The Latest: Hurricane Milton threatens to overshadow presidential campaigning

Hurricane Milton is threatening to overshadow presidential campaigning as it menaces Florida.

The storm has already scrambled Donald Trump’s schedule. He put off a virtual event Tuesday night focused on health care and postpone a Univision town hall in Miami. He’s scheduled to be in Pennsylvania on Wednesday.

Vice President Kamala Harris will virtually attend a briefing on the storm and the federal response that President Joe Biden is receiving Wednesday at the White House. Harris plans to head to Nevada and Arizona on Thursday. She spent Tuesday in New York taping interviews on ABC’s “The View,” with radio personality Howard Stern and on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

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Here’s the latest:

Biden says Congress needs to step up after Hurricane Helene

President Joe Biden says that the destruction from Hurricane Helene is going to cost billions of dollars that victims will need quickly and that “Congress better be ready to step up to help.”

Biden made the comments in excerpts of his interview recorded Tuesday with theGiro. The excerpts were released as Hurricane Milton threatens to unleash new devastation in Florida.

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Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who replaced him at the top of the Democratic Election Day ticket, have previously criticized former President Donald Trump, now the Republican nominee, for spreading false information about the federal response to Helene.

In the interview excerpts, Biden says that, “A lot of folks are out there spreading lies about what we are not doing, that things are not going well. That we are not responding.”

He responded, “We’ve been completely responsive, and we’ve been ahead of the game.”

Trump schedules rally in New York for end of October

Donald Trump is returning to New York in the race’s final stretch, scheduling a rally at the city’s iconic Madison Square Garden stadium.

Trump is planning his event for Oct. 27, kicking off the final week of campaigning, according to a campaign official familiar with the plans who spoke on condition of anonymity before a formal announcement.

It will be Trump’s second rally in the city he grew up in following a stop in the South Bronx in May.

Trump has claimed he believes he can win New York, even though it is an overwhelmingly Democratic state and the city even more so. But such an event is likely to draw outsized media attention.

The former president is also campaigning this week in other Democratic states, including California and Colorado.

— By Jill Colvin