By CHRIS MEGERIAN (Associated Press)

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday promoted their health care agenda in the battleground state of North Carolina, arguing that Democrats like themselves would preserve access to care while Republicans would reverse gains made over the past decade and a half.

Fourteen years after President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, the White House still sees health care as a winning issue during a campaign in which Biden has sometimes found himself on the defensive when it comes to immigration or the economy. Republicans have opposed Biden’s signature initiatives to lower medical costs, and they’ve seized opportunities to restrict abortion rights after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

“It’s sick. Now they want to quote, his words, terminate the ACA, as my predecessor says,” Biden said, referring to Republican former President Donald Trump. “If that were ever to happen, we’d also terminate a lot of lives as well. But we’re not going to let that happen, are we? We’re not going to let that happen.”

North Carolina was Biden’s final stop on a tour of battleground states after his State of the Union address this month, which jump-started a frenzied travel schedule as the Democratic president makes his case for a second term in a likely rematch with Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee.

The state is also a health care success story for the president. The American Rescue Plan, a coronavirus pandemic recovery measure signed by Biden, included financial incentives for states to expand Medicaid coverage for low-income residents. North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, used the money, which amounted to $1.8 billion, to persuade Republican lawmakers to support his plan. More than 600,000 residents are expected to qualify.

Biden and Harris visited hours after the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case about access to mifepristone, a widely used abortion pill. The justices appeared inclined to preserve access to the medication.

The White House has tried to make mifepristone more available as one of its few opportunities to protect women’s ability to end their pregnancies.

Afterward, Biden and Harris attended a campaign fundraiser in Raleigh that raised $2.3 million, said Cooper. Harris told supporters, “This is the most existential, consequential and important election of our lifetime.” Biden asked, “Does anyone here want to go back to 2020?” and the crowd shouted, ”No.”

Biden’s approval ratings on health care are among his highest on a range of issues, but he trails there, too, According to a February poll from The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 42% of U.S. adults approve of Biden’s handling of health care while 55% disapprove.

KFF, a health policy research firm, found in its own poll in November that 59% of U.S. adults trust the Democratic Party to do a better job addressing health care affordability issues. Only 39% said the same about Republicans. There was a similar divide in trust when it came to access to mental health care, prescription drug costs and the future of the Affordable Care Act, Medicare and Medicaid.

Trump has never detailed his health care proposals despite campaigning since 2016 on a promise to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. After Biden landed in North Carolina, Trump denied in a new social media post that he wants to “terminate the ACA,” even though he had promised to do just that as recently as last week in Arizona. Trump pledged Tuesday, without providing any details, that he would make the Affordable Care Act better, stronger and less expensive.

However, health care has not been a prominent issue in his 2024 campaign as Trump instead focuses on immigration, inflation and the wars in Europe and the Middle East.

Polls show a tight race between Biden and Trump, and Democrats hope to create another potential path to victory in North Carolina.

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Although Democrats have failed to win a U.S. Senate seat or a presidential race there since 2008, Trump beat Biden in North Carolina by just 1.3 percentage points in 2020. The White House has repeatedly highlighted federal injections of funds for transportation, rural broadband and other initiatives while dispatching top administration officials to the state.

Democrats also want to exploit what they view as weaknesses among Republican candidates for statewide offices. For example, the party’s nominees for governor and state schools superintendent, Mark Robinson and Michele Morrow, respectively, have a history of inflammatory comments.

“We’re seeing a Republican slate at the statewide level that is filled with MAGA extremists that ultimately is going to hurt the Republicans’ chances of winning the state again,” state Sen. Jay Chaudhuri of Raleigh, the chamber’s Democratic whip, said Monday in an interview, using the acronym for Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan.

Democrats hope unaffiliated voters, the largest category in North Carolina, will cool to Trump in part based on worries that his election along with Robinson and Morrow could make businesses question relocating to a state that is currently riding an economic boom.

Associated Press writers Gary Robertson in Raleigh, North Carolina, Jill Colvin in New York and Darlene Superville, Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Matt Brown in Washington contributed to this report.

By STEVE PEOPLES (AP National Political Writer)

NEW YORK (AP) — In his bid to retake the White House, few states hold as much promise for Donald Trump as Michigan.

The former president has already won the state once and President Joe Biden, who reclaimed it for Democrats in 2020, is confronting vulnerabilities there as he seeks reelection. Trump’s campaign promises an aggressive play for Michigan as part of a robust swing-state strategy.

But, at least for now, those promises appear to be mostly talk. The Trump campaign and its partners at the Republican National Committee haven’t yet made significant general election investments in the state, according to Michigan Republican Party Chairman Pete Hoekstra. The national committee, he said, hasn’t transferred any money to the state party to help bolster its operations heading into the general election. There are no specific programs in place to court voters of color. And there’s no general election field staff in place.

“We’ve got the skeleton right now,” Hoekstra said. “We’re going to have to put more meat on it.”

It’s much the same in presidential battleground states across the country, according to Republican operatives and party officials involved in campaign planning elsewhere.

Widely praised for its professionalism and effectiveness throughout the primary phase of the 2024 election, Trump’s political operation has been slow to pivot toward the general election in the weeks after executing a hostile takeover of the Republican Party’s national political machinery. In fact, the former president’s team has rolled back plans under previous leaders to add hundreds of staff and dozens of new minority-outreach centers in key states without offering a clear alternative.

Indeed, just six months before the first early votes are cast in the general election between Trump and Biden, Trump’s Republican Party has little general election infrastructure to speak of.

Officials on the ground in top swing states are not panicking, but the disparity with the Biden campaign is stark.

This month alone, Biden opened 100 new offices and added more than 350 new staffers in swing states from Arizona to Georgia to Pennsylvania, according to campaign spokesman Ammar Moussa. That’s in addition to the Democratic president’s existing battleground-state staff of 100 that was already in place.

Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita, who is now also running operations at the RNC, declined to detail any of the Republican campaign’s plans.

“By combining forces, the Trump campaign and the RNC are deploying operations fueled by passionate volunteers who care about saving America and firing Joe Biden,” he said. “We do not feel obligated, however, to discuss the specifics of our strategy, timing, or tactics with members of the news media.”

Trump may be discussing strategy with some state Republican officials behind closed doors.

Hoekstra was among a handful of Michigan Republican leaders who trekked to Florida last week to meet privately with Trump and members of his senior campaign team about plans for the general election. The conversation, Hoekstra said, left him optimistic about the former president’s commitment to his state.

“I feel good about where we are,” he said. “The Trump team is engaged.”

Earlier this month, Trump replaced Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel with his new hand-picked leadership team, including daughter-in-law Lara Trump, who is now RNC co-chair. LaCivita, who took over as the committee’s chief of staff, promised sweeping changes in the GOP’s political infrastructure across the country.

In the days since, more than 60 Republican staffers across the country were issued layoff notices. They included virtually all the people who staffed the RNC’s minority outreach community centers and others inside the committee’s department of State Parties Strategies.

“There was never a fully cohesive bond between the Trump campaign and the RNC in the past, and we are now operating as one entity,” Lara Trump said Tuesday on David Webb’s SiriusXM Patriot channel program. “We have cut a lot of fat.”

Facing internal pushback on some of the cuts, Lara Trump has vowed that the committee’s half-dozen existing community centers would remain open. But it’s unclear whether Trump’s team will follow through on McDaniel’s plans to open an additional 40 community centers in the coming months.

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The centers were seen as a critical resource in boosting the Republican Party’s relationships with minority groups who have traditionally voted Democratic, but may be open to the GOP’s populist message. Advocates suggest that such investments have made a significant impact in recent years, especially in competitive House districts where several thousand votes can make a difference.

“It seems that there’s a consensus that community centers are vital for the Republican Party in general,” said Shawn Steel, a RNC member from California who credits a community center in Orange County’s Little Saigon with helping his wife, Rep. Michelle Steel, R-Calif., win her seat.

Democrats, Steel said, have been effectively engaging in minority communities since New York City’s Tammany Hall more than two centuries ago. “We’re trying to catch up,” Steel said. “I’m optimistic.”

Amid such optimism, however, there is also a deep sense of uncertainty as Trump’s team rewrites the party’s 2024 battleground-state strategy after burning the previous playbook.

Trump’s lieutenants have already postponed plans in place before McDaniel’s ouster that would have begun adding hundreds of Republican staffers in presidential battleground states beginning this month, according to people with direct knowledge of the plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose private conversations.

It’s unclear if or when the field staff will eventually be in place. Recently laid-off staffers have recently begun interviewing for new positions, although some have been told they must relocate to Florida or new states.

Georgia GOP Chair Joshua McKoon said he has had several meetings with RNC leadership about “the deployment of additional resources” to his state, although there is no set timeline.

“What wins elections is having the staff necessary to carry out your get-out-the-vote plan, so that’s what I’m most interested in,” McKoon said. “I certainly expect to have further discussions in the very near future about the timeline and having some more specifics.”

He added, “I feel like we’re going to have what we need.”

Aware of a building sense of urgency, newly elected RNC Chair Michael Whatley issued a memo to party officials over the weekend promising that the committee is “building on our existing programs and expanding our outreach at the RNC.”

He vowed to “re-engage America’s working voters,” continue to engage rural voters, and grow Trump’s support “with demographics who have not traditionally voted for our candidates…”

Whatley did not offer any specifics, however, aside from mentioning a new battleground-state program that would direct officials within the committee’s State Parties Strategies department to work with “auxiliary Republican groups and other grassroots organizations” in addition to state parties.

Trump’s team did not clarify, when asked, which grassroots organizations Whatley meant, although the chairman before his recent election had aggressively courted leaders at Turning Point USA, a leading group in Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement that had been a driving force in McDaniel’s ouster.

On Tuesday, Lara Trump wrote “Awesome!” in sharing a social media post from Turning Point founder and CEO Charlie Kirk that highlighted the group’s efforts to organize “full-time ballot chasers” in Arizona and other states.

Meanwhile, Biden’s campaign earlier in the month launched a $30 million six-week advertising blitz targeting swing-state voters with a particular focus on Black and Hispanic-owned outlets and “culture and sports programming such as Comedy Central and ESPN.”

Biden is also hitting the campaign trail with more intensity.

He has campaigned in Pennsylvania, Georgia, New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Michigan in recent days. He was in North Carolina on Tuesday, signaling the president’s ambition in a state that Trump narrowly won in 2020.

Trump, by contrast, has been hardly seen in public this month aside from his court appearances.

Moussa, Biden’s spokesman, slapped Trump for embracing a general election strategy focused on “apparently hiding at his country club.”

“Meanwhile, the RNC fires staffers, shutters community centers and shuts down their minority outreach programs. Not exactly how to win the hearts and minds of the American people — or get to 270 electoral votes,” Moussa said.

This story has been corrected to show the California congresswoman’s surname is Steel, not Steele.

By MICHAEL R. SISAK (Associated Press)

Donald Trump lashed out Wednesday at the New York judge who put him under a gag order that bars him from commenting publicly about witnesses, prosecutors, court staff and jurors in his upcoming hush-money criminal trial.

The former president posted on social media that the gag order was “illegal, un-American, unConstitutional” and said Judge Juan M. Merchan was “wrongfully attempting to deprive me of my First Amendment Right to speak out against the Weaponization of Law Enforcement” by Democratic rivals.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee also laid into Merchan’s daughter, a Democratic political consultant, noting that she had posted a photo on social media of him behind bars. An account appearing to belong to Loren Merchan on X, formerly known as Twitter, has a photo illustration of an imprisoned Trump as its profile picture. Loren Merchan’s consulting firm had linked to that account in a previous social media post.

The gag order does not bar comments about Merchan or his family, nor does it prohibit Trump from criticizing Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, the elected Democrat whose office is prosecuting him.

Messages seeking comment were left with Judge Merchan, Loren Merchan and a court spokesperson. Bragg’s office declined to comment on the gag order.

Trump’s post on Truth Social was his first reaction to the gag order, which Merchan issued on Tuesday, a day after he scheduled the trial to begin on April 15. Hours before the judge’s ruling, Trump had referred to Merchan in a Truth Social post as a “very distinguished looking man” and a “true and certified Trump Hater.”

Merchan’s order cited Trump’s history of “threatening, inflammatory, denigrating” remarks about people involved in his legal cases in granting the prosecution’s request for what it deemed a “narrowly tailored” gag order.

Though not covered by the gag order, Merchan referenced Trump’s various comments about him as an example of his rhetoric. The restrictions mirror ones imposed and largely upheld by a federal appeals court panel in Trump’s Washington, D.C., election interference criminal case.

Trump’s lawyers had fought a gag order, warning it would amount to unconstitutional and unlawful prior restraint on his free speech rights — an argument echoed by Trump in his Truth Social post.

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Merchan had long resisted imposing a gag order, recognizing Trump’s “special” status as a former president and current candidate and not wanting to trample his ability to defend himself publicly. But, he said, as the trial nears, he found that his obligation to ensuring the integrity of the case outweighs First Amendment concerns. He said Trump’s statements have induced fear and necessitated added security measures to protect his targets and investigate threats.

“So, let me get this straight,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “the Judge’s daughter is allowed to post pictures of her ‘dream’ of putting me in jail, the Manhattan D.A. is able to say whatever lies about me he wants, the Judge can violate our Laws and Constitution at every turn, but I am not allowed to talk about the attacks against me, and the Lunatics trying to destroy my life and prevent me from winning the 2024 Presidential Election, which I am dominating?”

“Maybe the Judge is such a hater because his daughter makes money by working to ‘Get Trump’ and when he rules against me over and over again, he is making her company, and her, richer and richer,” Trump continued. “How can this be allowed?”

Trump also accused President Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland and their “Hacks and Thugs” of “tracking and following me all across the Country, obsessively trying to persecute me, while everyone knows I have done nothing wrong.”

The gag order bars Trump from either making or directing other people to make public statements on his behalf about hush-money trial jurors and potential witnesses, such as his lawyer turned nemesis Michael Cohen and porn star Stormy Daniels. It also prohibits any statements meant to interfere with or harass the court’s staff, prosecution team or their families.

A violation could result in Trump being held in contempt of court, fined or even jailed.

Trump’s hush-money case centers on allegations that he falsely logged payments to Cohen, then his personal lawyer, as legal fees in his company’s books when they were for his work during the 2016 campaign covering up negative stories about Trump. That included $130,000 Cohen paid Daniels on Trump’s behalf so she wouldn’t publicize her claim of a sexual encounter with him years earlier.

Trump pleaded not guilty last April to 34 counts of falsifying business records, a felony punishable by up to four years in prison, though there is no guarantee that a conviction would result in jail time. He denies having sex with Daniels and his lawyers have said that the payments to Cohen were legitimate legal expenses, not part of any coverup.