Donald Trump’s speech at a smaller rally of supporters in Dalton, Georgia, was interrupted by three protesters holding signs against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Supporters pushed them out of the crowd, including a man wearing a yellow Gadsden flag like a cloak.
Two of the protest signs condemned the idea of sending ICE officials to polling stations on election day, a possibility the administration had not ruled out. After resuming his speech, Trump praised the "woman in the yellow cloak", apparently mistakenly referring to the man draped in a yellow Gadsden flag with the slogan "Don't Tread on Me".
"She went up there, pulled them out of their seats and threw them out. Where is the woman in the yellow cloak? She was excellent," Trump said. He added: "I love the woman in the yellow cloak. She was right there. Shoving them around, hitting a man."
Trump spent most of his time in Georgia defending his presidential record, rather than speaking about Republican candidates on the ballot for next month’s elections. Before Trump visited Georgia on Friday to campaign against him, Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff stated he would be "happy to have the president come every day from now until the elections".
On Thursday, Trump recorded a video for social media from the Oval Office in which he falsely claimed that El-Sayed, an American doctor born in Michigan to a family of Egyptian immigrants, was a "member of the Muslim Brotherhood". There is no evidence that El-Sayed was ever part of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. El-Sayed said that reports suggesting his biological mother may have been connected to the group as a student in the 1970s, a decade before his birth, did not mean he had "ties" to the group. El-Sayed, who was raised by his father, stepmother and grandparents, told NBC News on Wednesday: "My mother did not raise me."
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez condemned attempts by Trump and other Republicans to smear Abdul El-Sayed by falsely claiming he was connected to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, calling it clearly "racist". After eating at a Culver’s in Michigan on Thursday, a TMZ journalist asked her to comment on the smear. "On a scale between real and racist, where does the whole Muslim Brotherhood thing fall?" the question went. "I think it falls into racist, very clearly," Ocasio-Cortez replied.
"As someone who knows Abdul’s story – he has spoken about it – it is a very sensitive thing. When Abdul was born, his parents separated very quickly and his mother left, so his father raised him," she said. "I think it is hard that people, you know, throw around really painful and insulting and racist things, but it also hits, you know, a little boy in Detroit who grew up without a mother." She added: "That does not define Abdul at all."
In Maine, Troy Jackson, the Democratic candidate for the US Senate, and Susan Collins, the Republican candidate with five terms, exchanged insults on Thursday in their final debate ahead of the November elections. It was the fourth confrontation between Jackson and Collins. Collins attempted to portray Jackson as an inexperienced state legislator and link him to former candidate Graham Platner, who dropped out of the race earlier this year following allegations of rape and sexual assault, which he continues to deny. Jackson accused Collins of corruption and criticised her for her "moderate" persona in Congress.
