Harris and Beyoncé to rally in Texas while Trump sits for Joe Rogan interview : NPR

Texas is not a swing state that will decide the next president, but stops Vice President Harris and former President Donald Trump are making there Friday could have an impact — or so they’re hoping.

The Lonestar State may seem like an unusual stop with less than two weeks until voting closes, although it has a high-profile Senate race featuring incumbent Republican Ted Cruz and Democratic challenger Rep. Collin Allred. But the messages and the mediums both campaigns have planned highlight the urgency of their closing messages.

Harris is focusing on Texas’ strict abortion ban at her rally in Houston, as Democrats have spent years hammering Republicans over unpopular crackdowns on reproductive rights — to great success at the ballot box. Trump’s appointment of three conservative justices to the Supreme Court and the subsequent overturning of Roe v. Wade has been a key liability for him.

On the campaign trail, Harris has also featured the stories of women who say their lives were endangered by abortion bans, including in Texas. A new ad unveiled by her campaign this week features a woman in Texas who was denied care when she had a miscarriage. She developed a septic infection which required emergency surgery, and because of what happened she may never be able to have children. The audio in the background is Trump from a recent rally saying he will be a “protector” of women.

“This is not just some theoretical concept. Real harm has occurred in our country, a real suffering has occurred,” Harris told reporters traveling with her on Friday. Her campaign said Harris would underscore that the kinds of restrictions seen in Texas could happen in any state if Republicans were to pass a national abortion ban. Trump said this month that he would veto such a ban.

The Houston rally will also feature hometown superstar Beyoncé, whose song “Freedom” has been Harris’ campaign anthem. Harris has earned endorsements from a slew of entertainers like Taylor Swift, Megan Thee Stallion and Bruce Springsteen, who performed several songs at a Thursday rally in Atlanta with former president Barack Obama.

“We here understand we have an opportunity before us to turn the page on the fear and divisiveness that have characterized our politics for a decade because of Donald Trump,” Harris said Thursday. “We have the opportunity to turn the page and chart a new way and a joyful way forward.”

Trump joined Joe Rogan for an interview

Trump started his Texas pit stop in Austin, where he largely focused on immigration, baselessly blaming Harris for crimes committed by undocumented migrants. “Kamala refuses to stop importing these killers into our country. Every day she brings in more,” Trump said. “She’s got no remorse at all for the innocent blood that’s on her hands.”

At one point, he invited Alexis Nungaray, to speak. Nungary is the mother of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray, who was allegedly killed by two men accused of entering the country illegally earlier this year.

Trump also repeated inflammatory attacks against immigrants, calling America a “garbage can for the rest of the world to dump the people that they don’t want.”

Harris told reporters the line was “another example of how he really belittles our country.”

Trump also criticized a federal judge’s decision Friday to restore the voting rights of more than 1,600 people who had been purged from the state’s rolls, calling the ruling “un-American” and “election interference.”

While in Texas, a state he is all but certain to win, Trump taped a podcast with Joe Rogan, who has millions of followers and an audience overwhelmingly younger and more male — a key constituency for the former president.

Unlike other more friendly interviews Trump has sat for in recent weeks, Rogan has not always been uncritical of him. In an August podcast, Rogan appeared to offer praise for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who at the time was running for president as a third-party candidate. In the episode, Rogan said that politicians from both sides of the aisle “gaslight you, they manipulate you, they promote narratives.”

That drew Trump’s ire, and Rogan quickly tried to smooth things over.

“This is me saying that I like RFKjr as a person, and I really appreciate the way he discusses things with civility and intelligence,” Rogan wrote on X. “I also think Trump raising his fist and saying ‘fight!’ after getting shot is one of the most American f****** things of all time. I’m not the guy to get political information from.”

Trump’s media strategy this election cycle has relied heavily on these social media-friendly, male-heavy podcasts and influencers that largely eschew probing policy questions and paint the former president as a friendly, accessible figure.

The two appearances in Texas also underscore what could potentially be the largest gender gap in a recent presidential election, with Trump increasing support among men and Harris among women.

That gender split is reflected in the audiences each candidate will be reaching through interviews they were holding Friday. While Trump had Joe Rogan, Harris was set to speak with Brené Brown’s Unlocking Us, a podcast popular with women.