Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and President Barack Obama had campaign stops Thursday in Florida, with the president seeking to rally young voters for Hillary Clinton and Trump stoking concerns about Clinton's practices as secretary of state.
In Miami, Obama labeled Trump "uniquely unqualified" and "temperamentally unfit" to be president. In Jacksonville, Trump said Clinton, his Democratic presidential rival, is under FBI "criminal investigation" for "pay-for-play corruption," although no such investigation has been announced.
At Florida International University, Obama spoke to a young and diverse crowd, whose turnout will be key in deciding the Clinton campaign's fate in four days. In the closing days of the campaign, Obama has returned repeatedly to Florida and North Carolina to urge young people and blacks -- two key elements of his constituency in 2008 and 2012 -- to turn out at the polls.
Obama blasted Trump over his treatment of women, members of minority groups and working-class Americans.
[INTERACTIVE: 2016 election coverage]
[ARKANSAS BALLOT: Vote in our polls for all state races here]
"What kind of message are we sending if that's our voice?" asked Obama. After the crowd booed when Obama first mentioned Trump, the president remarked: "He can't hear you boo, but he can hear you vote."
Obama criticized Trump for vowing at an event earlier this week to repeal and replace the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The president said Trump and his fellow Republicans "don't even have a semblance of a plan" for an alternative.
Trump said the FBI is "investigating how Hillary Clinton put the office of secretary of state up for sale in violation of federal law." He added that "the FBI agents say their investigation is likely to yield an indictment."
Trump appeared to be referring to the Clinton Foundation, but there is no known criminal investigation over "pay-for-play" or talk of any indictment. The FBI is investigating whether emails reportedly found on a Clinton aide's computer are related to Clinton's private email server use when she was secretary of state.
Obama said Clinton "made me a better president." He added that his former secretary of state and political rival "doesn't whine or complain," or "suggest everything is rigged when things aren't going her way."
Trump often has said the election is "rigged" against him.
The president said a large part of his message to young voters is: "I'm asking you to believe in your ability to change things. You remember my slogan wasn't 'Yes I can.' It was 'Yes we can.'"
Obama criticized Trump for complaining on Twitter about the way he has been portrayed on Saturday Night Live.
"Come on, man," Obama said, drawing cheers. The phrase, a familiar chorus for the president on the campaign trail this fall, delighted the crowd that had heard it several times before.
Obama called Trump a "reality TV" candidate who regularly says "wacky stuff," and he wondered how Trump's fellow Republicans can continue to support him. "You can't make excuses for this fellow," Obama said. "This isn't Survivor. This isn't The Bachelorette."
He also blamed Republicans for gridlock and dysfunction in Washington. "I will sometimes propose their own stuff, and they oppose it," Obama said. "I mean, it surprises them."
Trump, Clinton in N.C.
Trump, who left Miami on Thursday morning, criticized Obama on Twitter: "Looking at Air Force One MIA. Why is he campaigning instead of creating jobs & fixing Obamacare? Get back to work for the American people!"
At a rally in Jacksonville, Fla., on Thursday, Trump directed his message to moderate Republicans and independents who have been the holdouts in his campaign. He zeroed in, questioning Clinton's trustworthiness and the FBI's new review of an aide's emails.
"Here we go again with the Clintons -- you remember the impeachment and the problems," Trump said. "That's not what we need in our country, folks. We need someone who is ready to go to work."
Trump has hewed closer to convention, running some upbeat ads, enlisting the help of his wife for a rare campaign appearance and even talking publicly about trying not to get distracted.
"We don't want to blow it on Nov. 8," Trump said Thursday in Jacksonville.
Trump's path to victory remains narrow. He must win in Florida to win the White House. His campaign has been buoyed by tightening polls there and in other key battleground states, as well as by signs that turnout by black voters for Clinton may be lagging.
North Carolina's 15 electoral votes also will be among the biggest prizes Tuesday night. After the state voted Republican in seven straight presidential elections, Obama won there in 2008. But it flipped back to Republican Mitt Romney in 2012, and the GOP further reasserted itself in the 2014 midterm elections.
Republicans in the state have used their power in recent years to implement deeply conservative policies that Democrats have vocally criticized. The state is undergoing swift demographic changes, gaining Hispanics and young white professionals, who tend to vote Democratic.
Both candidates were in North Carolina on Thursday.
Clinton and allies said Trump's temperament and his disparaging comments about women and members of minority groups make him unfit for office.
"He has spent this entire campaign offering a dog whistle to his most hateful supporters," Clinton said, singling out Trump's endorsement from the official newspaper of the Ku Klux Klan and noting that he has retweeted messages from white supremacists.
"This has never happened to a nominee of a major party," Clinton said.
"If Donald Trump were to win this election, we would have a commander in chief who is completely out of his depth and whose ideas are incredibly dangerous," she said at Pitt Community College outside Greenville, N.C.
Clinton campaigned later Thursday with former primary opponent U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and pop star Pharrell Williams in Raleigh, where she warned that Trump's election risked "normalizing discrimination."
Trump, meanwhile, delivered a defense-related speech at a nighttime rally and said he can't picture Clinton as commander in chief. And he saluted veterans, saying, they are "so much more brave than me. I'm brave in other ways. I'm financially brave, big deal!"
The Trump campaign says it also has its sights set on more Democratic states. In an interview on MSNBC, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said the campaign is making a push into Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
"I mean, look, if you try to apply conventional political wisdom to Donald Trump, you lose every time," said Conway. "The idea that, well, Michigan or Wisconsin have been elusive to Republican candidates. He's just different. His message on illegal immigration, trade and jobs and patriotism. ... It's just a different messenger."
Trump's wife campaigns
Melania Trump made a rare appearance on the campaign trail Thursday, pledging to focus on combating online bullying and serve as an advocate for women and children if her husband is elected to the White House.
Her description of the perils of social media seemed at odds with her husband's online rhetoric throughout the campaign.
"Our culture has gotten too mean and too rough, especially to children and teenagers," she said, delivering a get-out-the-vote speech in the Philadelphia suburb of Berwyn. "It is never OK when a 12-year-old girl or boy is mocked, bullied or attacked" in the schoolyard, she said, but it is "absolutely unacceptable when it is done by someone with no name hiding on the Internet. "
"We have to find a better way to talk to each other, to disagree with each other, to respect each other," she said.
The highly personal speech, which also touched on conversations with her young son, her marriage and her experience as an immigrant, appeared to be aimed at humanizing her husband in front of an audience of suburban women who are critical to Trump's hopes in Pennsylvania and other key states.
Trump has used his Twitter account to attack his rivals, along with reporters, pundits and others who he feels have slighted him. Some educators have even described a "Trump effect" increase in bullying inspired by his rhetoric.
Nonetheless, Melania Trump told the audience, "We need to teach our youth American values: kindness, honesty, respect, compassion, charity, understanding, cooperation."
Kris Goodman, 65, of Berwyn said she believes Melania Trump would be a "great first lady" and an asset to her husband in the White House. Goodman, who has already voted absentee for the Republican nominee, said she was impressed with Trump's wife at the convention this summer.
"I think both she and [Trump's daughter] Ivanka are great examples of women of this century," Goodman said. "What's in the media, I don't think portrays his record and how he deals with women."
Clinton and her allies have tried to paint the Republican nominee as anti-women, a strategy that Democrats see as the best hope for rattling him and driving female voters away.
Support for Ryan
Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence declined to say whether Paul Ryan should be re-elected as speaker of the House, withholding support from a close friend and ally in the final days of the presidential campaign.
Pence's comments in an interview published Thursday in the National Review were startling because Pence and Ryan served together in the House and have been seen as ideological soul mates. Ryan heaped praise on the Indiana governor when Trump selected him as his running mate, saying "I can think of no better choice."
And in August, when Trump briefly withheld his endorsement from Ryan in the speaker's Wisconsin House primary, Pence was quick to publicly declare his own backing of Ryan.
But as the 2016 election draws to a close, Ryan faces rumblings of a leadership challenge from House conservatives frustrated with his declaration last month that he would no longer defend or campaign for Trump. That followed the release of the Access Hollywood tape in which Trump boasted of groping women and saying he could get away with it because he's a star.
And now Pence appears unwilling to offer a full-throated endorsement of Ryan.
The National Review story said Pence declined three times to answer whether Ryan should be re-elected as speaker presuming that Republicans maintain their control of the House. Pence said "my respect for Paul Ryan is boundless," but "I'm not a member of the House Republican conference anymore. I wouldn't presume upon what the members of the conference choose."
A Pence spokesman, Marc Short, insisted in a phone interview with The Associated Press that Pence does support Ryan being re-elected speaker, attributing other interpretations to people trying to "sow divisions" as the Republican Party comes together in the waning days of the campaign.
"He's 100 percent supportive of him being speaker of the House," Short said.
Ryan's aides declined to comment, directing inquiries to Short.
Information for this article was contributed by Sean Sullivan, Abby Phillip, Jenna Johnson, Matea Gold, Anne Gearan, David Nakamura, Sari Horwitz, Juliet Eilperin and Greg Jaffe of The Washington Post; and by Jonathan Lemire, Kathleen Hennessey, Darlene Superville, Errin Haines Whack, Jill Colvin, Erica Werner and Julie Pace of The Associated Press.
A Section on 11/04/2016