billion with a b. we ve got this honore got this. we don t force in america thursday, july 4 x 70s dirt on cnn hi, everyone. you re in the cnn newsroom. i m omar jimenez in washington. we are just five days away, people from the first presidential debate of 2024. and today, we re seeing a pretty stark difference between incumbent president joe biden and his republican challenger, former president donald trump, as the two men prepare for this high-stakes face off, while biden is holding intense, meaningful, a closed group of advisors at camp david trump is skipping the tradition no route for now and is instead hitting the campaign trail. here is just a few hours ago at an event and washington rallying his supporters for the big showdown with biden nobody is going to be watching the debate on thursday night, right nobody. will anybody be watching cnn s steve contorno, we ll be watching him in person soon live in philadelphia where trump is expected to hold a campaign rally
he has to name somebody on monday who has a good chance of having the support of all these folks. of these seven candidates, it s not obvious. no, it s not. and that s why all of us trying to put this in boxes, trying to figure out maybe venn diagrams is a better word than boxes. in the end this is not going to come down to some pro/con list, plus this, minus that. it will come down to what feels right for this president. and to this point in his presidency, the president s gut has guided him to some victories
group. i think that that s really i think that carries more weight, right, ali, that that s put together by a conservative group. i was just discussing these poll results with my colleague today, he s following the midterms more closely than i am. one thing he reminds me is that immigration is such a hot button issue for conservatives, and while a lot of democrats might feel strongly about the way immigrants are treated, they tend to rank it lower. it s not necessarily the thing that gets them to the polls. but i think that we ve seen a shift. i think we ve seen it through the rallies last week, through ads like this, that this, what is happening now at the border, what happened with the travel ban, is in a new place that they haven t seen before. this could bump up that issue for democrats and it could even swing some conservatives on the issue, who say, you know, i want laws to be enforced, i want strong borders, but this is a step too far and in some cases could go against their
they have to weigh that against a lot of other things that i encountered in my research. well, listen, the rubio vet begins with reading the rise of marco rubio, okay? everybody down there in romney headquarters up in boston who s pretending to vet him, you better at least have this book. if i read this book, vetting marco rubio, what is the worst thing i find out in terms of vice presidential qualified. well, it depends on who you are. if you re somebody who s looking at well, i just mean from political liability. i m not saying there s a scandal in there, or maybe there is, but from a political liability standpoint, when you re thinking about what you re rolling out here, in a vice presidential candidacy, what are the cons that i put on my pro/con list. what are the cons from this book? well, the first ad that you re going to see is about his credit card spending when he was in florida and when he was speaker of the house. oh, boy. i don t like that. okay. they gave h
that i put on my pro/con list. what are the cons from this book? well, the first ad that you re going to see is about his credit card spending when he was in florida and when he was speaker of the house. oh, boy. i don t like that. okay. they gave him a credit card whoops. and he used that credit card for some stuff like buying wine at a wine shop near his house, getting an expensive haircut, which reminded some people of john edwards. it doesn t look like an expensive haircut, his haircut, i ve got to say. a lot of people like his hair. yeah. so, you know, he is going to say that those were inadvertent personal expenses that when they were brought to his attention, he repaid. but there were a series of these sorts of expenses. and then there are the two big ones related to his family history. one is that he had been saying for a long time that his family came over in 1959 from cuba. they were pushed off the island by castro. i found documents that clearly show that