — A 71-year-old French man admitted in court Tuesday that for nearly a decade, he repeatedly drugged his unwitting wife and invited dozens of men to rape her while she lay unconscious in their bed.

His wife of 50 years, who has divorced him since his arrest, also got to speak, telling the court that she feels completely betrayed.

In a trial that has gripped France and raised awareness about sexual violence in the home and beyond, Dominique Pélicot told the court that he also raped his wife, Gisèle Pélicot, and that the 50 men standing trial alongside him understood exactly what they were doing.

“Today I maintain that, along with the other men here, I am a rapist,″ Dominique Pélicot testified. “They knew everything. They can’t say otherwise.”

Pélicot’s testimony marked the most important moment yet in a trial that has shocked the world. Although he previously confessed to investigators, his court testimony will be crucial for the panel of judges to decide on the fate of his co-defendants, who range in age from 26 to 74. Many of them deny having raped Gisèle Pélicot, saying her then-husband had manipulated them or that they believed she was consenting.

Many following the case also hope his testimony might help explain why Dominique Pélicot would subject the mother of his three children to such unconscionable abuse.

Gisèle Pélicot has become a hero to many rape victims and a symbol of the fight against sexual violence in France for agreeing to waive her anonymity in the case, letting the trial be public and appearing openly in front of the media. She shows up every day, passing through the courthouse security line behind men accused of raping her. As she left court during a break Tuesday, supporters brought her flowers.

After days of delay due to what his lawyers said was a kidney stone and urinary tract infection, Dominique Pélicot, seated in a wheelchair, testified that the charges against him are true. With his ex-wife looking on from the packed gallery and his voice trembling and barely audible at times, he started a long day of testimony trying to explain childhood traumas that he said scarred and molded him into the person he became.

“One is not born a pervert, one becomes a pervert,” Pélicot told the judges after recounting, sometimes in tears, being raped by a male hospital nurse at age 9 and being forced to take part in a gang rape at age 14.

Pélicot also said that for years, his father sexually abused a young girl his family had taken in, and that his brother later said their father had invited other men to do the same.

He regretted that his parents didn't let him continue his studies after he turned 14. He said that around that time, he tried to persuade his mother to leave the house with him, but “she never wanted to.”

“I don’t really want to talk about this, I am just ashamed of my father. In the end, I didn’t do any better,'' said Pélicot, who faces 20 years in prison if convicted.

After he spoke about his difficult upbringing, Gisèle Pélicot was given the opportunity to address the court.

“It is hard for me to hear this. For 50 years, I lived with a man. I couldn’t imagine even one second that he could have committed acts of rape,″ she said. “I trusted this man entirely.″

The two looked at each other, him from behind the dock’s glass window and her from the witness stand.

“I am guilty,” he told her. “I regret everything I did. I ask you for forgiveness, even if it is unpardonable.”

Asked if she wanted to respond, Gisèle Pélicot turned and left the stand.

When asked about his feelings toward his ex-wife, Dominique Pélicot said she didn't deserve what he did.

“From my youth, I remember only shocks and traumas, forgotten partly thanks to her,” he said in tears.

At that moment, Gisèle Pélicot put on her sunglasses.

Later, Dominique Pélicot said, “I was crazy about her. She replaced everything. I ruined everything.”

A supermarket security guard caught Pélicot in 2020 secretly shooting video up women’s skirts, according to court documents. During a search of his house and electronic devices, police found thousands of photos and videos of men engaging in sexual acts with Gisèle Pélicot while she appeared to be unconscious in bed.

With the recordings, police were able to track down most of the 72 suspects they were seeking, but not all.

In addition to the photos and videos of Gisèle Pélicot, investigators found photos of the Pelicots' daughter, Caroline Darian, and two daughters-in-law that were surreptitiously taken while they were in their underwear, getting undressed or taking showers, according to authorities.

While her mother has stayed remarkably calm throughout the trial, Darian walked out of the courtroom Tuesday as her father was being asked about photos of her that were found on his laptop.

″Excuse me, I’m going to vomit,″ she said angrily before rushing out. She has written a book about what happened to her family, called ″And I Stopped Calling you Daddy.″

After retiring, the Pélicots moved from the Paris region to a house in Mazan, a small town in the Provence region.

When police officers called Gisèle Pélicot in for questioning in late 2020, she initially told them her husband was “a great guy,″ according to legal documents. They then showed her some photos. She left and later divorced her husband.

Since Dominique Pélicot’s arrest, other cases have surfaced. He was fined after being caught shooting video of a women’s crotch in 2010 and required to see a psychologist. Gisèle Pélicot has said she never knew about this incident.

Under French law, the proceedings inside the courtroom cannot be filmed or photographed. Dominique Pélicot has been brought into the court through a special entrance that's inaccessible for the media, because he and some other defendants are being held in custody during the trial and can't be filmed. Defendants who are not in custody have been arriving at the courthouse wearing surgical masks or hoods to avoid having their faces filmed or photographed.

Among those hoping to secure a seat to watch the Tuesday's proceedings was Bernadette Tessonière, a 69-year-old retiree who lives a half-hour drive from Avignon, where the trial is taking place.

“How is it possible that in 50 years of communal life, one can live next to someone who hides his life so well? This is scary,” she said.

Gisele Pelicot arrives at the Avignon court house, in Avignon, southern France, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024. Her ex-husband admitted in court that for nearly a decade, he repeatedly drugged his unwitting wife and invited dozens of men to rape her while she lay unconscious. (AP Photo/Diane Jantet)

Gisele Pelicot arrives at the Avignon court house, in Avignon, southern France, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024. Her ex-husband admitted in court that for nearly a decade, he repeatedly drugged his unwitting wife and invited dozens of men to rape her while she lay unconscious. (AP Photo/Diane Jantet)

Gisele Pelicot exits the Avignon court house, in Avignon, southern France, Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024, after her ex-husband admitted in court that for nearly a decade, he repeatedly drugged his unwitting wife and invited dozens of men to rape her while she lay unconscious. (AP Photo/Diane Jantet)

FILE - Police officers walk in the Avignon court house prior to the trial of Dominique Pelicot, in Avignon, southern France, Thursday, Sept. 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Lewis Joly, File)

FILE - Gisele Pelicot speaks to media as she leaves the Avignon court house, southern France, Thursday, Sept. 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Lewis Joly, File)

FILE - Gisele Pelicot, left, arrives in the Avignon court house, in Avignon, southern France, Thursday, Sept. 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Lewis Joly, File)

FILE - Gisele Pelicot, left, arrives in the Avignon court house, in Avignon, southern France, Thursday, Sept. 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Lewis Joly, File)